If you're talking about the past-past (say up until the mid-nineties) IMHO you're wrong. Pre-mass-internet there wasn't really anywhere to share code. People were swapping floppies, or dialing bulletin boards. The competetiveness was absolutely real.
Also, pride.. If you wanted to figure out how an effect was done, either you reverse engineered the binary, or you figured it out on your own, based on your own experience and the occasional hint.
You have to remember that the demoscene largely grew out of the cracking scene (well, that + Compunet) in the mid-eighties, where _being first_ to release a cracked version of a game was of great importance. Likewise, being first to create a new effect for a demo.
That piece of culture was extremely short lived, maybe just the late eighties and the early nineties.
Already in the mid to late nineties people started mocking this culture, eg the MFX Transgression intros which were just 3d polygon renderers but with some uglifying post processing and then they claimed it was super impressive real-time raytracing (which, for no context, was basically impossible to do full screen on computers of the days).
Some stuck up kids blamed them for cheating but generally everybody laughed at the prank. The demoscene has been open, friendly and collaborative much much longer than it was properly competitive. It's really a minor origin detail, not a key part of culture and ethos.
People do still like to make fun of it, i.e. pretend is still current. Eg common proclamations such as "Kewlers suck", or demos like "Regus Ademordna" which IMO is a particularly splendid example and worth checking out.
I remember reading Howard Rheingold's book "Virtual Reality" when it came out almost 30 years ago, and seeing the Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar) quote where he claimed that "Reality is 80 million polygons per second"
80 million is nothing nowadays, and we still have 20 years to go. How could he be so far off?
If your set is not the same as everyone else's set, you risk being forked off. Trusted third party based schemes have a tendency toward centralization, making them less resilient than ones based on cryptoeconomic incentives. Inevitability it will mean TTP based ledgers will be permissioned, with the TTPs acting as gatekeepers, rather than p2p.
This isn't just theoretical either. Stellar has co-authored a paper arguing for regulations against anonymous cryptocurrencies:
It always confuses the hell out of me when I see this. Back when I grew up, a polyfiller was a polygon filler, i.e. a polygon rasterizer for computer graphics.
This gives me severe flashbacks to clueless clients/PMs. We had projects we had to run through Black Duck -- "No open source code."
The reference implementation of the Mersenne Twister was once GPL, although it wasn't anymore at that time. Still, there are only so many ways you can implement a Mersenne Twister. So my implementation got flagged.
Worse thing is sometimes getting 30 different projects with the same snippet of code but the code was written by neither, it was simply copied from Stackoverflow and then applied by each developer on their code.
Have you had a chance of trying out the report?
If you are scanning open source, there is a trick to ignore matches from the repository where it comes from.
Just create a file called "ignore.txt" inside the samples folder and on that file include the keywords that blacklist positive matches. For example, if scanning the "Adblock Plus" code then add as keyword "adblockplus" on the ignore.txt file and no matches from repositories containing "adblockplus" on their URL will be listed.
Works good for discovering which parts of an already open source project are not really original.
My understanding is that Mersenne Twister is kind of a gold standard for non-cryptographic PRNGs. Linear congruential generators are known to be rather poor, and only ideal where speed is critical and the quality doesn't matter.
I never thought about the question of whether, in languages that require nouns to have grammatical gender, particular countries may have a different grammatical gender from others, but on reflection I already know examples where they do in Portuguese: o Brasil, o Canadá (amusing to me because of the national anthem), but a Argentina, a Alemanha.
I wonder if this also happens in German; the only examples I'm thinking of offhand are feminine (die Schweiz, die Türkei) but now I'm not at all sure that there isn't a masculine one too!
Actually I can't think of many cases where German would use pronouns with countries. The reason these are masculine is because they are typically referred to using a definitive pronoun (literally "the Iraq", "the Iran", etc). It's more common with names of regions -- which may indicate that these countries used to be mere geographical regions (rather than sovereign nations) when the names entered the German language.
It also happens with countries like the UK, the US, the Czech Republic and so on, but obviously for the same reasons as in English.
I can't actually think of a country that's feminine in German. The "die" you often see is actually indicating plural (e.g. "die vereinigten Staaten", the United States; or "die Niederlande", "the Netherlands").
When you use pronouns for anaphora, would you use "es" for all countries, or is it plausible to imagine "er" or "sie", as with common nouns?
For example: Vor drei Monaten waren meine Mutter und ich in der Schweiz; wir haben _____ wirklich schön gefunden.
Would you accept "sie" here as a reference to Switzerland (because it was referred to as "die Schweiz"), or "es", or both? My intution is "es", but I'm not not a native speaker and non-native German speakers notoriously over-apply "es" to inanimate things.
I'd use "es" because it refers to the experience of being in Switzerland rather than the country itself.
But Switzerland is another example of a country that is typically used with an article. Consider the sentence "Ich fahre nach ____" with a country name. It doesn't work for countries like Switzerland ("nach Schweiz" sounds wrong, you'd instead say "in die Schweiz" -- same as "nach Kongo" vs "in den Kongo").
Several countries have articles in German, most don't. Plural countries (USA, UAE) have the plural article, which in the standard form is the same as the feminine article ("die") which makes for even more confusion, but when used in a case changes differently ("in den USA" vs "in der Schweiz") :)
Some feminine countries: Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Mongolia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Central African Republic.
Male, in addition to your own list: Niger (!= Nigeria), Sudan, Vatican.
Neutral: UK (because kingdom is a neutral noun in German), potentially others
In their native tongues, sure. But we're not talking about Afrikaans or French, we're talking about English. And since Britannia is feminine, English would have developed with the word "motherland" representing the native country.
Words used in patent claims are always defined by how they are used in the context of the patent description.
You can't read the claims and think you understand what they cover, without reading the description. A thesaurus doesn't matter, wikipedia doesn't matter, the opinion of an math professor doesn't matter. Patent description.
That doesn't explain whether or not the N=1 case is covered by an "integer" multiple of time steps. I'm not aware of a definition any definition of the term integer which does not include 1, which is what the EFF is mocking here.
Even the patent holder said N=1 was obviously included... until that presented a problem and they decided it was obviously not what they intended.
Why is it the case that people believe that the public, who did not write this patent, should have to guess regarding what it may or may not cover when they're also at threat of millions of dollars in penalties should they guess wrong? And that's neglecting court costs & attorney's fees, which are almost always a sunk cost--you pay them merely for getting sued and you have essentially no chance of recovering any of that, even if you're right, unless they essentially get laughed out of court because it's your burden to prove that the case was exceptionally bad... even though you did nothing wrong.
