It can't be. What we have here is hero worship. A simple statement made in a magazine that few people read has been elevated to the status of eternal truth.
Moore's law is a hardware thing, and has been applied to more and more improbable situations in recent years. I suspect this is because many people in computer science feel envious of the laws other disciplines enjoy. Computer science has few of its own, and of those few, this is the most often quoted.
Any transposition to software is without merit. Therefore any line of reasoning using this as a basis is irredeemably flawed.
It is true that the multi core 'revolution' means we have to change our ways. I'm in the midst of a total re-write of my open source product for this very reason. However my choice of language has been determined by suitability to the problem, not fluffy nonsense about Moore's law and it isn't a functional language.
You think that quantum computers are not able to justify grants or PhDs? What world are you living in?
One where I read peoples comments properly before replying to them. I did not say that at all.
Yeah, because classical computers were never useful to anyone (or anyone important) until datacenters existed.
We use datacentres *now* we didn't use them before. These days people in the real, working world need access to computing power in ways that we didn't before. I am talking practicality. The kinds of applications that get companies investors.
And until then, developments that bring us closer are irrelevant? Applications that could give us more reason to develop the technology are pointless?
What exactly is your point here?
Irrelevant is not the same as useless. It is, 'a lack of relevance', look it up. Academia will continue to explore the issue, but until we see deployments of quantum computers in large enough numbers to start basing the computer 'economy' on them they lack real world relevance.
Maybe it's just a story, but I've read something about Faraday that made me think about what you've written.
When the Prime Minister asked him about a new discovery, "What good is it?", Faraday replied, "What good is a newborn baby?"
Wrong, actually it was in reference to his new electric motor, and the proper quote is 'When asked by the kind what use it was, Faraday replied, 'One day sir, you may tax it'.
Note also at that point the electric motor existed, quantum computers do not, not in any useful sense.
I know quantum is the 'new toy' in computer science, but seriously, until these quantum computers exist and are cheap enough to fill datacentres with, no-one outside of academia is going to get any useful work from them.
I define useful work as gaining a Ph.D or justifying grants. Besides, fast linear equation solvers are only good if you can actually get what you need to run them.
No, to be really useful, quantum computing has to be as easy to afford and deploy as current computing technology. As it happens I'm currently grappling with trying to create an ODE solver that works superQuickFast using normal computers. Unless someone buys be a quantum computer I think I'll be working this way for a fair while yet.
I suspect they are going for the daytime soap watching audience, including, yes, the kind of people who watched Dallas. That is a pretty hefty and reliable market, there are millions of people with time to watch these things, so if they could get it, the advertising space revenue would be good.
However, without a helluva loads of advertising, they just won't reach their target audience, since last I checked, people who don't normally watch SF don't even look at the SciFi channel.
Looking at the tags for this story (and many others), it seems tags are being used more for comments on the story than as a useful means to group stories by tag. For instance here we have the tags 'corporatewhining' and 'fuckemboth', both of which are most definitely a comment on the story, not a useful tag as such, well, not very useful as comment either, truth be told.
For that matter, the more useless a tag, the more likely it is to be of a derogatory nature.
That's pretty broken really, not even slightly useful as a feature. Perhaps there should be a list from which people select, such as there is when submitting stories
people who learned the coding but didn't learn enough theory to get decent course grades
If I am understanding you correctly, this is the problem. Grades are supposed to measure the effectiveness of your learning. You are supposed to be learning how to be a useful programmer. If useful programmers are getting poor grades, an idiot has set up the curriculum...
No, I mean they didn't apply themselves to the task of learning. If your teacher isn't that good, but you have to know the subject, study at home or in the library. I had to once or twice to compensate for crap lectures.
If the entire department sucks, well thats a different problem, but frankly I'd suspect such a situation would be quite rare.
University != school you know, you are there to teach yourself as much as be taught.
I don't think you can lay the blame for students knowing less on the department that they attend.
Mine taught a good mix of coding and theory, but we still had morons who didn't do enough coding to actually learn their craft well, and people who learned the coding but didn't learn enough theory to get decent course grades.
The point is, while at university studying computer science or any other subject it is your own responsibility to teach yourself around the subjects you are introduced to in the classroom.
I was taught using Java and Delphi, and yet finished my degree as a pretty competent C coder, in spite of never having attended a class on that language.
I also studied a great deal more around the subjects then many of my peers. Those who did the same as me tended to do well on graduation, I went on to more years of poverty as a Ph.D student myself.
Almost all of the time, a neural network can be replaced by a standard statistical method, which will perform better and have a lower computational cost.
During my Ph.D I wrote a temporal neural network because I was told it would be a good idea for my work. Turns out it was really bad for my particular pattern matching problem, and a simple linear discriminator beat it both in terms of accuracy and speed. That ended up as two months work down the drain, and a few thousands lines of very complex code I have never had a use for since.
These days I start any new problem by seeking the simplest technique that might produce a good result, and work up from there. Its the only way to avoid costly wastes of time and effort.
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Note how your interesting explanation hasn't been modded up? You should added some 'foam at the mouth' reactionary stuff about the ISPs turning of the interwebs, and possibly a little 'conspiracy theory', in the first paragraph,then you'd have been modded up.
To hear that from someone on slashdot just makes me laugh.
It's been more of a social/news site ever since they added the politics section. I think the definition of 'nerd' has expanded somewhat as well... you certainly don't see as many tech savvy folks here as you used to.
I didn't bother to reply to his comment, because it stuck me as stupid, but you did, so..
Unless there is some magical technology I am unaware of that can deliver packets to your computer without them going through anyone elses computer first, your online activities can be tracked. This is aside from encryption. Encryption conceals (from some) the content of packets, but not their existence. Encryption will not prevent a record being made of what computers you connected to.
Peerguardian and other IP 'blockers' will deny active connections from computers that you are not activelly trying to access, but they cannot hide you from your ISP. Nor can Tor. All Tor gets you is the ability to route through others so people who aren't your ISP can't easily tell where you are. One letter to your ISP though, and that 'protection' turns to snake oil.
I value PJs contributions to the open source movement, in terms of her legal coverage, but she does have a tendency to go off the deep end sometimes, and I think this is one of those occasions.
The internet has no privacy whatsoever, everything you do can be tracked. This has been true since day one when they turned on ArpaNet, and it will continue to be true. Even if you encrypt your traffic, it can't hide heavy usage, and you cannot hide from your ISP when you are online any more then you can hide making a phonecall from your telecom provider.
People need to realise this and move on. I realise it, and I can cope, but then I never was inclined to tinhattery.
I must agree. I went to school in the UK in the 70s. Being what is now recognized as Dyslexic I had a rough time, being considered 'thick' and not worth teaching. Since I now have a Ph.d in Computer Science, I often find myself wondering at this assessment, and how many peoples lives such labels all but destroyed. For me it was a hard road up the education ladder, but I got there in the end.
I didn't notice anything much better back then myself. Seems to me, given how many people I knew from that time still work in local factories, and got pretty much nothing of benefit from their 'harder' exams (I wasn't allowed to take them, so I can't comment) I don't see how things have changed that much.
My boy is also dyslexic, gets extra help as a result, and in spite of some issues with the low standard of education which even he realises is a problem, he's doing OK (far better then I did), and will be going to university to do a science subject himself.
I personally think people need to be looking to their own parenting, and how they encourage their child to learn, and not expecting the government to sort it out for them. Behavior is so bad in UK schools at the moment that I'm amazed the kids learn anything at all. This is almost entirely a parental issue.
Cyber Monday? Is there any proof that people spend more money on this day then any other? Show me the correlation coefficients of money spent online vs day of the year and then we'll talk.
Its just marketing hype, fairly obviously so. They want/desperately need to create new 'big shopping days' now that peoples buying habits are changing.
Amen to that. I'm a parent, and I take parenthood very seriously, but that doesn't mean I need to be 'normal' and act like I'm not allowed to have fun anymore..
Fortunately, my kid can cope with me. Well, most of the time he can...
Here's an idea: Don't buy the fucking game. Problem solved.
I won't be, that's certain. Its a shame I have to miss out on so many good games, but I do not want that SecureROM shit on my computer.
I won't pirate it either, I should be clear about that, I do have principles. I don't think pirating the games of these moronic publishers will change their minds, so I don't do it.
Devil's advocate: If other people can't understand your error messages, doesn't that make them... bad error messages?
Well, in my defense, the actual error was reported below that line. However I have removed it from the version of my software for use by students, since he spent far too much time confused about it.
Easter Eggs? No, funny comments/error messages, and bizarre variable names, absolutely.
I will never forget the day a student who was using my software for a project asked during a meeting what an 'out of cheese' error was. The poor kid was so confused:)
Slashdot Mirror
How can Moore's Law ever be a software issue?
It can't be. What we have here is hero worship. A simple statement made in a magazine that few people read has been elevated to the status of eternal truth.
Moore's law is a hardware thing, and has been applied to more and more improbable situations in recent years. I suspect this is because many people in computer science feel envious of the laws other disciplines enjoy. Computer science has few of its own, and of those few, this is the most often quoted.
Any transposition to software is without merit. Therefore any line of reasoning using this as a basis is irredeemably flawed.
It is true that the multi core 'revolution' means we have to change our ways. I'm in the midst of a total re-write of my open source product for this very reason. However my choice of language has been determined by suitability to the problem, not fluffy nonsense about Moore's law and it isn't a functional language.
You think that quantum computers are not able to justify grants or PhDs? What world are you living in?
One where I read peoples comments properly before replying to them. I did not say that at all.
Yeah, because classical computers were never useful to anyone (or anyone important) until datacenters existed.
We use datacentres *now* we didn't use them before. These days people in the real, working world need access to computing power in ways that we didn't before. I am talking practicality. The kinds of applications that get companies investors.
And until then, developments that bring us closer are irrelevant? Applications that could give us more reason to develop the technology are pointless?
What exactly is your point here?
Irrelevant is not the same as useless. It is, 'a lack of relevance', look it up. Academia will continue to explore the issue, but until we see deployments of quantum computers in large enough numbers to start basing the computer 'economy' on them they lack real world relevance.
Maybe it's just a story, but I've read something about Faraday that made me think about what you've written.
When the Prime Minister asked him about a new discovery, "What good is it?", Faraday replied,
"What good is a newborn baby?"
Wrong, actually it was in reference to his new electric motor, and the proper quote is 'When asked by the kind what use it was, Faraday replied, 'One day sir, you may tax it'.
Note also at that point the electric motor existed, quantum computers do not, not in any useful sense.
I know quantum is the 'new toy' in computer science, but seriously, until these quantum computers exist and are cheap enough to fill datacentres with, no-one outside of academia is going to get any useful work from them.
I define useful work as gaining a Ph.D or justifying grants. Besides, fast linear equation solvers are only good if you can actually get what you need to run them.
No, to be really useful, quantum computing has to be as easy to afford and deploy as current computing technology.
As it happens I'm currently grappling with trying to create an ODE solver that works superQuickFast using normal computers. Unless someone buys be a quantum computer I think I'll be working this way for a fair while yet.
I suspect they are going for the daytime soap watching audience, including, yes, the kind of people who watched Dallas. That is a pretty hefty and reliable market, there are millions of people with time to watch these things, so if they could get it, the advertising space revenue would be good.
However, without a helluva loads of advertising, they just won't reach their target audience, since last I checked, people who don't normally watch SF don't even look at the SciFi channel.
It sounds pretty boring to me too.
Looking at the tags for this story (and many others), it seems tags are being used more for comments on the story than as a useful means to group stories by tag. For instance here we have the tags 'corporatewhining' and 'fuckemboth', both of which are most definitely a comment on the story, not a useful tag as such, well, not very useful as comment either, truth be told.
For that matter, the more useless a tag, the more likely it is to be of a derogatory nature.
That's pretty broken really, not even slightly useful as a feature.
Perhaps there should be a list from which people select, such as there is when submitting stories
I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...
Handy for Gentoo installs tho.
people who learned the coding but didn't learn enough theory to get decent course grades
If I am understanding you correctly, this is the problem. Grades are supposed to measure the effectiveness of your learning. You are supposed to be learning how to be a useful programmer. If useful programmers are getting poor grades, an idiot has set up the curriculum...
No, I mean they didn't apply themselves to the task of learning. If your teacher isn't that good, but you have to know the subject, study at home or in the library. I had to once or twice to compensate for crap lectures.
If the entire department sucks, well thats a different problem, but frankly I'd suspect such a situation would be quite rare.
University != school you know, you are there to teach yourself as much as be taught.
I don't think you can lay the blame for students knowing less on the department that they attend.
Mine taught a good mix of coding and theory, but we still had morons who didn't do enough coding to actually learn their craft well, and people who learned the coding but didn't learn enough theory to get decent course grades.
The point is, while at university studying computer science or any other subject it is your own responsibility to teach yourself around the subjects you are introduced to in the classroom.
I was taught using Java and Delphi, and yet finished my degree as a pretty competent C coder, in spite of never having attended a class on that language.
I also studied a great deal more around the subjects then many of my peers. Those who did the same as me tended to do well on graduation, I went on to more years of poverty as a Ph.D student myself.
Almost all of the time, a neural network can be replaced by a standard statistical method, which will perform better and have a lower computational cost.
During my Ph.D I wrote a temporal neural network because I was told it would be a good idea for my work. Turns out it was really bad for my particular pattern matching problem, and a simple linear discriminator beat it both in terms of accuracy and speed. That ended up as two months work down the drain, and a few thousands lines of very complex code I have never had a use for since.
These days I start any new problem by seeking the simplest technique that might produce a good result, and work up from there. Its the only way to avoid costly wastes of time and effort.
I agree. They can only keep this going with money. They don't have any, so it's not going to be five more years of crapola.
SCO is dead.
SCO have become what was suggested to them, a company that only does legal action. The employees and directors are getting paid well during this time.
Other companies who like the idea of Linux in a quagmire have provided money for 'licences', and will continue to do so.
Obligatory Monty Python quote:
Reg:
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
brought peace?
Note how your interesting explanation hasn't been modded up? You should added some 'foam at the mouth' reactionary stuff about the ISPs turning of the interwebs, and possibly a little 'conspiracy theory', in the first paragraph,then you'd have been modded up.
To hear that from someone on slashdot just makes me laugh.
It's been more of a social/news site ever since they added the politics section. I think the definition of 'nerd' has expanded somewhat as well... you certainly don't see as many tech savvy folks here as you used to.
I didn't bother to reply to his comment, because it stuck me as stupid, but you did, so..
Unless there is some magical technology I am unaware of that can deliver packets to your computer without them going through anyone elses computer first, your online activities can be tracked.
This is aside from encryption. Encryption conceals (from some) the content of packets, but not their existence. Encryption will not prevent a record being made of what computers you connected to.
Peerguardian and other IP 'blockers' will deny active connections from computers that you are not activelly trying to access, but they cannot hide you from your ISP. Nor can Tor. All Tor gets you is the ability to route through others so people who aren't your ISP can't easily tell where you are. One letter to your ISP though, and that 'protection' turns to snake oil.
I value PJs contributions to the open source movement, in terms of her legal coverage, but she does have a tendency to go off the deep end sometimes, and I think this is one of those occasions.
The internet has no privacy whatsoever, everything you do can be tracked. This has been true since day one when they turned on ArpaNet, and it will continue to be true. Even if you encrypt your traffic, it can't hide heavy usage, and you cannot hide from your ISP when you are online any more then you can hide making a phonecall from your telecom provider.
People need to realise this and move on. I realise it, and I can cope, but then I never was inclined to tinhattery.
I must agree.
I went to school in the UK in the 70s. Being what is now recognized as Dyslexic I had a rough time, being considered 'thick' and not worth teaching. Since I now have a Ph.d in Computer Science, I often find myself wondering at this assessment, and how many peoples lives such labels all but destroyed. For me it was a hard road up the education ladder, but I got there in the end.
I didn't notice anything much better back then myself. Seems to me, given how many people I knew from that time still work in local factories, and got pretty much nothing of benefit from their 'harder' exams (I wasn't allowed to take them, so I can't comment) I don't see how things have changed that much.
My boy is also dyslexic, gets extra help as a result, and in spite of some issues with the low standard of education which even he realises is a problem, he's doing OK (far better then I did), and will be going to university to do a science subject himself.
I personally think people need to be looking to their own parenting, and how they encourage their child to learn, and not expecting the government to sort it out for them. Behavior is so bad in UK schools at the moment that I'm amazed the kids learn anything at all. This is almost entirely a parental issue.
Can we please kill the word "e-tailer"? Bury it next to the absurdly-overused "meme". And "mashup".
Don't you mean iKill it? or eCancel?
Cyber Monday? Is there any proof that people spend more money on this day then any other? Show me the correlation coefficients of money spent online vs day of the year and then we'll talk.
Its just marketing hype, fairly obviously so. They want/desperately need to create new 'big shopping days' now that peoples buying habits are changing.
The answer is simple: anti-arthritis death sqauds. If you end up with arthritis, we kill you and your whole family.
It's obvious- why hasn't anyone implemented it yet?
A superbly psychotic answer, I salute you sir...
You can only be young once,
but you can be immature forever.
Amen to that. I'm a parent, and I take parenthood very seriously, but that doesn't mean I need to be 'normal' and act like I'm not allowed to have fun anymore..
Fortunately, my kid can cope with me. Well, most of the time he can...
Before they cure aging, they have to cure arthritis. What use is living to be a thousand if for 940 of those years you are immobile.
Arthritis is an interesting case, since it strikes humans after breeding age mostly, so evolution hasn't killed it off.
Fun. No really, the older I get, the more fun life gets. My thirties rocked hard, and life in my forties is thus far great.
Here's an idea: Don't buy the fucking game. Problem solved.
I won't be, that's certain. Its a shame I have to miss out on so many good games, but I do not want that SecureROM shit on my computer.
I won't pirate it either, I should be clear about that, I do have principles. I don't think pirating the games of these moronic publishers will change their minds, so I don't do it.
Devil's advocate: If other people can't understand your error messages, doesn't that make them... bad error messages?
Well, in my defense, the actual error was reported below that line. However I have removed it from the version of my software for use by students, since he spent far too much time confused about it.
Easter Eggs? No, funny comments/error messages, and bizarre variable names, absolutely.
I will never forget the day a student who was using my software for a project asked during a meeting what an 'out of cheese' error was. The poor kid was so confused :)