Be Excellent To Each Other

In those examples it's not actually failing at doing what it's supposed to do. But maybe that's not what you meant.

I was grumpy earlier so I went and got my haircut and put the barber's tip in the charity box. Now I feel more cheerful.

No, I worded it poorly. What I'm saying is that greedy algorithms, in the process of navigating only local optima, are almost guaranteed to overlook global optima in any sufficiently complex problem space. What I should have said was "deceived" not "failed." Which is why we have meta-heuristics, of course!

This doesn't apply to Dijkstra's algorithm. It can be proven to be correct* on any weighted, directed graph. You might even call it the poster boy for correct greedy algorithms.

* By which I mean that it finds the optimal solution, since it is not a heuristic.

As we are delving into science talk, I am engaging my h index filter. The threshold index is 8 for each participant.

What SADIST decided that six week old babies should start crying real tears? My heart is forever and irrevocably broken

Arg! Maths geeks!

*runs screaming*

They're big globby round ones too. MiniPaz can still squeeze a cartoon teardrop when she really gives it the effort.

Note to self.
When swapping a failing disk in a RAID 5 array, always double check that it's *actually* a RAID 5 array, and not a single disk for the OS and a RAID 1 pair for data.

It's awful.

We have been cuddling for eight hours to try and get over the upset. My upset, not his.

Activision has bought King (the people that make Candy Crush and Bubble Witch) for $5,900,000,000.

That's a lot of zeros.

Eagerly awaiting Candy of Duty: Bubble Witch Ops.

Yeah, I thought that, but couldn't remember if it gave an error of its own (I would've been 5, I guess, when the zx81 completely died. Strangely, I remember it looking nothing like a zx81. I remember it having proper keys for a start. And red ones. My father insists that it was just a stock zx81 though.)

Batchgeo.com can map hundreds, if you ever need that many.

Also, more than Minecraft when Microsoft bought it. That's a lot of money.

If it was red keys it could have been the official external keyboard

http://www.zx81museum.net/sinclairzx81hardware.html



Its weird the stuff you remember - i still remember how to copy games on it without a twin tape deck

FAST
RAND USR 836

Which basically loaded up your game and dropped you back into basic - with a C/0 message so you could then save the game back out to a fresh tape :-)

Some of the games on the Dragon 32 had to be run with CLOADM &HC000
No idea why I remember that shit.

Read zaphods post and immediately remembered shift/run stop on the Commodores.

Someone else can make a joke about the Commodores. I'm too tired. Don't leave me this way.

Edit. THATS HOW TIRED I AM

What a feeling

More than Star Wars, too.

Fucking hell.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I remember it in my minds eye. How odd. I'd become convinced my memory was entirely faulty on the subject.

I still remember daft amounts of how to use assembly to draw vga graphics with some alacrity. That's not been needed for quite some time. Fairly much forgotten any spectrum era assembly though.

I suspect it makes quite a bit more money right now, so that's hardly surprising.

Exactly. Star Wars is a licence to spend $200+m making a film that hopefully won't suck. King is a licence to sit back and feel your arse grow as the money rolls in.

It is stupid though that activision can throw that sort of money around.

Activision Blizzard, to use their full name. They have plenty more money to sling.

Oh, how I despise printers. I would happily destroy every printer in this whole university with a big heavy hammer and/or explosives. Why do people have to print so fucking much? It's 20-fucking-15 for fuck's sake!

Grrr!

Not infrequently I have people print stuff, bring it up to me and ask me to put it on the Internet. I politely explain that they need to email it to me instead. I don't think they ever even realise how hard I'm fighting the urge to roll up their wad of A4 to a point and see if it could be used to gouge out their eyes.

I used to work somewhere that introduced a paperless office and brand new IT system.

This system involved printing out a useless confirmation on a side of A4 every time you booked something... Which happened every 3 or 4 minutes.

With 15+ staff, we went through reams of paper that all ended up in the recycling bin.

I once got talking to a GP practice where they were receiving the discharge summary letters generated by a system I made for the hospital. It's possible to configure their GP system to automatically receive the letters and use the NHS number to add them to relevant patient records. It emerged that these lot were printing them off before scanning them back and shredding the print in because the manual input part of the GP system would only accept jpegs.

Where my wife used to work so used to fill in a rather lengthy form on a Word template, print it out and take it to the "operations" department.

Ops would then - I shit you not - read off the printed sheet and type the exact same words into an online version of the form used by local government.

I have a Game app on my phone for the video game store. Within it, it has a QR code for my reward card number.

This QR code has a refresh button that changes the look of the QR code every time it's pressed.

Why? My reward card number never changes?

We've had a couple of staff that insisted on printing out documents just to scan them in and save a copy.
They could never explain why this had to be done, but they were very sure that it should be so.

Time stamp as well as your ID?

Surely they'd use their own time stamp, not whatever's on you phone. I reckon they're stealing your nuddy pics a few bits at a time.

Yay! I'm old! A student has just asked, using the tones of one talking to a very old, possibly senile relative, if I'd heard of a thing called 'Teamspeak'.

"why yes I have, sonny, but in my day, we used text chat and we LIKED IT!"

Then they didn't actually introduce a paperless office, did they?

I would imagine that the various Star Wars games and merch make a lot more than a film is guaranteed to make; though the upcoming film will obviously make a bajillion dollars.

I bet that Star Wars is the better long term investment

I'm not sure, Activision now have the ability to target sPecific adverts at targeted users of 500000000 active users. Advertisers will pay a lot for that.

Sure but what happens when other companies come up with new and incredibly popular games? That value surely gets reduced. Star Wars isn't going anywhere even if they manage to make a total tit of the new films.

King has already diversified beyond Candy Crush; it's already proven it can be the company producing the new and incredibly popular games (unlike Zynga.) That's going to have driven a huge amount of the valuation.

http://investor.king.com/investors/news ... fault.aspx

Now it's Christmas time, motherfuckers.

I'll watch it at home. Need to maintain my ice cold gunslinger image at work

It's not as bad (in the dust in the eye sense) as I thought it was going to be.

I've got the office cold, jin time for the weekend. Grrr...

The wife has gone to St Louis. Which, turns out isn't on the coast, nor was it hit by Katrina. I need to bone up on this to be Ticket to Ride World Champion.

Haven't heard the first Slade yet. The excerpt on a recent 'Only Connect' did not count.

"Here you are you lonely old cunt, now you can watch everyone else having fun at Christmas."

Spoilers. Ffs.

Its spirit is on display at the Air & Space museum in DC.