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>> ... How can this be possible?

It's called common mode failure. You have multiple identical redundant computers running the same software. All of them have the same bugs. Boom.
an example here : http://www.around.com/ariane.h...

Indeed, they would need some mechanism like this, which is implemented using several heterogeneous processes. Triple hardware redundancy is useless if they all have a common mode software bug. Same thing happened to the first flight of Ariane 5, where all 3 controllers crashed within milliseconds.

It's from James Gleick's Chaos.

It's an example of order in chaos. What you do is to take a bathtub faucet and hook it up to a water source. Then turn it down to a trickle. Eventually you'll get to the nonlinear bit, where the oscillations from the last drop affect when the current drop falls.

Hook up a light beam to time when each drop falls and plot the result.

Then do a sort of second-order plot. With the delta time between drops 1 and 2 on the X axis, and the time between drops 2 and 3 on the Y axis.

It will create a sort of phase space portrait of the system. You'll see attractors form.

If I had the time I'd do it myself. Sounded pretty magical when I read it the first time.

Ian Stewart has written numerous popular mathematics books that are lucid, educational, and entertaining. _Letters to a Young Mathematics_ (review) is likely a good bet.

  _Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James Gleick was a book I read in high school that was a classic about chaos (dynamic non-linear systems) and one of books I can point to as and fractals that inspired me to maintain a heavy mathematical bend in additional to the trendy (profitable, and for me at least, easy) Computer Science courses in university.

  The classic autobiographical _A Mathematician's Apology_ by G. H. Hardy might be worth considering.

  Others have already mentioned _Flatland_ by Edwin A. Abbott, but the writing style might be off-putting for some readers who find its dated style strange. _Flatterland_ (review) by Ian Stewart might by an alternative.

  Others have already mentioned Simon Singh's books, which I can endorse as well. In general anything about deciphering the Enigma crypto-machines during World War II, and Alan Turing are potential books to consider as well. Anything about Paul Erdos (_The Man Who Loved Only Numbers_), and the classic book turned into a movie about John Nash, _A Beautiful Mind_, by Sylvia Nasar.

As long as the book shows that mathematics is about critical thinking and problem solving, not about pushing around numbers in equations, any popular mathematics is likely worth considering.

For hands-on math education / experience, that's a different question, that's a problem to be left to the interested student...

James Gleick has a fantastic writing style that portrays the normally dry material in a engaging style.

Otherwise, books on logic, astrophysics etc can all be found in some books that present the information in a format edible for younger kids.

That's unfortunately not a foolproof system if they're all running the same software. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that they will all fail in the same way at the same time for the same reason, leaving things completely out of control. See the Ariane 5 accident for a practical demonstration.

You might enjoy the following books. Be warned, they are subversive. You may wind up with an understanding of science less like that conveyed by a diet of Fox News (strange, skewed, and vaguely hostile). These are fun to read and very accessible.

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Chaos
The Selfish Gene
Why Flip a Coin?

One of the quickest things I learned after only a few months out of college is that the guys sitting in the ivory towers of my university were there for a reason: they didn't know a thing about working in industry. Many had never spent any time actually applying knowledge and skills from the piles of degrees they had earned, or had only worked 20+ years ago in some corporate research lab (read same environment as academia). Like my compilers instructor who went off about how the Ariane 5 rocket failure would have been avoided if they had used his pet language (Haskell). The real answer is of course software testing, not silver bullet languages. That's not the type of thing you'll learn in an ivory tower setting though.

What they didn't tell you is that you need to spend a bit more money and only put forth 1/2 the effort of your CS degree (your real degree) to get an MBA so that you can deal with the dipshits who run the world. The CS degree alone lines you up for a bumpy ride at best while you put together the business sense that your engineering courses are structured in complete contrast to on your own in your working life. I would tell anyone who wanted to do CS today to minor or get a double bachelors in business (if not, enjoy a light couple of semesters and stick around to get an MBA - it's a non-thesis "masters" for cryin' out loud!).

The Ariane 5 Rocket self destructed because of an unhandled overflow exception thrown by the flight control software. http://www.around.com/ariane.html

Pretty soon the Blue-Screen-of-Death is going to become a lot more sinister.

I think what they're describing is an effort to move many of their products over to being web services, and focusing on the revenues from things like Microsoft Live search.

I find it amusing that the statement I quoted was so ambiguous and confusing that two readers found two entirely different meanings for it. Maybe as this discussion continues we'll find even more potential meanings.

Of course when I tried Windows Live! a week or so ago, it simply did not work. I even tried it with Firefox (instead of Safari) and it still didn't work. I'm using a Mac, but that's no excuse; Google works great.

One thing you can say for Apple: I have read about many keynotes and Apple press releases and such, and I don't think I have ever encountered language that was in any way unclear or ambiguous. When Apple says something, I know what they mean and I feel I can trust them.

Microsoft's problem, incidentally, is not new, but I think at this point the harmful effects may be catching up to it. This is almost a decade old but still well worth reading.

D

If you want to understand it read Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

qz

If you want to understand it read Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

qz

Have you seen the use to which Amazon.com has put the patent office?

I think I'll patent a "procedure for simultaneously walking and chewing gum"

-- if it hasn't already been patented.

http://www.around.com/patent.html
Patent Absurdity

IMHO, the problem is not with the big companies but with the pathetic ignorance at the US patent office which seems to lack the discrimination of distinguishing obvious techniques from more escoteric and "genuinely genuine" methods.

Their IT department needs to be better informed with what's obvious and what's not. It will always be a human opinion regarding what constitues a patent and what doesn't. but that line needs to be drawn at a saner level.

Unless this is fixed, companies like Amazon, will be obviosuly tempted to take advantage , no one wants to give up huge commercial advantages related to these.

All said, I guess Amazon also shares some responsibility

Microsoft degrades technology, the concept of business fairplay, and The English Language, too.

It's the MS replacement for HTTP and HTML, and... oops, it's been cancelled.

Your point was...?

It's to late now, but if you want exact WYSIWYG, use PDF instead of HTML (and be prepared for issues such as A4 vs Letter). HTML was not and is not designed to be a layout language. Any layout you can do with it is a bonus. Get over it.

She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...

A similar and possibly authentic story is told about Einstein:

Meanwhile, like any demigod, he accreted bits of legend. That he opened a book and found an uncashed $1,500 check he had left as a bookmark (maybe--he was absent-minded about everyday affairs). That he was careless about socks, collars, slippers . . .

While Einstein was known to be unfailingly polite, Newton "had a suspicious and quarrelsome temper" and was "very irritable when contradicted."

We clerks in this world must be prepared to cut the geniuses among us some slack. If we can't learn anything from them we can at least turn the inconvenience they cause us into amusing anecdotes.

"Under a $1,000,000" is a mere bagatelle, the failure to check for arithmetic overflow cost the European Space Agency two Communications Satellites at well over 600,000,000 Euros. For more such fun see Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related SystemsForum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems

In his biography of Feynman, "Genius", James Gleick basically comes out and states that there is a cult of personality around Hawking. I need to grab the book and find the exact passage, but he states that some physicists and cosmologists have gotten way too much pub due to their personal afflictions. And that many others who are perfectly healthy have had their work overlooked because they aren't in a wheelchair.

I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."

Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.

It's not a contract without consideration. You should offer to leave a flaming bag of poop on their doorstep. If they accept the poop, you have a contract. If they stamp it out, it's null and void.

The reason it is "fair" is that they are giving you music, which by your opening the packaging and listening to it (using the product), you are tacitly agreeing to the EULA. It's called a shrinkwrap agreement. If you don't like it, you can return the product unopened.

As for the details, the most important reform is a change in the incentive structure. It seems like it's easier to get a patent than a municipal parking permit, because the office subsists on application fees. If there were a reapplication fee for every rejected application, the office would change overnight from a Walmart greeter to a Viper Club bouncer.

James Gleick's "Patently Absurd" is a decent post-one-click overview of the topic.

If you don't want to deal with NYT, the author, James Gleick, also has the article on his website.

A couple of books to start with might be James Gleick's Chaos and Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature. (Off of the required reading list of Professor Allen's Systems class at UW - Madison) Both deal with complex systems and emergent behavior.

You almost got it, and I got a nice laugh at your fluent MicroSpeak.

Might I add one refinement? The last option is not just listead as "advanced", it is under the "Advanced" tab and is not visible on the main screen of the product.

People will never find it.

D

Is this another one of IBM's joke patents like their:
"Method of Bra Size Determination by Direct Measurement of the Breast" patent?

I find it hard to believe that anyone would take either patent seriously.

Ariane in 1996

Ariane in 2002

Actually, as long as he's asking you about it you can discuss it. Not a bad learning opportunity. As my son barrels through adolescence, I am increasingly tolerant of mildly sexually explicit material, but not pornspam.

What really angers me about explicit pornspam is that it often portrays sexuality in ways that promote underage sex with adults, violent sex, bestiality, etc. It's almost always seriously disrespectful of women.

I hate all Unsolicited Commercial Email, and explicit pornspam is the worst of the worst. Responsible for their actions? They work really hard to avoid filters, which makes it much more difficult to be a responsible parent.

I agree with James Gleick :
1. Forging Internet headers should be made illegal. The system depends on accurate information about senders and servers and relays; no one needs a right to falsify this information.

2. Unsolicited bulk mail should carry a mandatory tag. That alone would put consumers back in control; all the complex technological challenge of identifying the spam would vanish.

James Gleick's "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" is not mentioned frequently enough when Feynman bios come up. Very good reading indeed.

Gleick is also known as one of the first authors of a popularized book on Chaos theory, and in general produces some interesting reads.

And while we're at it, Malcolm Gladwell produces for the social sciences what Gleick does for the hard sciences... equally fascinating writing that examines wide implications of interesting facts and disciplines.

You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible.

They do go to great lengths to remove the errors. In fact the Challenger investigation singled out the methods used for validating the shuttle's software as a model for the other parts of the program to follow in improving safety. Also, the article said that the backup system kicked in automatically and led to a safe, albeit off-target, landing. So in fact the overall system worked as expected.

And as for the "big mistakes", it's very easy to point fingers afterward and boil a problem down to a catch phrase. However, engineers aren't idiots; almost all accidents involving spacecraft are a result of a long string of seemingly innocuous miscommunications, coincidences, and bad luck. Consider the story of the Ariane 5, which was destroyed because of an overlooked feature in a piece of code reused from a smaller rocket. No software engineer can say that they haven't made a similar mistake.

> It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents.

That's apparently true for any kind of patent, see this or this link (gathered from this excellent article by James Gleick).

I guess my patent application for "Achieving sexual stimulation in males by applying a repeated vertical up/down motion to the male reproductive organ using either the left or the right hand" has a real chance to be approved, then. Unless anyone here wants to step forward and claim prior "art" (ahem), of course.

Check out where Gleick quotes Feynman on the inherent risk of Shuttle flights. Prescient, that Feynman.

Check out where Gleick quotes Feynman on the inherent risk of Shuttle flights. Prescient, that Feynman.

Check out where Gleick quotes Feynman on the inherent risk of Shuttle flights. Prescient, that Feynman.

For what it's worth, an ever-so-slightly longer version, lacking a few bits of Times editing, is posted here, at my own site. And may I say how helpful and fascinating the many Slashdot discussions of this subject have been?

For what it's worth, an ever-so-slightly longer version, lacking a few bits of Times editing, is posted here, at my own site. And may I say how helpful and fascinating the many Slashdot discussions of this subject have been?

The uneducated guy that send this story in, need to know that was instrumental in taking Chaos theory from an obscure science in Santa Fe into something that almost every scientific discipline benefits from. Incl CS. .

and the full text of the interview. I'm starting to think he's onto something, given such newer areas of research as chaos theory and complexity . For the uninformed, these are the folks who bring you such things as fractal generation and the "butterfly effect". (I have purchased hardcopy/books a few years ago). I hope he will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that what Jaron's question really is, is "At which point can we not use complex computations/computers to model the "real" world (FSVO $REAL)? If our computational mechanisims and models approach the complexity of the "real", how can we validate our results against a third-party?" Just an idea.

A closely related field, where there is probably lots of overlap, is Chaos Theory.
For a good starter on that I recommend "Chaos" by James Gleick, a most excellent book. It both describes chaos theory extremely well and is engaging and readable.
Gleick's site is here:
http://www.around.com/
His page on the book is here:
http://www.around.com/chaos.html
And here is an Amazon.com link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140 092501/qid=1043352869

Happy reading and thinking.

A closely related field, where there is probably lots of overlap, is Chaos Theory.
For a good starter on that I recommend "Chaos" by James Gleick, a most excellent book. It both describes chaos theory extremely well and is engaging and readable.
Gleick's site is here:
http://www.around.com/
His page on the book is here:
http://www.around.com/chaos.html
And here is an Amazon.com link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140 092501/qid=1043352869

Happy reading and thinking.

You mean this bug? Here are some other doosies!

Does anybody know if they are any patents that might interfere with this (like that damn patent on mp3 encoding)?
All it would take is one good patent for MS to shut this down.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the legal battle to begin. sigh. I wish I lived in a country that allowed intellectual freedom.
On the brighter side of things, at least I don't live in a country that allowed someone to patent the wheel. Although, we did let IBM get a patent on measuring bra cup size via direct measurement. :(
I wonder which is worse.

There are patents for "Walking while chewing gum", "Playing tennis while wearing pads", and "Amusing a cat using a laser pointer". This one doesn't surprise me a whole lot. :-)

An interesting site to read about this stuff is Patently Absurd

Ok, the "Walking while chewing gum" one is fake, but the others are real...on the second page of that link it shows a patent for determining bra size. As follows: 1) Prepare unclothed breast 2) Breast Size Measure 3) Conversion to cup size You gotta wonder about some people..

Actually the Ariane 5 exploded in 1996. See James Gleick's article for a lucid explanation.

random'

A Bug by Any Other Name by James Gleick

My favourite part:

Microsoft has brought spin "to a high art in the software industry," says Peter Deegan, editor of Woody's Office Watch, an online newsletter for Microsoft users. "The MSN email debacle reminded me immediately of the story of how the old U.S.S.R. is supposed to have announced the Chernobyl nuclear accident to the world media." Ah, Peter, if only. Continuing to respond to users' desire for clean, inexpensive power, the Soviet Union has accelerated an upgrade of its historic Chernobyl plant . . .

One problematic assumption these folks make (but do not state, as it would discredit their other claims) is that the earth should and would naturally stay the same as it is right now. While some of the general public may swallow this if they don't think about it too much, it is obviously false. There is plenty of evidence that long before we had an impact on the earth it went in and out of ice ages and had huge temperature fluctuations.

Global weather is a chaos system. You can't predict the behavior of a chaos system. It changes all the time, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, of its own accord. That's why it is chaotic.

You can effect a chaos system, though, so one could make a valid argument that we MAY be effecting the global weather and therefore should reduce our emmissions, etc. But we can never KNOW for sure whether or how we effect the weather system.

I think some scientists may grasp this, but continue to use scare tactics and misleading information to try to get people to clean up and reduce our impact on the environment. Which is a reasonable goal, but an unacceptable means of promoting it.

There is an excellent book on Chaos by James Gleick. It does a good job of presenting the basic ideas of chaos in a non-mathematical, comprehensible way.

Unlike tangible goods and real property, the nature of IP -- or any form of knowledge -- is to spread."

Looks a lot like "Information wants to be free" to me.. :)

Yes, but then he goes on to say

As far as IP being worthy of being safeguarded, it matters little to me whether or not a week's worth of my labor was spent fashioning a dining room table or writing code -- both consumed part of my life and are fruits of my labor, and I want both to be guarded from those who would take them without my giving me something in exchange.

The (unspoken) implication is that copyright, patents, and other forms of IP are OK, although strictly speaking he did not state that explicitly.

I think he (and a lot of people, both here and elsewhere) need to be educated and made to realize (or at least confront and argue against) the notion that a government mandated and enforced monopoly isn't necessary for IP creators to be fairly compensated and, furthermore, has a stifling impact on the field of endeavor so affected, not to mention the society, culture, and the economy as a whole.

Nevertheless, while Libertarians are split on the question of IP (and he perhaps falls on the wrong side of that debate), he is quite correct in saying that "our first step on the road to freedom is to return to the Constitution as the rule of law for our nation." We can (and must) fix the debacle that is IP, but he argues (perhaps correctly) that getting bogged down in that is putting the cart before the horse.

Although I disagree with his (implied) stance on patents and copyrights, I have been persuaded to vote for Harry Browne over Ralph Nader nevertheless. There is no candidate I agree with on every issue, but I agree with Harry Browne's agenda on far more points than I do with any other candidate.

(And yes, as someone who was going to vote for Ralph Nader based on his stance WRT corporate and special interests influencing government, I have had my mind changed. This happens from time to time, if one's mind is truly open.)

But these problems should be seen as part of a larger challenge facing intellectual property protections. The Napster and DMCA and DeCSS problems are all related to copyright - another form of intellectual property protection, which is challenged by our new information technologies' ease of dissemination.

Some people have called for major revisions to our copyright laws, and others (like Jeff Bezos and the people in the introduction above) have suggested that the patent system should face strict reforms.

These are sometimes extremely good suggestions, but we would do well to keep in mind the following:

• 1. The battles over intellectual property protection have been at least this
• intense before (even if patent applications have not be so prolific before), and the system survived.

  2. We cannot just tinker with these systems, but must treat them with profound respect (even if they are broken) because huge amounts of money and acclaim could end up going to people who don't deserve them, while innovators who do deserve them could get screwed.

  3. If we think of copyright and patent problems as parts of a larger set of intellectual property issues that need consideration, it will actually help avoid confusion -- and we will be more likely to convince others (read: legislators) that these issues deserve attention.

For more background on the patent problem, see James Gleick's superb piece, Patently Absurd (NY Times, 12 Mar 00).

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

http://www.around.com/

...and check out the article at James Gleick's personal site, around.com:

http://www.around.com/patent.html

...and check out the article at James Gleick's personal site, around.com:

http://www.around.com/patent.html