Posts by Hungry Sean

Re: Comcast sucks schweaty monkey bung.

if you're in the bay area, you should check out sonic. Yes, it's DSL, but it ended up being faster and cheaper than comcast for me.

Re: Gates FAIL

ok, I get it, capitalism is a screwed up, miserable system and by any sense the cash Gates accrued off the labor of others and abuse of market position is absurd and inequitable. But while Gates certainly benefited from the system, he didn't create it and his story isn't much different from that of other billionaires. I think it's worth considering what he's doing given where he stands and looking at that in comparison to others in the same position.

Lots of wealthy people donate to charities of various sorts, often as a tax dodge, or as a means to further some political ambition, or for good publicity (usually something that resonates well with a first-world audience like breast cancer awareness).

What I think sets Gates apart is that he's spent significant effort focusing on a few areas that will have a major impact in the quality of life and the life expectancy of the vast majority of our world's population. Sanitation and malaria research are not glamorous, and as we see here, efforts to improve sanitation in remote locations in particular are more likely to draw sniggers and childish remarks about drinking shit than adulation. I can't say that in his position I'd be doing anything near as worthwhile or with nearly the same persistence. For that at least, I think Gates deserves some credit.

Re: Can anyone recommend a starter gamer for 9yr old?

How about Bohnanza? Simple rules, lots of fun.

Slightly more complex is Bang!

Both work better with 4+ players, not sure if thats a problem.

Re: Bad science @Tromos

all diodes are LEDs, all diodes are photo-diodes. Just depends on the efficiency and wavelengths. . .

Re: The Grapes of Wrath!

I don't think you understand capitalism-- to be a capitalist, first and foremost, you need to have capital. A union doesn't have capital, it's a body for organized labor. And yes, unions raise wages, just as bosses try to keep them down. You don't need to refer to anyone as recent as Marx, Adam Smith had something to say about this in fact, to the effect that it was no coincidence that the owners everywhere always have tried to break up unions while getting their own agreements in place to keep down labor prices.

Re: Can you trust accounting software numbers?

If I'm understanding correctly, you've got fractional currency pricing and potentially units, and the tally isn't matching exactly what you calculate by hand.

To handle these issues on a large scale, some finance and accounting packages use (and may be required to use) decimal floating point libraries. I don't know enough about your situation to say if this could be a factor or not.

Re: Un-downvoted (was: Downvoted.)

wait, since when can you retract a thumbs up/down??

That is an interesting development. Looks like I can convert an up to a down or vice versa but can't merely undo. Is there a timer on this?

Re: Seriously guys?

and no sound either.

Re: There's no such thing as too much coffee.

Not sure if it's common in the EU, but here in the states several of the headache meds (I think Excedrin in particular) have a goodly dose of caffeine for exactly that reason. Of course there's the negative side-effect of getting people who wouldn't otherwise consume caffeine addicted, but that just helps business, right?

Re: "Engaging" with the younger generation...

thanks for the swearies Trevor. Don't work with networking gear myself, but I can sure appreciate the venting.

Re: Xeon? You mean the silicon space-heater?

no intention of defending intel, but Xeon Phi is a different beast entirely from Xeon. It is largely a scrapping of the chip architecture-- previously it was called Larrabee.

Re: Incorrect...

surely it is an enormous, prehistoric shark caught by a chilly glacial current during its struggles with a terrifyingly tentacled cephalopod back in the jurassic. Global warming has weakened the ice just enough that their battle can resume. That's right, a mega-shark vs. a giant octopus. Scientists would investigate further, but they're afraid there might be snakes on the plane.

opposable thumbs

Jake, I've got mixed feelings about the badges myself, but the thumbs do serve a valuable purpose in my opinion, and having both directions is an important part of it. In real life, if I say something, people may not respond to me with a considered response, but simply smile or laugh, or instead frown or storm out of the room. The thumbs provide a similarly light-weight means of response. I'm sure I've occasionally made the inflammatory post-- the forums would be pretty crummy to use if everyone who felt one way or the other about it had to post "me too" to that (see some of the old forums with Eadon as an example of how this can go wrong).

It strikes me that your personal grudge against the thumbs might be that you receive consistent negative feedback through the medium. Possibly you don't get this in real life-- it strikes me based on your posting history that you are a person who has a good deal of authority and possibly people are fearful to tell you when you're being an ass. Maybe instead of railing against a feature on a website that has no real impact to you, it might be worth considering why you are drawing consistent negative reactions when I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of thumbs on the site are up rather than down.

I don't think you're a troll and I do think you frequently have good contributions to the forums, but the constant one-upmanship and boasting about how amazing your life in Sonoma making everything yourself and expressing your contempt for people who don't live as well or aren't able to do as many things as you do is tiresome and childish.

Re: Onwards to upwards towards 2bn Android phones.

true, but in Google, I think Microsoft have an adversary with equally bountiful pools of cash and engineers. Commiting to burning money and playing creeping death I think mainly works when you're bigger than anyone in the market you're trying to enter. I just can't see MS enticing much of anyone to their platform.

Re: nsfw ad

Thanks Drew. Haven't seen it again.

This would have been Thursday the 7th around 5:00 PST. I was logging in from the bay area if that makes any difference.

some ways of relaxing reliability

This sounds like it's related to the utterly mind-bogglingly "brilliant" dark silicon work. Good job on the good professor for getting himself a ton of publicity (and presumably funding), but it seems pretty clear he hasn't ever worked in say imaging where tons of effort is put into killing bad pixels because people are actually very good at catching them and find them offensive.

My guess is that they are assuming that you take your existing test machines, characterize hard and transient failures per die, look at under-voltage characteristics either in simulation or final silicon, and use that information to optimize power and die yield. Now how putting a dot is sufficiently informative to distinguish between "I can tolerate 3lsb error in this calculation" and "the result of this calculation can be completely bogus (e.g. NAN, INF, -INF, 42, . . .) 97% of the time I have no clue. If you knew that you had an adder that was say, stuck at zero in the LSBs you could guarantee the first, characterization of delay and running at an appropriately over-aggresive lower voltage can be done to meet the second constraint.

At any rate, this all seems like a useless crock. Another day passes and I remain grateful that I dropped out of academia.

good points. Ceramic (as used in the sharpener you suggest) is much less likely to screw up a blade than carbide. Personally not a fan of that style sharpener, but maybe because I've seen too many people mess up nice cutlery.

this is what I normally use-- takes and holds a great edge, unquestionably dishwasher friendly, and not at all expensive.

http://www.foodservicewarehouse.com/dexter-russell/s145-12pcp/p8634.aspx

I have used Wusthof and Sabatier knives in other people's kitchens, but they've always been disappointingly dull in comparison to my $20 knife. Which goes to the general point of this discussion that you can have the most expensive and best equipment, but if you don't treat it right it won't perform.

Re: The importance of complexity

if you can make your problem look like a graph, it is pretty much assured that there's either a known polynomial time solution or it's np hard. The good thing about these kind of problems is there's no "right" answer, so you can take your pick from a variety of reasonably good heuristics.

Fun example: was considering a while ago an AI for a turn based game where monster hordes would try to maneuver through the dungeon to cut off the free space available to the player with the hopes of eventually surrounding him in an indefensible area. So how do the monsters move to optimally cut down the fraction of the dungeon that can be reached?

In professional work, I have generally tried to find approaches to problems that avoid getting into NP hard nasties. Simplifying the problem statement so that something in linear or log time works instead is good if you do work with real-time systems.

Overall, I agree with the second poster-- even those engineers who do work with algorithms spend the majority of their time on unglamorous tasks-- plumbing, buffer management, refactoring, validation/verification, etc. A well written kernel is generally small and tractable, a production system typically is not. I think this may have something to do with why algorithmics get a lot more attention in our schools than software engineering. Frankly, I'm not convinced you can teach software engineering in an environment where everyone gets the same exact problem and is assessed objectively on individual performance. Building a big system is ultimately a group endeavor and possibly beyond the scope of a semester course.

Re: How about

possibly the right answer is, alright, it's screwed, exhausted all options, time to go home and sleep? May not be glamorous, but it's true.

Re: My favourite comment

This just happened to me!

Except that the comment was less obviously a "to do"

two end cases to handle in an algorithm, he handled the second, but had the detection for the first as well. The comment said something like "increase gain here" followed by several lines apparently modifying some gain parameters (but not actually increasing anything).

d'oh.

Re: Walkie Scorchie Death Ray.

similar story here in the US a few years back

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/vdara-visitor-death-ray-scorched-hair

oh, and look, it was the same architect. And the guy admits to knowing that there would be problems in both cases. The arrogance and stupidity boggles the mind. "who cares if you scorch people in vegas?"

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/06/walkie-talkie-architect-predicted-reflection-sun-rays

Re: Human Brain 1000000x more powerful than a computer

don't buy the 1million times smarter argument at all.

Almost every time a claim about a good measure of intelligence has been made computers have eventually done a better job (with a few notable exceptions).

Computers are now better than the top humans at chess, jeopardy, chip layout, optimization and path planning, mechanical assembly, specialized vision applications (spot the tanks), library science (index the web), weather prediction, stock market prediction, and probably more I'm not thinking of.

Where they aren't yet even are things like natural language parsing, artistic endeavors, and general vision applications.

Also worth noting that the human brain is about 14,000 times the volume of a single die. So a more fair comparison would be an average human against the Oakridge Titan. Transistors are pretty frickin' good already, it's the power, cooling, and interconnect on the large scale that needs work.

Re: It *looks* like the Victorians *should* have been capable of doing this

when I went several years ago, the tour guides explained that one of the major advantages over the locks is that there isn't any water loss involved. These are after all, canals, and not rivers.

Really cool to see in person. I could have sat watching the giant planetary gears spin around for hours.