Slashback: Hilbert's, Transgenic, Silicon

Slashback tonight with another round of updates and corrections to recent stories, including transgenic fish, Hilbert's 16th problem, Microsoft's FAT patent plans, Utah's hyped public fiber network, and more. Read on for the details.

Still an acorn at this point. Jose Nazario writes with a correction to my recent post claiming that OpenBSD had gained a "fuzzy" user-profiling IDS. Jose writes: "It is NOT in tree. it is a privately developed research project. It is not an official project."

And Yes, the Apple I schematics were available, too. In response to the recent article about the freely available chip design from opencores.org implemented by Flextronics, Henry Keultjes offers a reminder that this is not the first time chip whose internals have been open for inspection:

"Happened quite some time ago with PowerPC. That's the essence of Microsoft's deal with IBM because without that Open Architecture Microsoft would have had to buy a lot more than it did. This for example is used in a roughly $150 French set-top box that has USB and, according to a friend in the UK who has tried that, runs just fine as a PC with the attached USB HDD, KB and rodent."

Could Wayne Inouye sell you an eMachine? After reading many pointed comments in the story about eMachine's Athlon offerings, arrasmith writes "To add to the topic of AMD64 eMachines and the launch of "I hate eMachine" posts I'll throw out why you should buy one.

eMachines are the number-3 seller of computers, only behind Dell and HP. If you are wondering about how that happened, you need to read about the new CEO.

Wayne Inouye has had some articles published about him in Business Week and Forbes. Great articles on how you can sell good computers at reasonable prices. And if you are wondering why eMachines is selling an AMD64 system read the Business Week article."

OK, as long as you buy it from us. Alien54 writes "As reported in the most recent Spyware Info Newsletter, Dell seems to have listened to the criticism handed to them last week, after their decision to forbid tech support persons from providing assistance to spyware-infected customers became public knowledge. They have partnered with PestPatrol, Inc. to sell Pest Patrol's spyware removal software to Dell customers. It is interesting to note that Dell does not recommend any freeware or shareware product because 'we cannot test these open source utilities reliably.' Which is simply silly, of course."

Utah may not be Utopia after all. brysnot writes "The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the Utopia project, which plans to run fiber to every home in Utah, has miscalculated its 2003 budget and now needs each member cities to come up with an additional $250,000. Also reported is that 'Its largest member, Salt Lake City, is uncertain whether to provide financial backing to guarantee payment of the principal and interest on the bonds the project needs -- a development that could force the project to be scaled back.'"

Writes Lighthop "The best way to overcome Qwest's vast resources and well orchestrated opposition is for citizens and business owners to speak out and let their city council members know we support them in approving UTOPIA's funding. We have to be visible and give them some political cover.

The 18 UTOPIA member cities are Brigham City, Cedar City, Cedar Hills, Centerville, Layton, Lindon, Midvale, Murray, Orem, Payson, Perry, Riverton, Roy, Salt Lake City, South Jordan, Taylorsville, Tremonton and West Valley."

Hilbert's 16th is still a problem. commodoresloat writes "The work of Elin Oxenhielm, the 22-year old Swedish student who apparently solved part of the 16th Hilbert problem, is coming under heavy fire from some prominent mathematicians, including her own adviser, who said the work contained "serious mistakes, which I think any educated mathematician can easily see." Here's an article in English. Oxenhielm responded to the criticism by saying that the journal that accepted her work, which now owns the copyright, is responsible for any errors. More information on this weblog."

Periscope is up, showdown commences. McSpew writes "The Register states that Microsoft's patents on the FAT filesystem may be subject to new scrutiny, thanks to their announced plan to collect royalties from media and CE manufacturers. The Public Patent Foundation is behind the effort to get the USPTO to start from scratch with Microsoft's FAT patents."

FDA gives GM fish sales the eerie green light. fishfishfish writes "The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Tuesday released a statement saying that it will not be stopping the sale of transgenic Zebra danios in the USA. The move could allow fish retailers in any U.S. state to sell the fish. Apart from California, where Arnie has banned them..."

Comments

From her own adviser

[Adam_Trask]

including her own adviser, who said the work contained "serious mistakes, which I think any educated mathematician can easily see."...
We know geniuses tend to be social geeks, but getting that from your own adviser while you are still doing you PhD...wow! Good luck with that PhD!!

Re:From her own adviser

[Noren]

Zhou was her advisor when she got her Master's degree, but is no longer her advisor now that she's working on her PhD. From the blog cited in the story:

Finally, I have a correction. I have spoken of Yishao Zhou as being both Elin Oxenhielm's professor and supervisor. The fact is, though, that Zhou was an advisor for Oxenhielm's masters degree. She is neither her professor nor her current advisor. And the paper submitted to Nonlinear Analysis isn't a paper that Zhou has been an advisor for.

Dell is mixing upo OSS with Shareware/Freeware...

[Androgynous Coward]

...Dell does not recommend any freeware or shareware product becausefreeware or shareware product because 'we cannot test these open source utilities reliably.'

Someone should inform Dell that freeware and/or shareware products are not necessarily open-source.

AMD 64bit CPU's and linux

[Space cowboy]

So, assuming I get hold of one of these AMD 64-bit boxes, how hard/easy is it to get Linux compiled for 64-bit. What are the pitfalls with gcc (is an int 64 bit in 64-bit mode ?)

The only reviews I've seen are on Windows OS's running in 32 bit mode (why, for crying out loud, if linux runs on them cleanly...) I think I saw that RH and Suse have 64-bit offerings, but RH is expensive... never tried Suse ....

Just curious. Pointers to informative articles would be welcome :-)

Simon

Re:AMD 64bit CPU's and linux

[mcelrath]

An int on a 64-bit CPU is 32-bits. A long int is 64 bits and an int* is 64 bits. Thus most C code is highly compatible. The fatal flaw being when programmers assume sizeof(int)=sizeof(int*) which fails.

The other posts in this thread indicating otherwise are wrong. An int is 32 bits on 64-bit archs under linux and gcc. (I know, I have 2 alphas and a sparc)

-- Bob

Re:AMD 64bit CPU's and linux

[JoeBuck]

No, on 64-bit Linux platforms int is still 32 bits, while long is 64 bits. Pointers are also 64 bits.

The two most common C models are commonly referred to as ILP32 (int, long, pointers all 32 bit) or LP64 (long and pointer are 64 bit).

the FDA?

[Mad_Rain]

So how come the Food and Drug Administration is the organization approving the sale of transgenic fish?

Isn't there a more appropriate group to be handling this? Sure, let the FDA approve them if you plan on eating the fish, but I figured they were for display only. ;)

Why is there no law.....

[Microsofts slave]

that makes it impossible for a patent holder to hold people hostage on a technology after it becomes ubiquitous.

Conspiracy?

[jfmiller]

If one were a conspiracy theorist, and I am not, one might postulate that dell ether now or in the future plans to install spyware themselves and that open source programs would mess this up. Therefore they have told there techs not to recommend any of them, and now have found a willing corp. that will agree with them about the difference between marketing tools and spyware. Bu there is of course no proof and since I am not a conspiracy theorist, I will not make such accusations.

IANACT

JFMILLER

"we can not test"...

[dbc]

Well, they don't mention *why* they can not test. In a past life, I have managed both hardware and software validation laboratories. It is an expensive proposition to do it well. Windows is the worst.. Between 95, 95osr1, 95osr2, 98, 98se, 98me, variants of 2000... and the fact that every application install is an OS upgrade because of DLL-Hell... and then add in a zillion flavors of language support (OK, I was running 98me with the left-to-right Hebrew keyboard, the German version of Visual Studio, and Oriental character file name support...) ... oh, now cross all these with hardware variation, chipset, cpu, what-have-you.

So, personally, I can well believe that *if* they looked at the cost of validating some particular build of some particular OSS software for download from their web site, that they would conclude that it cost too much. So "We can't because it costs too much" is a reasonable response. Chicken, yes, and maybe doesn't server the customer the best possible way, but reasonable.

Of course, every time I've dealt with Dell in the past they've been idiots, so that might be a reason, too.

they're not

[dangermouse]

If you read the statement, you'll see that they're not "approving" sales of the glofish. They're saying exactly what you are-- the glofish aren't in the FDA's bailiwick.

Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes...

Drawing the Hardware/Software line

[segment]

Dell seems to have listened to the criticism handed to them last week, after their decision to forbid tech support persons from providing assistance to spyware-infected customers became public knowledge.

I'm all for helping people when necessary, and I would agree with Dell for not wanting to waste their own money on people's stupidities.

Now I work at an ISP and sub as IT staff at a mid sized college every here and there. (Fixing T1's, students' comps, all sorts of shit) main causes of students' issues? Spyware. I visited I think 80% of the campus based students for the same shit... Joe football player wants VirtuaGirl on his machine and clicks on everything in existence... Result? Spyware, viruses, and trojans. One chick had a 8k phone bill on her cellphone because she kept her info on a backdoored machine. All this after they receive bulletins, I've told the same ones over and over, etc.

I would side with Dell, just think about the costs of a persons moronicy on the Dell level. So you have say low ball figure of 100,000 morons calling you because they've just downloaded garbage...

TS = Tech Support (low ball salary) $10.00 an hour...

DU = duration of call say 5 minutes

CL = Calls (per 8 hour day)

Whats that an extra +1000 tech support staff that need to be hired? 20mill per year thrown away on morons...

Re:Drawing the Hardware/Software line

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I think you're being a bit harsh. Part of it is a lot of this crap comes from holes in software. Is someone who got rooted (can I say Administrator'ed?) because of an IE hole a moron? And before you say "patch your systems" I can say zero-day exploits and unpatched holes in IE.

But lets say thats just part of the issue, most people are running unpacthed versions of Windows, using IE (unpacthed IE, shudder). They're browsing the web because . . . they bought the computer to browse the web. They're opening email attachments because . . . attachments are made for you to open. They're using the machien for what it's designed for. They're doing what all the nice shiny pretty people in the commercials say they can do.

Closest real world analogy I can think of would be:
guy comes home. Guy doesn't lock door. Robber comes in, beats guy up. Guy goes to hospital, but insurance refuses to pay because he was too stupid to lock the dorr, so go bleed somewhere else.

Would never happen. We'd just solve the problem. Even the door angle is too simplistic, for most people it would be closer to "robber comes in through grate at bottom of building that connects through shaft which goes to his room". Non obvious stuff.

The issue is computers are immature. Neither windows nor Unix were originally designed to be in a hostile network environment. UNIX has improved a lot more than Windows has, but there are still flaws. Until we redesign everything to live in a hostile world, we will have issues. Until then, it will be us morons who program the systems, and the marketing morons who sell a bill of goods that can't be delivered.

Zhou is protecting herself

[GuyMannDude]

Did you read the article that was linked to? Zhou's public comments are an attempt to distance herself from Oxenhielm. Oxenhielm thanks Zhou in her (possibly flawed) paper for assistance and Zhou is terrified that the community is going to laugh at her (Zhou). It's easy to forgive a youngster for getting excited and making mistakes but they would come down very hard on Zhou for letting stuff like this slip through. Effectively Oxenhielm has put Zhou's name on this work in spite of the fact that Zhou never reviewed it. You wouldn't want to be blamed for something you had no hand in, would you?

Oxenhielm is probably too young to remember what happened to Ponds and Fleishman at University of Utah regarding cold fusion. Zhou wants to make sure that Oxenhielm doesn't take her down too when her proof gets shot down.

GMD

Re:Zhou is protecting herself

[Licensed2Hack]

You wouldn't want to be blamed for something you had no hand in, would you?

Spoken like someone who has never been married.

The journal is not responsible for the errors.

[mathematician]

Oxenhielm responded to the criticism by saying that the journal that accepted her work, which now owns the copyright, is responsible for any errors.

As one who has refereed math papers, I think that this is not true. When I am sent a letter asking me to referee, I am asked to comment on how important the result is, and I am asked to assess how correct the paper is, but often I am explicitly told that errors in the paper are the responsibility of the author, and not the referee.

Little math discrepency?

[kwalker]

According to the SLTrib article:

"...needs member cities to pony up an additional $250,000 so it can continue to pursue its bond offering."

So it looks like they're just $250k short, not $4.5 million short as the poster seemed to indicate. In fact, if I'm reading this right, it means each city would only need to come up with ~$14k each, if they're going to split it equally.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not impossible: Inevitable

[GuyMannDude]

Two non-fugly math chicks! What are the chances?

Chances are probably not as bad as you might think. Two non-fugly math girls, lonely for a little love yet repulsed by the animate male lumps of lard and sweat surrounding them. Both so lonely, so sad. Trying to concentrate on their work. Young student huddled close together with advisor, going over a math problem. Then it happens! Zhou's hair brushes ever so lightly against Oxenheilm's cheek. They pull back from each other in surprise. They both felt it. And in that moment, their lives changed forever. It was unavoidable. It was their destiny. Their professional composure decays exponentially fast as they both realize the inexorable truth. They are going to have sex and there is nothing either of them can do to stop it. Is this attraction stable? Does it matter anymore?

Clothes are pulled off each other in an optimal fashion. Each woman studies the continuous curvature of the other's body. Fingers trace the inflexion points, the saddle points, the contours, and then, utimately, the poles. Their fingers now slick with the complex residue of the other, their heart beats begin to constructively interfere with each other. The intensity of one heart increased by the feedback from the other. So wrong. So dangerous. So good.

Groups give way to gropes. Rings give way to rimjobs. Fields give way to fondles. Their fingers, so skilled at manipulating mathematical equations, now find a use in manipulating each other's boundary layers. Both women writhe and squirm in unison until they are epsilon away from a mutual orgasm (epsilon -> 0 quadratically fast).

And then it's over. No more theorems, lemmas, corrolaries or proofs. The two young women lie on the floor knowing that their relationship has changed forever. Without a word they clothe themselves and the impressionable young student leaves the office. Never again will they discuss this incident. This will be an isolated singularity hidden for all time in the vast infiniteness of time.

GMD

Re:copyright ownership?

[thorgil]

the journal owns the text, not what the text says.
big difference.

In "ordinary errors" should have been catched in the review process. If not, the journal has bad reviewers.
It sometimes cost money to publish scientific articles.
In essance, you pay them to review your paper.
Major errors that slip through, should be blamed on the journal, yes.

Here's an idea for Dell...

[bckrispi]

Instead of making their customers jump through hoops to remove the preinstalled spyware, why don't they grow a pair and forbid the crap from being installed in the first place??? Don't they have some kind of say-so in what gets loaded on their products? Shouldn't they be held accountable for protecting their customers' privacy? As the saying goes: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". It looks like Dell has already determined which side of the line they want to be on.

Author's responsibility

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

In mathematics, the accuracy of a proof is the responsibility of the author. A referee will attempt to determine the correctness of a proof but neither an editor nor a referee is ultimately responsible. Publishing an incorrect proof is not always bad; the "Yamabe conjecture" arose from a paper by Yamabe in 1960 (Osaka Math. Journal, Vol. 12, pp. 21-37) which was accepted as correct. (Rick Schoen provided a correct proof for the case of compact manifolds in 1984 and, for example, Zhiren Jin provided a counterexample for noncompact manifolds in 1986.) However, claiming that the publisher is responsible for errors is silly and unprofessional.

on Oxenhielm's paper

[varaani]

(disclaimer: my background in dynamical systems, much less this particular problem, is not that strong)

The second part of Hilbert's 16th problem deals with limit cycles, the way things will go on eventually in dynamical systems if they are not disturbed externally. The subproblem 2/3 of this problem (it's the indexing that makes math complicated..) asks if there exists an upper bound on the number of different limit cycles one can have in the system.

Oxenhielm attacks the problem by considering first a special case called the Lienard equation and approximating its solution by harmonic oscillation. The proof begins: "Noticing that the state variable x of the Lienard equation (1) behaves approximately like a sine function in simulations (see Fig.1),we assume -- in order to make a good approximation of x -- that both state variables are dominated by a harmonic term ...."
Now, to my engineer's eyes, the functions in Fig.1 seem more like triangular waves, with definitely more than one single frequency component. Yet the accuracy of the approximation has not been considered at all in the paper. Also, 'proof by looking at results of simulations' is not really valid if you don't have any other evidence.

Another bad part is on page 6, where it is claimed that "Note that the method of describing functions may be used in a similar manner as in the proof above,to find the upper bounds for the Hilbert number in any planar polynomial vectorfield. Thus, it is possible to completely solve the second part of Hilbert's 16th problem by using this approach."
Wait a minute, how did that happen? What if the harmonic approximation fails on other than Lienard equations? It might just work, I have no idea, but this assertment hardly proves the fact.

Note however that this is very different from Andrew Wiles' proof of the Fermat conjencture. While very few people in the world could understand the odd-hundred pages of Wiles' proof, Oxenhielm's paper is just eight pages of much more accessible mathematics.

But I have a paper in the review process myself, and sure as hell would hate to see nonqualified people discussing its validity publicly, so maybe I'll just shut up now :)