actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really, it's the only motivator. what we need is an incentive structure (marketplace and regulatory framework) where greed does not necessarily compel people to do things that are solely beneficial to themselves, putting others at risk.
An interesting article, for sure. The issue with the Gaussian Copula model for pools of mortgages in CDOs is how sensitive they are to the assumptions of the model. If, for example, the annual growth rate of home prices is 2% instead of 10%, things look tremendously different. If correlations between housing prices in different cities is 50% instead of 10% -- disaster. The lack of stress testing of these models (checking what the results are for different inputs into the model) was a huge issue. Even if a model is decent (which in principle, copula models are), if they are too sensitive to inputs, then the prices it produces are not trustworthy. If the proper uncertainty was taken into consideration, then perhaps everyone would have been a little less gung-ho about CDOs.
Like the (worthless) Value-at-Risk figure, the (also pretty worthless in the end) Gaussian Copula was "easy" to understand. Given that the dynamics of financial markets are not simple and easy to understand, reliance on simple models that are easy to explain to the MBAs is probably not the best idea.
Blackmail and extortion are both serious federal crimes. A quick Google search turns up USC TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 41, section 875, paragraph (d) which seems that it might apply in your case. Speak to a lawyer and perhaps the FTC, DoC, and FBI.
even without skype, it's must be possible to have fully encrypted voice (or text or video) communication over the internet that should be completely private and impossible to decrypt in real time. so yet again, this will only affect those too lazy or ignorant to try to evade it (which will probably be most people--even most "criminals").
all windows machines have--or at least used to have--a (Free)BSD TCP/IP stack, and MacOS X is FreeBSD (+hacks). What about the X.org license itself, which is a BSD-type license. All of these are more used than linux or are the plumbing enabling things like GNOME and KDE.
As for userland (and I think it's true for desktop environments, too) the GNU project is just including more features in their tools, while BSD licensed tools stick to the standard (or minimalist appearance in the case of desktops). Either way, I would say there is far more BSD code running on people's machines than GPL code, although such a claim could never be proven.
I don't think that the issue is true of OpenSSH. It is true of any internet/server/protocol technology. Web servers, database servers, firewalls, ftp servers, email servers, and even web browsers would all benefit from having robust and secure code freely available to anyone who wishes to incorporate them into their products. The computing world would be more secure, but the developers would not get the credit they want.
Eh, I'm not sure where I stand on the GPL vs. BSD debate, but each probably has their own benefits.
the BSD license is the ideal license for openssh, since the goal is maximum use of the code. the code already works and does not need much improvement. ssh was designed to kill the clear text rsh/rcp/rlogin/telnet protocols which made the internet a much less safe place. now openssh is a de-facto standard. it can be put in proprietary products or modified however developers see fit. but the protocol remains and more people use it b/c it has a very simple (2 clause) license. nobody has to be afraid of using however they like. if it were gpl, it would be incorporated into fewer other products and it would be more difficult to achieve the goal that everyone use ssh instead of crappy, insecure r-protocols.
seems like gpl is for maximum openness of software where it is used; bsd is for maximum adoption of software.
i think the openbsd/openssh guys don't view themselves as "unpaid labor" -- rather they are developing tools to make the internet (and various sub-networks) a safer place for all users. they are non-commercial so they don't have to worry about "competitors"--they just want maximum adoption of their high-quality code and of their excellent security practices.
what's problem do people have with swiftfox. this is actually the first i've heard of it.
firefox on linux has been the bane of my existence lately. the flash plugin especially is troublesome, taking over my audio channel (blocking other applications from playing audio). and firefox or one of its plugins has occasionally caused full system (GNOME) freezes that require a hard reboot.
aside from that, it is just plain slow. it often gobbles 100% of the cpu to do very simple stuff and an optimized version would be very nice.
Even for so-called non-secret (i.e., personal) communications, some will be of the type "be home late tonight, honey" or "see you for lunch at restaurant xyz this weekend" which is a major security risk of the type described here. knowing where the president will be and when sure could be dangerous information in the wrong hands.
so the issue is not just that he'll be sending strategic directives to the pentagon via a potentially insecure channel, but that all of the president's communication could be considered highly sensitive information.
in the same vein, right after BeOS was abandoned, it made sense that priority #1 was binary compatibility and a consistent user interface. but (advanced as it was at the time) it is still an 8+ year old OS. are there really people who have mission-critical apps still running on BeOS-powered boxes who need to migrate them to BeOS?
BeOS was a nice idea, but it seems like the world has mostly moved on (if it ever cared in the first place). Mostly, the UI looks not just spartan, but downright limiting. The screenshots are really kind of pathetic-looking.
Then again, if the idea is to create a media-oriented desktop OS with no legacy code/decisions weighing down speed, but with a modern UI, then that is something interesting. Then again, every operating system now is media-capable, in a way that Windows3.1-98 and Mac OS 6-9 were just not. Can't really comment on Linux 1.x, but I would guess that it also was not very media-friendly.
yeah, even most math majors i know dread real analysis. i for one liked it, but it's certainly an acquired taste and a good way to drive people away from math.
another thought i had was complex variables. not the a+bi bullshit, but doing a good treatment of the complex exponential function (seeing all of those cryptic trig formulas just drop out is a potentially life-changing experience) and analytic function theory (cauchy-reimann equations, taylor series, Cauchy formula). i first took such a course concurrently with calculus in high school and it's not too much of a stretch. the stuff all seems really fancy, but is conceptually no more difficult than calculus. if students give you guff about "imaginary" numbers not being real, well...negative numbers are real either, in some sense. The square root of -2 is just as natural as the square root of 2.
The best introductory book for "real mathematics" (theorem-proof style) that I've seen is Calculus by Michael Spivak. It is a large book, lucidly explained in great detail. It teaches insight and intuition, and has a very "chatty" style, as one of my professors once put it. Stay away from his other books, though. They are very advanced and leave much to the reader to prove.
That being said, I think you ask the wrong question. Don't just give a reading list. As a teacher, you should be doing the reading and teaching things to your students. Most people will not take well to a giant (or even small) list of math books to just read.
Basic group theory is very nice and has many accessible results. The book I used is by Fraleigh and is called "A First Course in Abstract Algebra." The first half of the book is about groups.
If you are interested in computer applications, "Simulation" by Stephen Ross is quite good. It is reasonably basic and certainly requires little calculus. Most of the assignments involve programs that can be written in 20 lines of python--probably more for C/C++/Java. It shows a nice example of how computers can be used for nontrivial mathematical applications (i.e., more than just adding numbers and computing derivatives/integrals that are "hard").
Other topics of interest are Probability (the dice kind, not the measure theory kind), Combinatorics, and basic number theory. I always thought Linear Algebra was pretty cool--as long as you don't focus too much on the boring mechanical junk like Gaussian elimination and stick more to the abstract notions of vector spaces, bases, eigenvalues, and spectral theory. If you are feeling ambitious and your students have seen integral calculus, you can introduce the Fourier transform and show the equivalent of a basis in function (Hilbert) space. An excellent reference is Korner's Fourier Analysis. It has many examples of applications: lots of physics stuff, how you can use fourier analysis to estimate the age of the earth, and how it has applications all over mathematics.
My real recommendation is to take some books out of your local library and skim them yourself for topics to present in class. Pick interesting stuff that will engage students with the limitless possibilities of mathematics.
that book is fucking terrible. it provides neither insight nor technical precision. vector calculus is difficult, sure, but a decent course in physics (electromagnetism) is the place to learn it properly.
vector calculus is neither interesting nor accessible to most high school students.
there is a table at the bottom of the article with all the software versions. Gnome is 1.0.x in every case. i'm pretty sure Red Hat 6.0 came with a beta version of gnome (the article features RH6.1).
that's why we have these great things called LISTS. See, a list is an example of something called "documentation". in documentation, you write down things about your environment that are not easily remembered or intuited. i know most sysadmins think their job is just to condense their whole job into as concise a shell script as possible, but documentation is helpful, too.
yeah, my laptop (Ubuntu 8.04) has been freezing a lot lately. firefox cpu usage spikes to 100% all the time. try to watch a movie is often like a game of russian roulette. i'm pretty close to formatting and switching to a minimal debian install--it's about time. I never really had this problem with Gentoo, although that was on a desktop. And I kept that box lean and mean. RHL 5.2-8 were varying levels of crappy.
that "article" is dumb. i could count on one hand the number of spam messages that get into my inbox in a month--maybe even in a year. gmail has a great spam filter. ditto for other addresses i have that are run on conventional mail servers.
i have a yahoo account and a hotmail account that i never check. it used to be because they were too full of spam, but now it's just b/c i don't need them. i don't recall seeing any spam the last time i bothered to log in to those accounts, either, but it's been a while.
as for gates' other predictions, spam filters probably need more than 640K of memory to run.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really, it's the only motivator. what we need is an incentive structure (marketplace and regulatory framework) where greed does not necessarily compel people to do things that are solely beneficial to themselves, putting others at risk.
An interesting article, for sure. The issue with the Gaussian Copula model for pools of mortgages in CDOs is how sensitive they are to the assumptions of the model. If, for example, the annual growth rate of home prices is 2% instead of 10%, things look tremendously different. If correlations between housing prices in different cities is 50% instead of 10% -- disaster. The lack of stress testing of these models (checking what the results are for different inputs into the model) was a huge issue. Even if a model is decent (which in principle, copula models are), if they are too sensitive to inputs, then the prices it produces are not trustworthy. If the proper uncertainty was taken into consideration, then perhaps everyone would have been a little less gung-ho about CDOs.
Like the (worthless) Value-at-Risk figure, the (also pretty worthless in the end) Gaussian Copula was "easy" to understand. Given that the dynamics of financial markets are not simple and easy to understand, reliance on simple models that are easy to explain to the MBAs is probably not the best idea.
as of now Chrome is windows-only.
Blackmail and extortion are both serious federal crimes. A quick Google search turns up USC TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 41, section 875, paragraph (d) which seems that it might apply in your case. Speak to a lawyer and perhaps the FTC, DoC, and FBI.
even without skype, it's must be possible to have fully encrypted voice (or text or video) communication over the internet that should be completely private and impossible to decrypt in real time. so yet again, this will only affect those too lazy or ignorant to try to evade it (which will probably be most people--even most "criminals").
i added swiftfox's repository to my apt.sources and installed the one for my chip.
i notice absolutely zero difference. any idea why that might be?
core2duo on a laptop...
hardly slashdotted. don't you think that all the people downloading ISOs might have something to do with it?
And of course it's running BSD (Netcraft confirms it.)
SETI@Home -- now there's a waste of FLOPS :)
all windows machines have--or at least used to have--a (Free)BSD TCP/IP stack, and MacOS X is FreeBSD (+hacks). What about the X.org license itself, which is a BSD-type license. All of these are more used than linux or are the plumbing enabling things like GNOME and KDE.
As for userland (and I think it's true for desktop environments, too) the GNU project is just including more features in their tools, while BSD licensed tools stick to the standard (or minimalist appearance in the case of desktops). Either way, I would say there is far more BSD code running on people's machines than GPL code, although such a claim could never be proven.
I don't think that the issue is true of OpenSSH. It is true of any internet/server/protocol technology. Web servers, database servers, firewalls, ftp servers, email servers, and even web browsers would all benefit from having robust and secure code freely available to anyone who wishes to incorporate them into their products. The computing world would be more secure, but the developers would not get the credit they want.
Eh, I'm not sure where I stand on the GPL vs. BSD debate, but each probably has their own benefits.
the BSD license is the ideal license for openssh, since the goal is maximum use of the code. the code already works and does not need much improvement. ssh was designed to kill the clear text rsh/rcp/rlogin/telnet protocols which made the internet a much less safe place. now openssh is a de-facto standard. it can be put in proprietary products or modified however developers see fit. but the protocol remains and more people use it b/c it has a very simple (2 clause) license. nobody has to be afraid of using however they like. if it were gpl, it would be incorporated into fewer other products and it would be more difficult to achieve the goal that everyone use ssh instead of crappy, insecure r-protocols.
seems like gpl is for maximum openness of software where it is used; bsd is for maximum adoption of software.
i think the openbsd/openssh guys don't view themselves as "unpaid labor" -- rather they are developing tools to make the internet (and various sub-networks) a safer place for all users. they are non-commercial so they don't have to worry about "competitors"--they just want maximum adoption of their high-quality code and of their excellent security practices.
what's problem do people have with swiftfox. this is actually the first i've heard of it.
firefox on linux has been the bane of my existence lately. the flash plugin especially is troublesome, taking over my audio channel (blocking other applications from playing audio). and firefox or one of its plugins has occasionally caused full system (GNOME) freezes that require a hard reboot.
aside from that, it is just plain slow. it often gobbles 100% of the cpu to do very simple stuff and an optimized version would be very nice.
Even for so-called non-secret (i.e., personal) communications, some will be of the type "be home late tonight, honey" or "see you for lunch at restaurant xyz this weekend" which is a major security risk of the type described here. knowing where the president will be and when sure could be dangerous information in the wrong hands.
so the issue is not just that he'll be sending strategic directives to the pentagon via a potentially insecure channel, but that all of the president's communication could be considered highly sensitive information.
in the same vein, right after BeOS was abandoned, it made sense that priority #1 was binary compatibility and a consistent user interface. but (advanced as it was at the time) it is still an 8+ year old OS. are there really people who have mission-critical apps still running on BeOS-powered boxes who need to migrate them to BeOS?
BeOS was a nice idea, but it seems like the world has mostly moved on (if it ever cared in the first place). Mostly, the UI looks not just spartan, but downright limiting. The screenshots are really kind of pathetic-looking.
Then again, if the idea is to create a media-oriented desktop OS with no legacy code/decisions weighing down speed, but with a modern UI, then that is something interesting. Then again, every operating system now is media-capable, in a way that Windows3.1-98 and Mac OS 6-9 were just not. Can't really comment on Linux 1.x, but I would guess that it also was not very media-friendly.
Progress is good.
you should care because you need apps to make your OS useful. the more users, the more developers (generally).
yeah, even most math majors i know dread real analysis. i for one liked it, but it's certainly an acquired taste and a good way to drive people away from math.
sorry--it was sheldon ross
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0125980639
another thought i had was complex variables. not the a+bi bullshit, but doing a good treatment of the complex exponential function (seeing all of those cryptic trig formulas just drop out is a potentially life-changing experience) and analytic function theory (cauchy-reimann equations, taylor series, Cauchy formula). i first took such a course concurrently with calculus in high school and it's not too much of a stretch. the stuff all seems really fancy, but is conceptually no more difficult than calculus. if students give you guff about "imaginary" numbers not being real, well...negative numbers are real either, in some sense. The square root of -2 is just as natural as the square root of 2.
The best introductory book for "real mathematics" (theorem-proof style) that I've seen is Calculus by Michael Spivak. It is a large book, lucidly explained in great detail. It teaches insight and intuition, and has a very "chatty" style, as one of my professors once put it. Stay away from his other books, though. They are very advanced and leave much to the reader to prove.
That being said, I think you ask the wrong question. Don't just give a reading list. As a teacher, you should be doing the reading and teaching things to your students. Most people will not take well to a giant (or even small) list of math books to just read.
Basic group theory is very nice and has many accessible results. The book I used is by Fraleigh and is called "A First Course in Abstract Algebra." The first half of the book is about groups.
If you are interested in computer applications, "Simulation" by Stephen Ross is quite good. It is reasonably basic and certainly requires little calculus. Most of the assignments involve programs that can be written in 20 lines of python--probably more for C/C++/Java. It shows a nice example of how computers can be used for nontrivial mathematical applications (i.e., more than just adding numbers and computing derivatives/integrals that are "hard").
Other topics of interest are Probability (the dice kind, not the measure theory kind), Combinatorics, and basic number theory. I always thought Linear Algebra was pretty cool--as long as you don't focus too much on the boring mechanical junk like Gaussian elimination and stick more to the abstract notions of vector spaces, bases, eigenvalues, and spectral theory. If you are feeling ambitious and your students have seen integral calculus, you can introduce the Fourier transform and show the equivalent of a basis in function (Hilbert) space. An excellent reference is Korner's Fourier Analysis. It has many examples of applications: lots of physics stuff, how you can use fourier analysis to estimate the age of the earth, and how it has applications all over mathematics.
My real recommendation is to take some books out of your local library and skim them yourself for topics to present in class. Pick interesting stuff that will engage students with the limitless possibilities of mathematics.
that book is fucking terrible. it provides neither insight nor technical precision. vector calculus is difficult, sure, but a decent course in physics (electromagnetism) is the place to learn it properly.
vector calculus is neither interesting nor accessible to most high school students.
there is a table at the bottom of the article with all the software versions. Gnome is 1.0.x in every case. i'm pretty sure Red Hat 6.0 came with a beta version of gnome (the article features RH6.1).
Windows CE is dying
that's why we have these great things called LISTS. See, a list is an example of something called "documentation". in documentation, you write down things about your environment that are not easily remembered or intuited. i know most sysadmins think their job is just to condense their whole job into as concise a shell script as possible, but documentation is helpful, too.
problem solved.
this would be especially useful for an eskimo datacenter.
yeah, my laptop (Ubuntu 8.04) has been freezing a lot lately. firefox cpu usage spikes to 100% all the time. try to watch a movie is often like a game of russian roulette. i'm pretty close to formatting and switching to a minimal debian install--it's about time. I never really had this problem with Gentoo, although that was on a desktop. And I kept that box lean and mean. RHL 5.2-8 were varying levels of crappy.
Computers suck.
ha, google already picked up this page. damn, they are quick.
that "article" is dumb. i could count on one hand the number of spam messages that get into my inbox in a month--maybe even in a year. gmail has a great spam filter. ditto for other addresses i have that are run on conventional mail servers.
i have a yahoo account and a hotmail account that i never check. it used to be because they were too full of spam, but now it's just b/c i don't need them. i don't recall seeing any spam the last time i bothered to log in to those accounts, either, but it's been a while.
as for gates' other predictions, spam filters probably need more than 640K of memory to run.