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๐ Full employment theorem
In computer science and mathematics, a full employment theorem is a term used, often humorously, to refer to a theorem which states that no algorithm can optimally perform a particular task done by some class of professionals. The name arises because such a theorem ensures that there is endless scope to keep discovering new techniques to improve the way at least some specific task is done.
For example, the full employment theorem for compiler writers states that there is no such thing as a provably perfect size-optimizing compiler, as such a proof for the compiler would have to detect non-terminating computations and reduce them to a one-instruction infinite loop. Thus, the existence of a provably perfect size-optimizing compiler would imply a solution to the halting problem, which cannot exist. This also implies that there may always be a better compiler since the proof that one has the best compiler cannot exist. Therefore, compiler writers will always be able to speculate that they have something to improve. A similar example in practical computer science is the idea of no free lunch in search and optimization, which states that no efficient general-purpose solver can exist, and hence there will always be some particular problem whose best known solution might be improved.
Similarly, Gรถdel's incompleteness theorems have been called full employment theorems for mathematicians. In theoretical computer science this field of study is known as Kolmogorov complexity, or the smallest program which outputs a given string.
Tasks such as virus writing and detection, and spam filtering and filter-breaking are also subject to Rice's theorem.
Discussed on
- "Full employment theorem" | 2010-12-24 | 58 Upvotes 20 Comments
๐ Why is P3P not used more?
The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is an obsolete protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge were the only major browsers to support P3P. Microsoft has ended support from Windows 10 onwards. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge on Windows 10 will no longer support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value.
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- "Why is P3P not used more?" | 2010-12-24 | 18 Upvotes 16 Comments
๐ Smoothening complex polygons - RamerโDouglasโPeucker algorithm
The RamerโDouglasโPeucker algorithm, also known as the DouglasโPeucker algorithm and iterative end-point fit algorithm, is an algorithm that decimates a curve composed of line segments to a similar curve with fewer points.
Discussed on
- "Smoothening complex polygons - RamerโDouglasโPeucker algorithm" | 2010-12-23 | 30 Upvotes 14 Comments
๐ Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms
Pixel-art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that are often used in video game console emulators to enhance hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. The re-scaling of pixel art is a specialist sub-field of image rescaling.
As pixel-art graphics are usually in very low resolutions, they rely on careful placing of individual pixels, often with a limited palette of colors. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes with very little resolution, down to individual pixels. This makes image scaling of pixel art a particularly difficult problem.
A number of specialized algorithms have been developed to handle pixel-art graphics, as the traditional scaling algorithms do not take such perceptual cues into account.
Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many are designed to run in real time for sufficiently small input images at 60 frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors: 2ร is the most common, with 3ร, 4ร, 5ร and 6ร also present.
Discussed on
- "Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms" | 2010-12-23 | 208 Upvotes 32 Comments
๐ Heilmeier's Catechism: questions for every startup, every project.
George Harry Heilmeier (May 22, 1936 โ April 21, 2014) was an American engineer, manager, and a pioneering contributor to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Heilmeier's work is an IEEE Milestone.
๐ List of wikileaks mirrors deleted on Wikipedia
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- "List of wikileaks mirrors deleted on Wikipedia" | 2010-12-09 | 18 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Why shaken, not stirred?
"Shaken, not stirred" is a catchphrase of Ian Fleming's fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond and describes his preference for the preparation of his martini cocktail.
The phrase first appears in the novel Diamonds Are Forever (1956), though Bond himself does not actually say it until Dr. No (1958), where his exact words are "shaken and not stirred." In the film adaptations of Fleming's novels, the phrase is first uttered by the villain, Dr. Julius No, when he offers the drink in Dr. No (1962), and it is not uttered by Bond himself (played by Sean Connery) until Goldfinger (1964). It is used in numerous Bond films thereafter with the notable exceptions of You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the drink is wrongly offered as "stirred, not shaken", to Bond's response "Perfect", and Casino Royale (2006) in which Bond, after losing millions of dollars in a game of poker, is asked if he wants his martini shaken or stirred and snaps, "Do I look like I give a damn?"
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- "Why shaken, not stirred?" | 2010-12-05 | 39 Upvotes 35 Comments
๐ Bookland
"Bookland" is the informal name for the Unique Country Code (UCC) prefix allocated in the 1980s for European Article Number (EAN) identifiers of published books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN namespace can catalogue books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system. In other words, Bookland is a fictitious country that exists solely in EAN for the purposes of non-geographically cataloguing books in the otherwise geographically keyed EAN coding system.
๐ Commonplace Book
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator's particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler's responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tรณpos koinรณs, see literary topos) which means "a general or common topic", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.
In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, "in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective."
By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713 and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855, including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art. Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used: Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today). The commonplace book was often a lifelong habit: for example the English-Australian artist Georgina McCrae kept a commonplace book from 1828-1865.
Discussed on
- "Commonplace Book" | 2010-11-09 | 15 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Cool stuff you can do with netcat
netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. The command is designed to be a dependable back-end that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of connection its user could need and has a number of built-in capabilities.
Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.
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- "Cool stuff you can do with netcat" | 2010-11-05 | 126 Upvotes 39 Comments