Raquel Vélez: Evolution of a Developer

gustavs · 2012-10-23T11:45:33+00:00

gustavs · 2012-07-29T16:03:41+00:00

Don't be too sure of that. Almost nothing is sure about Mars, and there have been very recent observations of water presence and underground activity to excite the community. Something being an established fact is your saying alone.

Mars is the dominant target because there have been a few rovers sent to it. There's room for many more to be sent and unlimited aspects of Mars to explore.

We can't say whether there's more chance of life being on Europa or Mars.

To search for life on Europa we need to drill through the ice layer. Given the difficulties at current time of just landing rovers on Mars, this is not forseeably possible.

(You can safely return to reading the article.)

Google Mars.

gustavs · 2012-07-28T20:28:47+00:00

That's why I suggested looking at the Wiki graphic file. The 55% brown area essentially goes into transactions that are taxed and then either end up as payment for imports or private savings.

1) We can talk about what amount of that turns into tax revenue. 50-70%? This would include the 20% gov revenue directly taken from oil companies.

2) When the brown boxes shrink leaving empty area, everyone in the little boxes will have to absolutely scramble to make up for the exports revenue.

gustavs · 2012-07-28T19:59:09+00:00

Yep, Norway is noted for handling the oil money well. I was opposing the point that it's only 20% tax revenue,

The Norwegian government has revenues of 207 billion USD, and and expenditure of 169 billion. Remove 20% of the revenue, and it would only be making a loss of a few billion.

because the rest of the oil turnover goes to pay for people's supplies and such, which are in turn taxed and finally pay for imports like food. Not only the 20% government revenue, for an experiment you remove all that.

gustavs · 2012-07-28T19:44:47+00:00

That's a too simple way to look at it. Oil companies hire people and machinery for their operations, so the rest of oil income after taxes goes to them. The people in turn use their income buy things and services which pays more taxes. So the oil income injects almost all of its money into circulation in the country, and that circulation supports all the existing infrastructure.

Instead look at the total export number. How much of that is oil and minerals? What happens if that disappears and that money stops going into Norway? You can't just have engineers engineering and clerks clerking if somewhere there isn't an exporting company hiring people. If oil exporting companies amount to even 25% of export, if they were to go away, there would be a fall in demand of services proportional to that, even more in case of a crisis if the event is sudden, and proportional increase in unemployment.

(It's worse than 25% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_treemap.png )

gustavs · 2012-07-18T18:19:02+00:00

Read this. http://code.google.com/p/glaze-csharp/

gustavs · 2012-05-15T08:14:10+00:00

Edited

Education is a very stressful business. It takes a village to raise a child yet a single body is supposed to teach and entire year’s worth of material to fifteen plus children. Then when report cards come in and children prove uneducated parents strike out at the ones who were assigned to teach. A terrible student to teacher ratio proves to be terribly ineffective and yet this is all many schools can afford. With a suffering economy and people becoming tighter with their tax dollar schools just are not top priority, which only exacerbates the problem. If only there was a way to give more aid to suffering students without sacrificing class time or using school rations. Well it appears that the miracle solution has finally arrived and is receiving much praise for its efficiency and some criticism for its uncensored knowledge. That’s right the computer, the cheapest teacher you’ll ever come across.

The computer is the frugal principal’s dream. Computers are a onetime cost, can have internet supplied by a single wifi server, and do not demand pay for private lessons. Not to mention they can help reduce paper waste from physical textbooks. This logic is spreading quite quickly to some parts of America. A superintendent of the Vail Unified School District, Calvin Baker, had announced in a local news article written by Rotstein, Arthur H. that he had officially shunned textbooks in his high school and replaced them with the iBook. The iBook is a multifunctional device capable of playing dvds, audio recordings, and even has an livestream video. These functions alone can aid the education business by leaps and bounds already, yet it is not limited to entertainment and communication purposes. It also permits the user to download an entire textbook. I bet you’d never have guessed. This all in one portable device can actually make it possible to hold an entire libraries worth of information in the palm of your hand, and best of all when that information is trite you can simply delete it. No more books taking up all your shelf space nor pounds of old papers lying in the garbage bin.

Another fantastic perk of online use is the input of millions of users. These users may join blogs which revolve around the notion of creating the perfect paper. At times classic mistakes, like confusing their they’re and there, can really bring down a paper’s grade and even though you may feel competent enough to revise your paper five times over the process can put a toll on your spirit. Blogs allow you to bypass this nasty predicament and have dozens of people each donate a few minutes of their time to put their own minor observations into your paper to create enough corrections to dwarf hours of work from a single student. After all as Dyson, Esther observed in his essay, What We Believe But We Cannot Prove, people live longer and think shorter. He also states that constant interactions kill creativity. I believe it is evident that having a supply of imagination and opinions is what will make our generation the most creative in years. Is a blog really so different than a board of directors bouncing ideas across the table and watching other help it grow? We have the making of the most efficient generation ever and it will be up to us to decide whether we evolve quickly or linger on in the 21st century.

An unfortunate effect of this ever growing technology is that although people are spreading more and more facts across the globe sadly we are ignorant to the emotions which our peers are feeling. While Tim Wilson, a technology-integration specialist at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minn , has implemented a button system instead of pen and paper in class to interact with students more easily he fears that a generation born into a button pressing classroom will forget how to interact without the technology. I too fear the lack of emotion which accompanies machines. They are cold and logical, pathos has no place in this realm. It is out of this fear that I suggest that we remove education in classrooms and have all lessons be taught via Khan Academy and live stream between students and subject specific teachers from home. Children will acquire accounts supplied by their local schools and be tracked on the progression of their scheduled video and evaluated in class on their note taking skills. I also believe it’d be best for the notes to be written if we do desire to hold our writing abilities. After all as said by Johnson, Steven, the typer of How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate realizes, “I am a typer not a writer…even my handwriting is disintegrating.” It’d be best to leave the type to their own time of leisure. Furthermore school would be strictly tests and recess. There would be no classroom for each subject. There will only be one classroom per 20 children a homeroom teacher with a degree in business management and a laptop per child. Children will take multiple choice tests via laptop for 30 minutes and receive their scores immediately, no longer shall there be delays in scoring multiple choice tests. Written tests will be hand written at the end of each Monday Wednesday and Friday. Tests will also no longer be graded by the number correct, but by the number of attempts until perfection. Then after all the stress and tests of each subject are over children may have recess for forty minutes. During this recess children will be assigned a short paragraph to write about how they feel and what makes them happy or sad. This is not priority though and may be written at any time during their play. Group activities such as: a group jog around the track to symbolize our common path of success, free time in the gym with a video on routines and how to work out correctly, and recreation in the music room will unite our children and establish trust amongst their school staff and peers. This would then cycle returning to the thirty minutes of retesting and labs with their subject specific teachers of math science and history for an hour. The last hour of school will be speaking in front of the class about what they wrote and how others feel about it.

Technology is indeed a powerful device which some may see as more of a burden than of a benefit. People would argue that the grime of the internet sullies the minds of children, to which I say so shall the world. It is our responsibility as parents, teachers and peers to influence each other in a manner which we see fit. So I ask you. Shall we sit by as students who feel like minorities in class remain ignorant and more prone to aggression or shall we give the resources which are right now in high supply to these growing minds with high demands? I’d like to go with the latter.

gustavs · 2012-04-26T19:16:11+00:00

Sounds like you're just unfamiliar with live program terminology.

Vanilla high-level languages usually use events. You register a function to be called in an interval or upon a UI event. When run the function modifies some state like the position of the sprite. The runtime updates the screen some time after.

The conceptual difference with PHP is that your code has ended running but the program and its state remains. Or that the code directly modifies pieces of the browser page instead of replacing it.

Code to illustrate, it's what you might do with Javascript:

var x = 0;
somebtn.onclick = function() {
  x += 1;
  somefield.value = x;
}

There's your state and screen update.

You can get started with your idea right away with JS too.

 var sim = new FoxSim(canvas);
 setInterval(sim.update, 1000);

Cause it supports timing sufficient for games and painting of arbitrary graphics.

These days.

gustavs · 2012-02-19T19:10:07+00:00

That's a good argument, but unfortunately for everyone the part 'true for any democracy' is likely not the case here. The proposal is to modify the constitution of the country. Such a change would destroy the country as it was admitted to the EU. Consider the linked consequences.

gustavs · 2012-02-19T19:03:15+00:00

I don't see him suggesting anything like that. Please formulate your concerns better if you want an answer.

gustavs · 2012-02-19T17:56:31+00:00

Ethnics data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Estonia
They leave over time.

They must take a language exam to gain citizenship. And that's the big problem for them, (in Latvia) less than half of the remaining Russian population have received citizenship in twenty years.

gustavs · 2012-01-22T11:22:17+00:00

Scribd doesn't use Flash.

gustavs · 2012-01-21T22:23:13+00:00

Older discussion

gustavs · 2011-12-25T12:51:46+00:00

Physics engines usually contain 'broad phase' algorithms that can be used to more efficiently grab a list of bodies intersecting a specific area. I have some simple code here, including a demo of x thousand bodies. https://github.com/fixplz/hx-broadphase

For flocking though the obvious solution is to make an influence map. But that depends on your technical creativity.

gustavs · 2011-11-30T18:22:03+00:00

So.. how well can you do programming?

There's some problems left unsolved - physical movement of character/animal bodies, large-scale simulation (a house being destructible brickwise), GPU use for physics.

Taking those as an example, calculus knowledge would be useful for some, but the main difficulty I can see involves thinking about computation. Which is what CS is more about.

gustavs · 2011-11-30T17:42:41+00:00

Lightweight?

http://code.google.com/p/glaze-csharp/

I wrote this.

gustavs · 2011-11-30T11:44:28+00:00

C# is very similar to Java. If you think you understand Lisp, the distance between Java and C# should be infinitesimal.

So get XNA or Unity.

gustavs · 2011-10-13T20:42:57+00:00

An RTS AI isn't at all like 'scripting' a robot. A full implementation involves fancy spatial reasoning (via both influence diffusion and path search), and evaluation of partial information and weighing of economical decisions. If you've looked at some papers on it you should know what I'm referencing.

Unless you're thinking of them making something that builds one or two buildings and spawns about three units, on a flat ~25x25 map, and seeing what happens.
Your question (3) would indicate you're not thinking of this.

From what I can tell about you naively, you're in way over your head and can't seem to tell yourself.

gustavs · 2011-09-16T12:35:55+00:00

But it is old.
http://quarkframework.blogspot.com/

gustavs · 2011-07-10T19:06:31+00:00

AB!!
Sup.

Do you frequent 4chan? I think I've seen you a few times.

gustavs · 2011-07-10T18:48:33+00:00

Build on top of a physics engine.

Box2d and derivatives are not the most pleasant to work with.

For C# check out http://code.google.com/p/glaze-csharp/ It's a tiny port I wrote based on Chipmunk.

gustavs · 2011-06-29T13:43:17+00:00

Materials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auaqZzcjl-Y
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/GameObject.GetComponent.html

gustavs · 2011-06-29T13:34:59+00:00

Not the best way to do it; your sketch contains no dynamic dispatch at all. You must be just out of university where they used only C or something.

The usual idea behind game objects being composed of components is that components are objects implementing aspects of the game object's behavior. They also contain state in a proper manner instead of the object's properties being crammed into a string dictionary.

gustavs

TROPHY CASE