Neil Kandalgaonkar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "The Pelamis device consists of a series of semi-submerged cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. The wave-induced relative motion of these sections is resisted by hydraulic rams which pump high pressure oil through hydraulic motors via smoothing hydraulic accumulators. The hydraulic motors drive electrical generators to produce electricity." - bob

"offshore data havens?" wow, are they pursuing the "Cryptonomicon" Master Plan or what? :-D next up i guess is the tax-free Google Dollar ;-) - Karim

Double Meh! LMAO - Igor The Troll

The third, actually ;) - Mehrdad Afshari

Chrome is nice, but a browser war this is not. BTW, this would technically be the third browser war. #1: Netscape vs. IE, #2: IE vs. Firefox, #3: IE vs. Firefox vs. Chrome. - Jason Huebel

@Gabe: that reading is very, very generous to the RNC and the police. Even given your farfetched scenario, the police are obliged to check out random allegations before they go in with guns drawn. You should apply Occam's Razor here. What's the obvious reason why they were shut down? - Neil Kandalgaonkar

I'm sorry if it sounded like I actually supported what the police did. If I were one of those arrested, I'd be preparing to sue them for civil rights violations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and 1985. Seriously, though, the simplest reason is that they were just bumbling idiots. That doesn't mean it can't be a conspiracy, but it probably isn't. - Gabe

@Gabe: If it had been random idiocy, random people would be targeted. They are systematically intimidating the very activists who documented police misconduct during RNC 2004. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

Is true value determined by the market? Cultural prejudice? Pop culture? A cabal of high priests? It may differ by subject. - todd

This is something that we as a society are responsible for, it is no different to bad food or alcohol. Moderation is the key and something that people do not understand, why can't I have 65 cheese burgers with dinner, while I watch 4 hours of reality television and read about Britney's love child alien abduction ? And we in the geek world enable people to be idiots, by treating them like adults and expecting them to understand that crapware should be in moderation, like everything else. /rant over Great article. - Jonathan Ferguson

In other news, the number of people wanting to work at Google has dropped by 15%. - possible248

Hard to believe. Maybe they decided to be penny wise and pound foolish after all. - Paul Buchheit

This is similar to when the fine microbrews at various startups were replaced with PBR and Beast. Served warm. In a communal set of tumblers. - qthrul

File under "I CAN'T HAS CHEEZBURGER." Attention all staff: Due to budgetary constraints, the hot and cold running champagne taps will be switched to non-vintage blends until further further notice. That is all. - Karim

I guess they decided they don't want people working late. - Gabe

can u say JUMPED THE SHARK. - dave mcclure

harsh. - James Miao

End of the new beginning??? - Jigar Mehta

Dinner was always the least effective meal at keeping geeks at their desks. I saw it mostly abused by families who would zoom in to have dinner with Dad or Mom and then they'd all leave together. To my knowledge Google didn't even have a dinner serving before 2005 or so, anyway. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

In my experience it's always far worse when a company removes a perk than if they'd never introduced it at all. It's like removing features from software--even if it should never have been there in the first place, users will scream murder if you try and remove something in a future release. - Reto Meier

funny, funny (just coming back from my Google Dinner). this story is fake, as you can guess. - Ihar Mahaniok

@Ihar nope, I couldn't guess that - at least based on the contents of that article. Why do you think it's fake? - Metta (Kamath)

Kamath, because I know. I work at Google, I have eaten my dinner one hour ago, and my colleagues in MV are having their dinner in a few hours from now. Do I need to post pictures to prove this? :) - Ihar Mahaniok

Ihar, maybe it's the Last Supper? Sorry, couldn't resist. - Sprague D

Well, duh. If 3D movies were anything more than a sucky idea, why didn't they become popular the last time they were tried, in the 50s/60s? And why not the time before that? - j1m

Looking at it another way, what exactly would you want a 3D movie for? Would the idea be that you'd walk around the movie as it played, so you could see the action from all sides? I mean, your retinas are only 2D. - j1m

Anyone see U23D? http://www.u23dmovie.com/ WOW Count me as a big 3D fan (new tech= expanding experience) - Nice Fish Films

Singlely your retinas are 2D, but stereoscopic vision and a ton of neurology extends that to 3D. *Every* film uses 3D, whether it's through atmospheric perspective, geometric perspective (far things being smaller) or even simple occlusion. I don't see what's happening today as substantially different except that when they use it they wield it like a hammer, and you have to wear stupid glasses. - Kevin Fox

my point. but, while you're right that it doesn't provide any advantages worth bothering with, the list of disadvantages goes beyond the 2 you mentioned: a bunch of money is poured down the toilet, and those heavy-handed tricks you mention distract directors from doing other things to make their movies good. - j1m

How would second-person storytelling work? There have been a few video games with second-person sequences where you control one character while viewing the scene through the eyes of another (Battletoads, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass), but I'm not sure how you'd distinguish first- and second-person in a movie. - Ben Darnell

Maybe second-person is like Star Tours and Star Trek: The Experience, where there's a 'guide' who's constantly telling you what's happening to you. You're a passive participant, so it's not true first-person. The entire experience is saying 'you' metaphorically for the duration. - Kevin Fox

What's second-person storytelling in movies Kevin? - Philipp Lenssen

I'm not sure if it exists. If so it's certainly a novelty, but then that's true of fiction literature as well. Not many books start out with, "You woke up on Sunday with a hangover, trying to remember the night before." Except for Choose Your Own Adventure books, which just goes to show how interactivity is a hallmark of the second-person experience. - Kevin Fox

If Spam didn't work, you wouldn't get any. Just like direct mail and telemarketing - it will stop when it becomes unprofitable. Until then, get used to it. (Spam has an even greater head start because it is inherently cheap.) - AJ Kohn

I can believe it. If it weren't for spam I would never have met my husband. - April Buchheit

I'm still waiting for unsolicited email trying to sell me Spam. - Kevin Fox

April, now I'm curious. :P - Hao Chen

Ah...Paul was a mail-order groom. - Hutch Carpenter

This just doesn't pass a smell test - Brian Sullivan

Ok I'll say it- NO, no way- no how! - Nice Fish Films

oh yes, i have for fun. my limit is $20 and we have product demostrations. on my old blog, i had reviews on some of the crap i bought. - Faboo Mama

Brian, I agree. It should be closer to 80% with the 90,10,1 rule. The rest are just too embarrassed to admit it. - John Frost

No way. If it worked this well, more legit organizations would be using it. Right now, spammers who sell products are often deceiving even their customers about what the click-through rate is going to be. The rest are organized crime. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

I suspect these 'surveys' are using expansive definitions of spam, including newsletters from organizations that you've bought from before. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

About 29% of Americans can't find Canada on a map. The same 29%? - Dror Shimshowitz

29% of Americans support President Bush. - James Prudente

You're joking?!!?? Absolutely not, are there really people out there that are that stupid? - Kol Tregaskes via twhirl

About 2-4 times a year, I get a SPAM e-mail that I like. That's about 2-4 out of 40,000 = 0.005-0.01%. Lousy ratio compared to 0.5-3.0% direct mail or opt-in-e-mail, but I guess it works for many companies. - Mitchell Tsai

Me:inside of opposite 71% :) - Igor Poltavskiy

e-commerce, 'e' stands for e-mail :-D - Yung-Hui Lim

Never forget that things happen for a reason. There wouldn't be spam if it didn't work at least one in one billion times. That's all it takes. That's okay. Bill Gates solved spam back in 2006 or so. - Chris Brogan

i'm still waiting for my $29 million check from those guys in Nigeria. what's up with that? - .LAG

Where the hell did they find these people? At an idiots conventions? That number sounds exceptionally high!! - Paul OFlaherty

a security company suggests that 29% of survey "respondents" admit to purchasing something from a spam email. 622 survey participants, ~150 admit to purchases. So, 150 purchasers who visit a security company's website has been extrapolated to the entire population of the internet. well done. - Chris Hollander

NEO: Can you make that thing? TRINITY: Not yet. [picks up phone] TANK: Operator. TRINITY: I need a recipe for an apple pie. [Tank scrolls through database of recipes, selects 'APPLE PIE' and presses 'UPLOAD'] [Trinity's eyelids flutter] TRINITY: Let's go. - Karim

MOUSE: [bursts into room excitedly] Morpheus and Neo are having a bake-off! - Karim

MORPHEUS: What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this. [holds up a slice of apple pie] - Neil Kandalgaonkar

Neil: So thats what the Martix is!!! :) - Roberto "Maverick" Bonini

Hm... thinking about this some more. Perhaps if I just stored all of the untaken items in a list (is that the right structure?)... then do a random role of rand(list.length()), and go to that spot in the list, and then use that number stored there, and remove it from the list. That may work. Not sure how that equates to a database though :-) - Shannon Bauman

Just talking to myself, don't mind me :-) I may have to just have a continuous process running that does the assigning of IDs, and always stores the unused numbers in it - and then just hit up that process whenever i need a new ID assigned. I could then add that number to the DB for bookkeeping, etc. (I need the resulting number stored in a DB for other reasons/Longevity). - Shannon Bauman

It sounds just like dealing with hash collisions... one easy approach is to pick a random number and then scan for the next available number after that (modulo table size). Linear scans should be fast if the database stores things in sorted order. - Jim Norris

@jim - yeah, that totally makes sense. Thanks! - Shannon Bauman

How about just using a larger number? (like perhaps 128bits) - Paul Buchheit

@paul (and jim) - I am actually trying to completely fill the namespace so to speak (or numberspace as the case may be in this case). I basically want to keep assigning people numbers as they come in the door until all 10,000 numbers have been taken, and then close the door. But ideally I would like to do the assigning out of order. Perhaps what I should do is just do the shuffle before hand all at once, and then assign them from first to last after they have been shuffled? - Shannon Bauman

By the way - it is pretty amazing for me to be able to post a CS question, and have the two smartest CS people I know on the planet be able to give feedback. Damn that's cool. - Shannon Bauman

I was just about to suggest pre-shuffling. Create a 10,000 item linked list, generate a random number from 1 to 10,000, pluck it from the linked list and add that number to an array table along with an auto-incrementing sequential ID. Then generate a random number from 1 to (10,000-N), and repeat until the list is gone and you have a table with IDs and random non-colliding numbers. Mind you, there may be a faster method than traversing a linked list each time, but if you're talking about 10,000 instead of 1,000,000 and you're not doing it often then it's probably more efficient to code it quickly than execute it quickly. - Kevin Fox

@Kevin: alternatively: put the N (10,000) numbers in an array A. At step i (for 0 <= i < N), swap element A[i] with A[j], where j is a random number such that i <= j < N. - Tudor Bosman

ff is now your one-stop shop for cheating on your homework. - j1m

@j1m a healthy discussion doesn't do any wrong. Even if it is HW, it is the effort that counts. - Akshay Dodeja

Tudor's method is the best (although I don't agree that j has to be constrained on the lower limit by i) and my understanding is that that's the method used for most card-dealing games to shuffle the deck. The only challenge is making sure your random number generator is really random. - Stephen Mack

Tudor's solution is simple and efficient. If you need a solution that takes even less memory, then you use a vector of booleans indexed by id to keep track of allocated ids. If each boolean is represented as a single bit, then the solution requires 1250 bytes for the 10,000 ids. - Gary Burd

Could you use a block cipher/Feistel network approach? That way, you'd only have to store the number you had last operated on and when you needed the next number, you could pass it through the block cipher to generate the next one. I believe the easier way to do it is on an even number of bits, so 2^14 = 16384 > 10000. Whenever the cipher generated a number > 10000, you could just feed that number back into the cipher until you got one that was less than 10000. - Josh

Do these non-sequential numbers have to be random, or is "random-looking" good enough? If so, pick a primitive root of 10007 (5 works), and then cycle through by multiplying mod 10007 (multiply again if you get a 5-digit numbers). While the numbers are deterministic, they may work good enough for your approach, and you can get a counter that will spit out non-sequential numbers. - Alex Power

So, you'll get 5, 25, 125, 625, 3125, 5618, 8076, 352, 1760, 8800, 3972, ... Not random, but good enough to fool most people. If you use a larger primitive root, you'll probably be OK regardless. - Alex Power

Pre-shuffling is the way to go. Fisher-Yates shuffle is easy to implement. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

Josh and Alex's ideas are interesting. You can use an LCG to generate all numbers between 0 and n with suitable choice of constants. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... Then you just need to remember the last number given out. It might be hard to find a set of numbers for m=10000, but you can choose, say m = 10007 and just not hand out numbers higher than 10000. x = (37 * x + 7753) % 10007 works. - Sanjeev Singh

@Neil: I didn't know that there was a name for that :) @Stephen: apparently, according to the article on the Fisher-Yates shuffle on Wikipedia, not restricting j leads to a biased distribution. - Tudor Bosman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... - (modified) - "always selecting j from the entire range of valid array indexes on every iteration also produces a result which is biased, albeit less obviously so. This can be seen from the fact that doing so yields N**N distinct possible sequences of swaps, whereas there are only N! possible permutations of an N-element array." - Tudor Bosman

"Since N**N can never be evenly divisible by N! (as the latter is divisible by N−1, which shares no prime factors with N), some permutations must be produced by more of the N**N sequences of swaps than others." - Tudor Bosman