It's hard sometimes to explain to a person why algorithms are so important. I thought I'd try and list the top 5 informatics/comp sci. algorithms that *really* help peoples day to day lives. Reply with more!
5. Stero image reconstruction: Now just for cute things like Hawk-eye in tennis and cricket, soon to read road signs and stop you from hitting pedestrians. Also a cornerstone of robotics.
4. Quicksort and other sorting algorithms. It would take decades to sort even a city phone book without O(n log n) sorting.
3. Cryptography/Cryptoanalysis: Lets you shop online, and breaking crypto saved hundreds of thousands of lives in WWII.
2. Pagerank and hashing: Even the unitiated can learn the world's pooled knowledge. Once access to all opinions and all knowledge is free (in every sense of the word), true civilisation might be achievable.
1. Fast fourier transform and friends: We rely on this for most of our communication, and image/movie/audio compression.
Machine learing algorithms are important, but they are not important enough to make this list, yet.
Did you mean SVM? I think the quadratic programming optimizer used for SVM training would count as a black-box, even to most of the SVM crowd;) And don't get me started on Gaussian Processes.
Machine learning is supposed to *look* like magic. It's supposed to behave like a black box with just one or two knobs on it. When -- and this is unfortunatley almost always -- it doesn't, then it's not the machine learing doing the work, it's the programmer. In this case I can forgive Joe Wannabe for tearing his hair out over the complexity. The problem with machine learning is that the "no free lunch" theorem says that there is essentially no one-size-fits all black box. The programmer must have some understanding of why they are using that particular black box.
The perceived difficulty with tapping fibre seems to be from the assumption that any interruption in data transmission will be noticed and instantly treated as suspicious. I think it's possible that a quick fibre cut and splice on an underwater cable could be perceived as nothing but a temporary and unimportant glitch by Telco's.
But the NSA probably have spies amongst Google's data centre empoyee's anyway. So it doesn't matter;)
I've been pondering which of these is worse for some time: - The UK's overt population surveillance through CCTV monitoring, - or the US's covert population surveillance through electronic eavsdropping.
So take your pick, pixels or all other forms of bits! (Wait, I think I just answered my own question)
As an Aussie, it pains me to say that Australian politicians and officals are as likely to know the difference between quantum and deterministic computing as they are to know the difference between fission and fusion; i.e., no clue. But it's nice to know their ignorance extends to supporting QC research.
As for the story itself, FUD, FUD, FUD! Give me a 1024 bit quantum computer and I'll take some notice. I admit I haven't read the "for sale" article in NS, but I bet they haven't gone past 8 bits.
Are there analogies with the real Great Wall? They are both ineffective for someone that's determined to defeat them (just go around!); they are both more about show; and they are both as much about controlling what leaves as what comes in?
The question is, will we be able to test the great firewall from space?
Well, this flaw found in the second place team's code is the perfect example of why e-voting software should be open source. If it was hidden, odds are that flaw would never be discovered; and might not require a deliberate attack to cause problems in the future.
There is a strong correspondence between e-voting and encryption technology. The assumption for all encryption technology is that evesdroppers will always know your method (i.e., the source code), so instead you make that knowledge useless by using encryption that require a secret key.
One reason an e-voting system would need a random number is to generate some kind of key sequence. So a flawed random number generator is serious indeed.
No, I don't think the average salary is 100k USD. But I do think that companies like Google, MS, Yahoo, Amazon, are massive contributors to the shortage of good technical people. Just think, Google will just about on principle employ any computer science graduate from the top 10% of the good universities. Yes, they have to pass some tricky interviews, but that is what discriminates the top 10% from the others. Google don't need a position for them to fill, they just want to hire them, and for more that 100k. It stops other companies getting those students, their over-inflated work ethics, and their current and future ideas.
And imagine what these companies are doing to the long-term future of CS education. All over the world the best graduates are being sucked up this Web 2.0 straw, leaving the old-farts, and the not quite top notch newbies to teach the next generation of computer scientists and IT professionals.
Actually, I think that the ending brings the question back to the viewer, aren't soprano's people that get high notes without having to kill people for them?
1. Communicating with people instead of machines 2. Commenting and documentation (actually, that's a computer people never had) 3. Coders that know how computers work 4. Coding to a limited memory budget 5. Using debuggers effectively 6. Coding fundamental data structures (like lists) 7. Figuring out computational complexity (why is it taking so long!) 8. Assembly level coding of critical routines 9. Coding/testing/debugging across a slow serial link 10. Reading other peoples code
Sounds like someone in the Home Media stable was having a bad day when they looked at the HD-DVD slide presentation. But I think some blame might have to go to the HD-DVD group for possibly spinning the truth via dubious chart presentation practices. I.e., it sounds suspiciously like they used a cummulative measure of releases over the months, instead of releases per month, just to make sure they had a chart that keeps going up! Was the the same presentation that gave Home Media the idea that Blu-Ray were only going to release 43? Perhaps another chart?
The world is full of companies spinning the truth, but still maintaining complete deniability.
1) The wavelength of the radiation is significant in the damage it *might* cause. WiFi wavelength is a lot shorter than 60W globes.
2) Long term exposure to short length radiation is something that isn't thoroughly explored.
3) WiFi is not dissimilar to microwaves in terms of wavelength. Would you put an active microwave magnetron next to your brain for extended periods of time?
Any wavelength, of sufficient power, will have a negative impact on humans. Just consider UV light. The question is whether mobile devices have sufficient power for negative impact. I am convinced that no study has sufficiently answered this question in the long term.
I for one, will refuse to have mobile devices next to my reproductive organs until a few more decades of evidence has stacked up in favour of no harm.
The replies here show that many prefer a drip system, which I think reveals that most Slashdotters are in the US.
I think people *learn* to like coffee the way it is made where they live. Personally, I find the concept of a drip system awful. No matter how fresh the beans or how recently ground, if you have coffee that has been in contact with water for more than about 30 seconds, you get some pretty bitter products leeching out. Then the brewed coffee can sit on the warmer for half a day or more! I think the US (and to some extent German) palates have developed a taste for this bitterness. In fact, even the espresso's or cappuccino's I've had in the US seem extremely bitter and almost undrinkable to me, which I think indicates a national preference for this taste.
On the other hand, the French/Italian preference of ripping out espressos in just a few seconds produces a very smooth coffee, with a good creme, that has less of the caffeine leached out, thus they can drink many of them.
Then there's UK coffee, which still seems to mostly come in freeze-dried kilo sized tins;) (great tea though!)
So, is coffee preference about taste, convenience, or nationality?
You can't go past Greg Egan for sci-fi with science. More physics and info-science than otherwise. In fact, I sometimes feel I need a PhD to read his stuff.
Having read the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) white papers, and knowing something of the area prior to that, it looks like Jeff Hawkin's and his company have take a lot of ideas and algorithms that exist, and hacked them together to implement his neocortex ideas.. there's a bits and pieces of graphical models, time recurrent neural nets, Boltzmann machines, etc..
It does some cool stuff but nothing that AI and machine learning people haven't been doing for years. The difference is that Jeff has taken the entrepreneurial approach to AI. Instead of publishing and allowing the academic community (the original open source movement!) to peer review and contribute, he's formed a company to announce his ideas to the world -- ready or not.
This isn't necessarily bad, but the proof of his ideas will be scaling them up to start solving some useful problems. Bring on the face recognition that isn't fooled by dark sunglasses and a false mustache!
Slashdot Mirror
This is tripe.
People working in medical research, for a pharma or otherwise, save lives.
People working in IT, myself included, occasionally make lives easier (on a good day).
Do we really want to subject life saving professionals to V1.01 type deadlines every 6 months?
It's hard sometimes to explain to a person why algorithms are so important. I thought I'd try and list the top 5 informatics/comp sci. algorithms that *really* help peoples day to day lives. Reply with more! 5. Stero image reconstruction: Now just for cute things like Hawk-eye in tennis and cricket, soon to read road signs and stop you from hitting pedestrians. Also a cornerstone of robotics. 4. Quicksort and other sorting algorithms. It would take decades to sort even a city phone book without O(n log n) sorting. 3. Cryptography/Cryptoanalysis: Lets you shop online, and breaking crypto saved hundreds of thousands of lives in WWII. 2. Pagerank and hashing: Even the unitiated can learn the world's pooled knowledge. Once access to all opinions and all knowledge is free (in every sense of the word), true civilisation might be achievable. 1. Fast fourier transform and friends: We rely on this for most of our communication, and image/movie/audio compression. Machine learing algorithms are important, but they are not important enough to make this list, yet.
Did you mean SVM? I think the quadratic programming optimizer used for SVM training would count as a black-box, even to most of the SVM crowd ;) And don't get me started on Gaussian Processes.
Machine learning is supposed to *look* like magic. It's supposed to behave like a black box with just one or two knobs on it. When -- and this is unfortunatley almost always -- it doesn't, then it's not the machine learing doing the work, it's the programmer. In this case I can forgive Joe Wannabe for tearing his hair out over the complexity. The problem with machine learning is that the "no free lunch" theorem says that there is essentially no one-size-fits all black box. The programmer must have some understanding of why they are using that particular black box.
The perceived difficulty with tapping fibre seems to be from the assumption that any interruption in data transmission will be noticed and instantly treated as suspicious. I think it's possible that a quick fibre cut and splice on an underwater cable could be perceived as nothing but a temporary and unimportant glitch by Telco's.
;)
But the NSA probably have spies amongst Google's data centre empoyee's anyway. So it doesn't matter
Okay, wow. Does using /. put you on the subversives list?
I've been pondering which of these is worse for some time:
- The UK's overt population surveillance through CCTV monitoring,
- or the US's covert population surveillance through electronic eavsdropping.
So take your pick, pixels or all other forms of bits!
(Wait, I think I just answered my own question)
rm -fr /mnt/sco /dev/sco /dev/sco /dev/sco /mnt/linux /mnt/linux/LongLiveUnix
umount
mkfs.ext3
mount
echo "SCO is dead. Long live UNIX." >
No sex because we are online, or online because we can't get sex?
I guess it means that it will wash off, by rain and wind if nothing else.
But what we really need is something that makes the average gum chewer look less like a masticating cow by sticking their mouths shut.
As an Aussie, it pains me to say that Australian politicians and officals are as likely to know the difference between quantum and deterministic computing as they are to know the difference between fission and fusion; i.e., no clue. But it's nice to know their ignorance extends to supporting QC research. As for the story itself, FUD, FUD, FUD! Give me a 1024 bit quantum computer and I'll take some notice. I admit I haven't read the "for sale" article in NS, but I bet they haven't gone past 8 bits.
Are there analogies with the real Great Wall? They are both ineffective for someone that's determined to defeat them (just go around!); they are both more about show; and they are both as much about controlling what leaves as what comes in?
The question is, will we be able to test the great firewall from space?
...if he survives the freezing process.Let's hope not, for humanities sake. He might breed otherwise.
Well, this flaw found in the second place team's code is the perfect example of why e-voting software should be open source. If it was hidden, odds are that flaw would never be discovered; and might not require a deliberate attack to cause problems in the future.
There is a strong correspondence between e-voting and encryption technology. The assumption for all encryption technology is that evesdroppers will always know your method (i.e., the source code), so instead you make that knowledge useless by using encryption that require a secret key.
One reason an e-voting system would need a random number is to generate some kind of key sequence. So a flawed random number generator is serious indeed.
Lol..
Believe me, you'll thank me when you're 64 and you still alive!
No, I don't think the average salary is 100k USD. But I do think that companies like Google, MS, Yahoo, Amazon, are massive contributors to the shortage of good technical people. Just think, Google will just about on principle employ any computer science graduate from the top 10% of the good universities. Yes, they have to pass some tricky interviews, but that is what discriminates the top 10% from the others. Google don't need a position for them to fill, they just want to hire them, and for more that 100k. It stops other companies getting those students, their over-inflated work ethics, and their current and future ideas.
And imagine what these companies are doing to the long-term future of CS education. All over the world the best graduates are being sucked up this Web 2.0 straw, leaving the old-farts, and the not quite top notch newbies to teach the next generation of computer scientists and IT professionals.
1. Communicating with people instead of machines
2. Commenting and documentation (actually, that's a computer people never had)
3. Coders that know how computers work
4. Coding to a limited memory budget
5. Using debuggers effectively
6. Coding fundamental data structures (like lists)
7. Figuring out computational complexity (why is it taking so long!)
8. Assembly level coding of critical routines
9. Coding/testing/debugging across a slow serial link
10. Reading other peoples code
Sounds like someone in the Home Media stable was having a bad day when they looked at the HD-DVD slide presentation. But I think some blame might have to go to the HD-DVD group for possibly spinning the truth via dubious chart presentation practices. I.e., it sounds suspiciously like they used a cummulative measure of releases over the months, instead of releases per month, just to make sure they had a chart that keeps going up! Was the the same presentation that gave Home Media the idea that Blu-Ray were only going to release 43? Perhaps another chart?
The world is full of companies spinning the truth, but still maintaining complete deniability.
Who bothers to sell essays and dissertations when half the spam I get offers me a PhD outright for $200!
Has anyone tried to get ad sense to offer them a degree?
1) The wavelength of the radiation is significant in the damage it *might* cause. WiFi wavelength is a lot shorter than 60W globes. 2) Long term exposure to short length radiation is something that isn't thoroughly explored. 3) WiFi is not dissimilar to microwaves in terms of wavelength. Would you put an active microwave magnetron next to your brain for extended periods of time? Any wavelength, of sufficient power, will have a negative impact on humans. Just consider UV light. The question is whether mobile devices have sufficient power for negative impact. I am convinced that no study has sufficiently answered this question in the long term. I for one, will refuse to have mobile devices next to my reproductive organs until a few more decades of evidence has stacked up in favour of no harm.
The replies here show that many prefer a drip system, which I think reveals that most Slashdotters are in the US. I think people *learn* to like coffee the way it is made where they live. Personally, I find the concept of a drip system awful. No matter how fresh the beans or how recently ground, if you have coffee that has been in contact with water for more than about 30 seconds, you get some pretty bitter products leeching out. Then the brewed coffee can sit on the warmer for half a day or more! I think the US (and to some extent German) palates have developed a taste for this bitterness. In fact, even the espresso's or cappuccino's I've had in the US seem extremely bitter and almost undrinkable to me, which I think indicates a national preference for this taste. On the other hand, the French/Italian preference of ripping out espressos in just a few seconds produces a very smooth coffee, with a good creme, that has less of the caffeine leached out, thus they can drink many of them. Then there's UK coffee, which still seems to mostly come in freeze-dried kilo sized tins ;) (great tea though!)
So, is coffee preference about taste, convenience, or nationality?
I notice they didn't sue anyone that can't pay out mega dollars.
You can't go past Greg Egan for sci-fi with science. More physics and info-science than otherwise. In fact, I sometimes feel I need a PhD to read his stuff.
But you might have to bypass enterprise system development and look at the cutting edge of research into AI, robotics, and operating systems.
Computer *science* is what researchers do, not code monkeys.
Having read the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) white papers, and knowing something of the area prior to that, it looks like Jeff Hawkin's and his company have take a lot of ideas and algorithms that exist, and hacked them together to implement his neocortex ideas.. there's a bits and pieces of graphical models, time recurrent neural nets, Boltzmann machines, etc.. It does some cool stuff but nothing that AI and machine learning people haven't been doing for years. The difference is that Jeff has taken the entrepreneurial approach to AI. Instead of publishing and allowing the academic community (the original open source movement!) to peer review and contribute, he's formed a company to announce his ideas to the world -- ready or not. This isn't necessarily bad, but the proof of his ideas will be scaling them up to start solving some useful problems. Bring on the face recognition that isn't fooled by dark sunglasses and a false mustache!