Comment that chart (Score 5, Funny) 487
At 88,225 bytes, the image showing the comparison is also bigger. Oh the irony
Comment Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score 1) 868
Actually - according to wikipedia pieces of 8 were silver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar).
Comment Re:Gov't Controlled (Score 1) 402
I just got back from a weekend in Russia. They told me with great pride in both Moscow and St Petersburg that the entire city's heating was government controlled and that the poor therefore didn't suffer from lack of heating. Only problem is that the heating is so high everyone leaves the windows open. Not so good for energy saving.
Comment Microsoft's TrueSkill beat Elo before this comp (Score 1) 133
I believe the algorithm used by Microsoft to match players for X-Box games was already beating Elo before this competition. They have a description of their algorithm at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/
Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat
210
ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."
Comment Adding rockets (Score 1) 174
Seems like 110,000 feet is quite common for university balloon flights. The University of Cambridge in the UK also has a project which has been reaching that height for a while (33km). What is interesting there is that they're planning to launch rockets from the balloon, and hoping to reach 150km. You can see their plans at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/martlet.php. Don't know what their costs are.
Comment Visual Studio / Code::Blocks / Eclipse / Emacs (Score 2, Informative) 1055
I've tried a few IDEs and this is what I found for C++ development:
*Visual Studio*
- Best debugging
- Handles stl strings, etc
- Easy to change variable values while debugging
- Not very good with stl iterators
- Nice GUI for debugging
- Best interface
- Code completion, etc is all great
- Have to use project files: a pain
- A bit bloated (though not as slow as Eclipse)
*Code::Blocks*
- Debugging is pretty good
- Sometimes a bit buggy (Sometimes can't change variables and stl templates a bit weird)
- In theory does lots of good stuff
- Interface is nice
- Not quite as clean as VS but getting there.
- Allows plugins... could make it better than VS in future
- A lot less bloated then VS
- Project files are better than VS
- Allows for normal Unix makefiles
- Multi platform
*Eclipse/C++*
- Debugging not implemented in the C++ plugin
- Nice interface
- Really bloated, way too slow for me
*Emacs/make*
- I don't know how to use the debugging extensions and I don't feel like spending months to learn them
- Great when running things over ssh, no other method really works
Overall, I find that the debugging capabilities are by far the most important to me. So I use VS for almost all of my development. In fact, it's the only reason I still use Windows.
