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Comment Re:Cost of Programmers Cost of Engines (Score 2) 125

Of course there's trivial costs in a business. If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost savings of turning the thermostat from 70 to 71, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost of something that is less than 1% of your budget, you're wasting your time- even if you reduce it to 0 you'd have saved more by focusing elsewhere. A good businessman realizes whats worth being concerned about and what you just have to live with. Nothing is 100% efficient in life.

Comment Re:Poker is a lot more complex... (Score 1) 93

Card counting is keeping track of cards between hands in an effort to figure out altered odds on the current hand. For example, if you're playing single shoe blackjack and have seen 10 high cards out of 11 cards, you know low cards have a higher probability than normal.

That doesn't exist in Holdem, because there's no carry over between hands. Each is an individual event, with no altered probability from previous hands. You can calculate odds, but that's easy even for a human at holdem- if there's X cards which you think will give you the winning hand (called outs), your odds are X/47 on the turn and X/46 on the river, or just under 2% per out. For seeing both cards on the flop its 1-(47-X)*(46-X)/(47*46), or about 4% per out. Generally you just use 2% and 4%, as the nature of holdem makes it unlikely that percent or two you'd be off will make a long term difference.

So there are odds calculation. But there's no card counting. Also, card counting isn't the amazing thing some people think it is- if you don't play deep into a shoe, it isn't much of an advantage. In some games like baccarat its been mathematically proven to not give an advantage at all.

There are 2 poker games where it does help- razz and 7 card stud. This is because each player has a unique hand, including individual up cards. When they fold their hands are mucked. Remembering all the cards which were showing at any time is an advantage, as it can effect the odds of drawing to a straight/flush/full house. I would suspect a computer may have a big edge over beginners on those games due to that. But a pro at those games knows how to remember the dead cards already, I'm not sure it would be much of an advantage at high end stud.

Comment Re:Poker is a lot more complex... (Score 4, Informative) 93

There's no card counting in Texas Holdem. The deck is reshuffled after each hand dealt. Only 7 cards are shown to a given player, and all of them can be read at any time. There's no advantage to card counting, because you don't need to count. They may have some other card game they beat, but it isn't holdem.

Comment Re:Poker is a lot more complex... (Score 2) 93

No, it isn't. Or at least, it isn't by looking for tells. You win money by analyzing their betting pattern on this hand, comparing it to what makes sense, and putting them on a range of possible hands. One of those possible hands is always a bluff. Then you see what you beat of those hands, what beats you, and what your drawing odds are to improve and make a choice off that information. That is definitely something a computer can do. But the question is never "is he bluffing" its "is my hand strong enough and with sufficient odds of winning to be worth paying at the pot and implied odds this gives me".

Those are things a computer definitely can do.

Comment Re:The real question here (Score 1) 185

More or less right. There's a few other considerations though.

1)Taxes. You aren't taxed on "returns" from lowering debt. You are on investments. You need to factor that in.

2)Risk. The risk of investments are different. The risk of stock is on the company (and sector, and economy's) performance. The risk of bonds is the company or government going bankrupt. The risk of paying off debt is you personally being unable to make debt payments in the future and losing your collateral.

3)Ability to cash out. If you pay off a car loan early, you can't cash that out (as the loan is likely more than the car is worth on the secondary market). If you pay off a mortgage, you have to sell the house to get the money back. With a stock, you can cash out at any time although possibly at a loss.

Comment Re:Agile - like everything else it is good and bad (Score 2) 208

Except Agile would be even worse, as there's no way to keep the amount of communication lines an Agile project needs over the years. If you have a team of 100 programmers are you going to have the customer representatives needed at each engineering subteam meeting to make the proper choices? Not a chance in hell.

There's something in between the two that's better, but waterfall will do better in these cases than pure Agile.

Comment Re:The real question here (Score 4, Informative) 185

The extra $20 is a broken window fallacy. Paying off 20 dollars of debt pays off 20 dollars of debt. They'd only be saving far more in the high interest case because they'd be paying far more. Either way they're losing money by paying higher interest rates.

Same with your overall interest rates. In the end, people have $X per month to spend on housing. They can't exceed that. No matter what they pay $Y in principle per month and $Z in interest per month. All that changes is the relative ratio of Y and Z. High Z, low Y and the money goes to the banks. Low Z, high Y and the money goes to the property owners. Of the two I know which I prefer.

Comment Re:leave open a Skype channel (Score 4, Interesting) 208

No, no it doesn't. First off- why are you closing your IDEs, profilers, etc? Just leave them up. CHek out your source? Why would yours not be checked out already? Grabbing the latest updates takes about 2 minutes and can be done while doing other things. Getting mentally prepared for work may take a bit longer, but that should still be minutes, not 30.

At the end of the day? 0. There's nothing to do. You walk away and pick it up in the morning. And if you have a daily status email you have to write- tell your boss to fuck off.

Comment Re:So? (Score 5, Interesting) 310

So lets say I have a standing order to buy FooBar stock at $50 a share. Its current price is $55. So basically I'm looking to buy on dips.

Tonight it comes out that the CEO has been falsifying all financial reports, and instead of making money for the last 3 years they've lost millions. You don't think I should be able to cancel that buy order due to the new information?

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