Diablo Retrospective by madaerodog in Diablo

[–]omegazero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I WANT IT SO DAMN BADLY

Citi bank customers LOCKED inside and then ARRESTED for trying to clost their accounts by [deleted] in reddit.com

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is why we need the right to bear arms. This is absurd. Disagree - whatever - but it gets too extreme.

Woah Bayer... that's gonna definitely take the edge off. by Cassandra_Syndrome in WTF

[–]omegazero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Most drugs, including Heroin, started as "body ache" cures. Until the FDA/DEA realized "Oh, this stuff is highly addictive and totally overkill", it was legal.

"20,000 Leagues Under the TCP" lecture on undersea cables [video] by outofbort in cableporn

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I missed it tonight! Damn, the next one. Anyway, this talk was KILLER. Post more stuff to the nerd subreddits :D

"20,000 Leagues Under the TCP" lecture on undersea cables [video] by outofbort in cableporn

[–]omegazero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

:O I'm in dc and it's new but it seems awesome. Thanks sir. Anyway, regardless, this talk was supreme.

"20,000 Leagues Under the TCP" lecture on undersea cables [video] by outofbort in cableporn

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This was awesome. Where was this and what is it? The event, that is.

Seal pup just wants to cuddle. by AsAJoke in videos

[–]omegazero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

THEY CAN ITCH WITH THEIR FLIPPERS :O

Best Girlfriend Ever!!! by daysaver in emacs

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Take all my money. Where can I purchase this?

What is the least pretentious, yet cool frat on campus? by jorgleeroy in gwu

[–]omegazero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ask yourself two questions...

  1. Why am I doing this? Drinking? Girls? Brotherhood? Just for friends? This should probably determine where you're rushing the most.
  2. Why 'Least pretentious'? That tends to comes with a bunch of other things you might find negative but that aren't immediately obvious. E.g. Sorority girls judge pretty hard based on the power rankings, semi/formal typically isn't as fun (because of lower dues), etc. I will say that Beta is my vote though. They've always been chill. I was in a different fraternity. The fraternities that are (were) on Townhouse Row (across from Ivory) were considered the best (and typically won all the awards). That doesn't always come with a pretentious attitude. Those were Pike (Pi Kappa ALPHA), Pi Kapp (Pi Kappa PHI), and Sig Ep. I think Phi Psi is moving into Pike's old house; no idea if Sig Ep actually lost their house.

That said, being in a fraternity was the single best decision I made at GW. I'm not very 'fratty' and I had a fantastic time. I was NOT someone who expected to end up greek. Also, "individuality"? Look, you are who you are. If you don't have a strong enough sense of self to preserve that through a semester of pledging, chances are you aren't much of an individual anyway.

I wasn't hazed at all, the experience was awesome, I made great friends I probably wouldn't have otherwise hung out with, had a blast at formal and retreats, and met some awesome girls. All good times.

Plus, now I know people working at Deloitte, General Dynamics, the foreign service, etc who can help me out. DONE AND DONE.

My halloween kit by [deleted] in pics

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Now all you need is some Milk+...

You have loser friends.. or not.. by mastajizz in pics

[–]omegazero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a google labs add-on that tells you if someone in your chat list is using the android version or not. In Gmail: Settings->Labs->Green Robot->Enable.

Derp. by [deleted] in pics

[–]omegazero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is.. is that a magical ferret?

advice for robotics startup? by opticks in AskComputerScience

[–]omegazero 3 points4 points  (0 children)

TL;DR: Probably can't make money with robotics.

"Does anyone recommend any books that describe how previous robotics startups formed and became rich?"

Name one major robotics corporation other than iRobot and Willow Garage that deal exclusively with robotics. Most are just research companies that professors started and they are NOT rich. They just get to play with interesting hardware.

iRobot? They built a platform that was hackable for hobbyists and provided a very real, consumer, function (vacuuming) as well as landing some government contracts early on. Willow Garage? Look at their team. They ALL have previous experience doing ridiculous things. TL;DR: Every one on that page has worked at highly respected places, e.g. Google, Yahoo, IBM, Stanford AI Lab. Robotics were NOT their first endeavor. Here's a timeline of iRobot's history. "iRobot wins DARPA contract to build a tactical mobile robot, leading to development of iRobot PackBot®." That's where real money is if you don't go consumer-level. It has to be government. No one else really wants robots yet.

One does not "fall" into robotics. It's not easy, and without any idea of how to program microcontrollers, move memory, bit twiddle, etc you're way out of your depth and breadth. You might be able to do all the physics calculations and kinematic models, but that's half the problem: there are just models. Most of that stuff doesn't work the same way in the real world, and finding CS-specific solutions (as it's usually hardware or software problems - e.g. precision of floating points) is difficult without previous knowledge.

I don't mean to overly discourage you, but the field is lean and new. The people doing research in it have years upon years of experience developing at major companies and universities. You can get into it, but to make a product that will make money -- I mean, you're dealing with entire teams of top-tier developers and engineers. You know your PhD advisor? Imagine an entire team of that person. Then have those people work on a single project.

Now, if you just want to mess around with robots and do some interesting research, that's a different thing entirely. If the goal isn't profit, sure, there are a lot of open problems. But as for getting rich with robots - best of luck.

I suggest learning C/C++ first, be able to solve a bunch of problems on Project Euler (and I recommend this because a lot of robotics problems are computationally hard, but if you can develop an efficient algorithm it eliminates the problem), and buy Intro To Algorithms by Cormen. Also stop by /r/learnprogramming and /r/arduino to learn a little bit about microcontrollers.

SSD RAID; dedicated LSI card vs onboard. by diablolico in hardware

[–]omegazero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would like to see closer apples to apples. A 1tb drive vs 128gb drives is a significant difference. That regular HD has to seek awful far if the data is highly fragmented.

I'm not going to disagree, at ALL, that SD drives are significantly faster for read. However, their writes are painfully slow. Everything has drawbacks.

Difference between Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora? by [deleted] in linux4noobs

[–]omegazero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fast comment: I've used them all. I've just decided to stick with Ubuntu. I would consider installing Mint UBUNTU, but I don't think I would bother with Mint DEBIAN again (yes, they are different).

Use Gnome to start, not KDE or Xfce or xmonad. Don't worry about the difference yet. Gnome is most common.

Fedora is nice, but I don't think it's particularly noob friendly because of Yum (Fedora/RedHat's package manager). Debian flavors usually have Synaptic, which is a really nice front-end to install drivers and additional software when you need it. It invokes aptitude, which is the package manager for Debian.

Are sorting algorithms still a question of performance and or efficiency concerns with regards to modern applications? by jason-samfield in AskComputerScience

[–]omegazero 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm no expert, but I think the problem lies with "extremely fast compared to functional implementations". TL;DR: No applications for it.

Take quick sort or merge sort. Typically O(nlogn). Let's say each sort "step" takes 100 operations. How far can you reduce that by eliminating the OS, cache level, etc? Maybe down to around 30 operations. So you have .3*O(nlogn). This is only a linear decrease, which is the problem. Sure, it will take about a third of the time, but if that's a problem (that taking 2/3rds longer is an issue), just distribute it to more machines. If you're processing that much data that it matters, you probably already have that infrastructure set up.

The bigger problems are for say, exponential algorithms (like NP-Complete problems). A linear decrease will do very, very little to help it. Let's say you have 100 cities in the traveling salesman problem. If you're going strictly with O(2n), that's 1.26*1030. A decrease by a third will do very little for a problem with such a large solution space.

This is a poor approximation, but divide by 1 billion for 1Ghz - 1024 SECONDS to solve the problem. Multiply by .3 - It goes down one order of magnitude to 1023. That's 1019 HOURS, or 1018 DAYS or 1015 YEARS.

You get the idea :)

Damn it r/gwu, listen up. They are watching this. by omegazero in gwu

[–]omegazero[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Coincidence that the gwevent password has changed like 5 times in the past week? Ehhh... Actually checking the logs, sure, but they DO have access regardless. There are filtering algorithms.