pvitz
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
793
Submissions
309
Member since
Oct 22
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
A big software for simulating the economic balance sheets of life insurance companies moved many years ago from using FoxPro under the hood to CSV files and sold it as a huge improvement. I don't think anybody was convinced by that, but vendor lock-in makes companies accept such regressions.
Comment · 4 months ago
If it were "the EU", it would be on https://code.europa.eu
Comment · 5 months ago
You will possibly like Needham's "Visual Differential Geometry and Forms" and even if you don't have much time to study it, it's quite beautiful to look at from time to time.
Comment · 6 months ago
Segfault provides something similar with a direct ssh connection: https://www.thc.org/segfault/
Comment · 8 months ago
The book "Robot Builder's Bonanza" is a nice introduction and gets you started on the hardware side.
Comment · 10 months ago
From the manual:
The control variable in for loops is read only. If you need to change it, declare a local variable with the same name in the loop body.
Yes. The old code does an implicit "local x = x" for all loops, in case you modify 'x'. With the new semantics, the code only does it when you ask for it.
Comment · 11 months ago
That symmetries imply conservation laws is pretty fascinating (see the Noether theorem). I guess it seems only strange it you assume already that the conservation law holds.
Comment · 11 months ago
When I was a student of physics and came across this paragraph in Feynman's book, I was curious if he really meant the simple technique explained in the article, a more general one (also described in the article with the integral bounds as functions of a parameter) or something else. I don't know, but this led me to read the text "Advanced Calculus" by Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1912), which includes a lot of examples and gems. If there is some young student out there who wants to go well beyond the basic techniques of calculus taught in analysis or mathematical physics courses, have a look at [0].
[0] https://archive.org/details/advancedcalculus031579mbp/mode/1...
Comment · 1 year ago
I understood "binaries" in "compressed binaries" as "executables", e.g. like a packed executable, but I see that you mean indeed a binary file (and not e.g. a text file).
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks for your reply and advice! I guess what you describe as "impossible" is the case I am mostly interested in, though more for non-executable binary data. If I am not mistaken, this goes under the term "file fragment classification", but I have been wondering if practitioners might have figured out some better ways than what one can find in scholarly articles.
And yes, searching for the reimplementation beforehand would have saved me some hours :D
Comment · 1 year ago
A shot in the dark, but maybe you could give me a hint. Recently, I was interested in extracting sprites from an old game. I was able to reverse the file format of the data archive, which contained the game assets as files. However, I got stuck because the image files were obviously compressed. By chance, I found an open source reimplementation of the game and realised it was LZ77+Huffman compressed, but how would one detect the type of compression and parameters with only the file? That seems a pretty hard problem or are there good heuristics to detect that?
Comment · 1 year ago
Same experience here! We used Origin and/or QtiPlot in a physics lab for the graphs and quick regressions.
Comment · 1 year ago
More like "precomputed table" and "table lookup"...
Comment · 1 year ago
We have been in the process of upgrading to the latest version and can't continue. The lack of communication by Mathworks is very strange.
Comment · 1 year ago
The reasons for this change seem to be described in [0] with the following summary:
> The contribution workflow in Guix has been facing several challenges:
> difficult onboarding, lack of legibility, complex, unreliable, and
> labor-intensive infrastructure, and lack of automation. All these lead
> to an experience that contributors often find frustrating and hinders
> quality assurance efforts. We propose to address these limitations by
> migrating repositories, issue tracking, and patch tracking to Codeberg,
> an integrated forge with a Web interface that is hosted by a non-profit.