I worked for three months in Hong Kong in 1984, and I had to get an ID card. I still have it today, although it has long since expired. When they took the photograph of me, they spent several minutes touching up the photograph. They also insisted that I take off my glasses. It is one of the most flattering photos of myself that I have ever had.
I also still retain my bank account card. I left HK$10 in that account (about 1 English pound, or US$1.7). I wonder if that account still exists today?
I'll probably be flamed for this, but C is inherently unsafe. The basic problem is that memory management is the programmer's responsibility in C, and that's just too hard for mere mortals.
I would completely agree with you. I think the ideal programming environment would still allow these unsafe practices, but provide enough other tools so that these unsafe practices would only be used in exeptional circumstances.
Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you found and fixed every single flaw [in your program]?
I am only a recreational programmer. But recently I have been writing code, and in the middle of the night, I suddenly think of a security hole. I write in C, and it is just too easy for buffer overflows and such like to slip through, even if you are thinking about them as you program. In the end, it was not that hard for me to batten down the hatches in my code, but it was a small program, and I had no time pressure.
It seems to me that we need a new approach to designing code - an approach where things like checks for buffer overflows are automatic in the program design. I have heard of an approach (I heard this maybe 20 years ago) where you "prove" the correctness of the program as you go along. The approach of "proving" the program cannot work for all programs, because of Turing's halting theorem. But most programming tasks could be written in such a way that they could be proven.
As applications become more and more complicated, it seems to me that some very clever person needs to rethink the whole way in which we designed programs. Possibly a very creative breakthrough approach is required.
My theory is that it is ethics that makes a difference. I am talking about the kind of ethics where is you see someone drop his or her wallet, you chase after that person to return it.
Certainly during its founding, and indeed for quite large parts of its history, the USA enjoyed a comparitively high degree of ethical standards from its population.
Ethics in the general population is important. It is what stops new businesses going under because the Mafia steps in. It is what creates the kinds of laws that this chap is talking about. It is what causes the degree of trust that is required to conduct business transactions in an easy manner.
It seems to me that if one looks at the various nations, that there is a high degree of correlation between the economic strength, and the general level of ethics.
Man's understanding of radio waves is - how old? - a little over 100 years. Before Maxwell, people had no conception that such things might even be there?
If aliens are actually out there, chances are they either are way behind radio, or have found a communication method far superior to radio, something of which we have no concept whatsoever.
What was so good about Hilbert's problems is that they were just the right degree of hardness - not so easy as to be solved the next day, but not so hard as to be totally unsolvable. The fact that so many of his problems were solved in the twentieth century shows that they really were the problems for the twentieth century.
Having worked on the Navier Stokes equation for about three years, I can say that this is a very interesting problem. Actually, the Navier Stokes equation is the equation governing an incompressible flow - that is, it is an equation that very closely approximates the flow of water. Thus to gain any understanding of this equation is to make a lot of progress in understanding turbulance. This will have great practical applications.
I know a little about some of the other problems, the Poincare conjecture, P=NP, and the Riemann hypothesis. Although these problems are hard, not too many people work on them. Basically, for an untenured professor, these are career destroyers. If one works on these problems as obsessively as a solution will require, you can kiss goodbye to tenure (unless you actually solve it).
In contrast, there are many many researchers the world over working on the Navier-Stokes problem, from graduate students to top mathematicians (like Charles Fefferman who wrote on the claymath website). One may not solve the real problem, but there is progress to be made, and many other easier problems to work on. One can make a reasonable career, while still having a dream of fame.
----
Another poster said that whoever solves this problem will probably already be very rich, working for some rich institute. This really is not the case - probably the solution will come from a moderately paid university professor. The money will be very handy, although then his/her career will be so certain that he/she will be comfortable without it. In any case, the motivation will probably be prestige rather than the money, but the amount of money raises the prestige.
Another poster commented that there are no Good Will's out there. I personally did not like the movie. I think that there are unfound genius's out there - Ramanujan is an example. But noone can solve these kinds of problems without being to some extent obsessive. Good Will did math as an afterthought, and no person can do great work like that. All the great genius's of history, in all creative endeviours, were not just brilliant, but also worked extremely hard.
"That's cool, now I can finally play minesweeper !"
Actually, there are a bunch of open source mine sweepers around. IMHO, the nicest is the one that comes with kde (and you don't have to run kde to run it.)
I have liked Secure Tax: http://www.securetax.com/. It is an online tax program, so all you need is netscape. (It is better if you also have truetype fonts.) Then you can use ANY O.S.
It does it all; printed tax return (as a P.D.F. file), electronic returns (both federal and state). It is free to use it, but you have to pay about $15 to print it out. But the electronic filing is then no extra charge.
Oh, oh - I just looked at their web page, and they have been bought by Intuit. So I don't know what it will be like this year. The last two years it has been superb.
Shouldn't you also have a couple of pro-censorship people to ask questions of?
Otherwise this is hardly a debate, and we only get a one-sided view of things.
A lot of people are proposing censorship, and it's supporters seem rather successful in Autralia. They must have some coherent arguments. Let's hear them.
I am really glad that RedHat is going to invest a lot of effort in Mozilla. I think that Microsoft were very wise when they realised how important the browser is. I think it is key to being a successful OS. I am glad that RedHat will work to make Mozilla successful. I think that the success of Mozilla (or some other browser) is very important if Linux is going to succeed in the desktop market.
Religion and freedom have never really gotten along, from the persecution of Galileo to the demands by Orthodox Jews that Jerusalem shut down its cinemas on Friday night to Islamic attacks on writers and reporters in some Middle Eastern countries.
My impression of world history is that the greatest freedoms for humanity have because of the influence of christianity. Historically, most cultures and civilizations are somewhat oppressive. The move towards freedom has come mostly from predominantly Christian cultures.
Example: women's rights are most prominant in the western world, in post christian cultures such as Europe and the USA. One of the ways in which Jesus was radical was in the way he respected and valued women, in a culture that was male dominated. The early church attracted many women for this reason.
Example: a major force in the abolition of slavery were Christians such as Wilberforce. A major American player in this movement was Lincoln, and while one cannot be sure if he was a Christian, he was certainly strongly influenced by Christianity. More recently, one of the most powerful persons in the Civil Rights movement was Martin Luther King. His message is universal precisely because of its Christian heritiage ("I have a dream...").
Example: The American war of independence was fought by people who were Christians, or strongly influenced by Christianity. The result is a society that has endured two centuries, and has led the world in fighting for human freedoms. At about the same time, there was also the more atheist led French Revolution. This was filled with atrocities. The society it spawned quickly turned into a dictatorship under Napoleon, leading France into a series of bloody revolutions for many years to follow.
Example: Today it is largely Christians who defend the rights of the unborn. It is largely Christians who seek to expose and destroy the slave trade in the Sudan. The Catholic Church plays a prominant role in countries like Cuba in pressing for political freedoms, and those who desire freedom are always exited when the Pope comes to visit their country, simply because his influence for freedom is so strong.
Example: when the Catholic Church lost for a while some of its direction, becoming a money maker, and a political player, rather than a spiritual leader, it was Christians such as Martin Luther who led the way towards freedom of religious expression.
Indeed the example of Galileo is an example of when the church lost its way, choosing to follow Aristotlean ideals instead of Christian ideals. Galileo's ideas have no conflict with the Bible.
Oppression and denial of freedom is spawned not by true religion, but by the greed of men and women. One only has to look at the Communist Soviet Block, and present day Indonesia, to see this. People may use religion, or any other ideals, as a cover for their political ambitions, but it is their selfishness and inner wickedness that causes the evil.
I have no sympathy for the woman who lost the $70,000 in debt. But I think that the ruling is a very good ruling, because it spikes the gambling industry, an industry that I see as largely parasitic.
Also, it is good that loan companies will be discouraged from giving loans for the purpose of gambling, because a loan company has a responsibility to make sure that they are making a responsible loan, and a loan for the purpose of gambling can never be responsible, since it clearly is not a good investment.
Also, in some cases, it really is the case that the gambler should not be held responsible for their debts, for example, if the gambler suffers from altheismers disease, or is in some other way mentally impaired. For they will lose a lot of money, and in many cases it will be their loving relatives who will have to pick up the tab for their debts.
The first ammendment allows people to express unpopular viewpoints, and not get put in jail or ostracised for doing so.
It is not supposed to force people to provide funding to allow people to express themselves in an obscene manner (as in the Brooklyn Museum case).
It is not supposed to guarantee a job to a polition if he expresses viewpoints that others in his political party disagree with (as in the example of Jesse Ventura or Pat Buchanan.)
It is definitely not supposed to protect speakers from being reviled (because otherwise you attack the revilers freedom of speech), as in the example of Peter Singer. And if as an employer, I am hiring a person to come up with different viewpoints (as in hiring a professor), and I find his viewpoints repulsive, I can say that he is failing at his job, and if the contract allows, fire the guy.
(Now if Peter Singer worked as a computer operator, I would not have just cause to fire him for his views, as his views would not affect his job. Although I think I might have cause to fire him if he was working in a children's hospital, if I had good cause to think that he might actually follow through with his ideas.)
America is free - it is very free. Try publically critisising the President in Indonesia. Really, that is the kind of freedom of expression that the founding fathers were talking about. When I listen to the news, I get very angry when I hear of the heavy censorship in other countries. But I also get very angry when I read of the idiots in the USA who think that their freedom of speech is surpressed when they cannot, fr example, publically display obscene material. Those people should try moving to a dictatorship for a while, and then they will see how abstract their former concerns were, and what lack of freedom of speech really means.
I gotta say that this looks like very shrewd work on the part of Microsoft.
1. I believe that a primary reason that people leave Windows to go to Linux/*BSD etc is reliability. By accounts of other posters, it seems that their new Win 2000 is far more reliable. As such, it will stem a lot of the flow away from their products.
2. It seems like they have aimed their guns at web servers, seeming to recognise that this is where they have been losing to Linux and other free OS. The Mindcraft benchmarks were good scores for them in the publicity battles, and they did well to pick a battle they could win, even if the results are somewhat irrelevant.
3. Some posters suggest that Microsoft could use Apache for their free web server. From a technical and immediate sales point of view, this might be a good way for them to go. But from the mindshare perspective, this would be admitting defeat. I don't believe they will do this.
4. Some are saying - why cannot we coexist. I think that it would be great if there were a proliferation of operating systems out there. I would have no problems if Microsoft were a large player in the market. But they seem to be not content with this, desiring not a large share, but total share. I think that this is why so many people hate Microsoft, not because they want to have high sales, nor because their products are buggy, but because they poison the others' wells, and seek to destroy.
The fourth reason is why it is important for the DOJ's and others' lawsuites to prevail.
The first point, if valid, shows the importance of competition. If Microsoft produces good products, that is good for all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoiler Warning:
Captain Kirk is killed on Star Trek 6 (The Undiscovered Country) - I saw it on the previews.
I worked for three months in Hong Kong in 1984, and I had to get an ID card. I still have it today, although it has long since expired. When they took the photograph of me, they spent several minutes touching up the photograph. They also insisted that I take off my glasses. It is one of the most flattering photos of myself that I have ever had.
I also still retain my bank account card. I left HK$10 in that account (about 1 English pound, or US$1.7). I wonder if that account still exists today?
Eric Weinstein has a very nice web site at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/. He had huge problems with the publisher CRC Press. You can read the author's account of this at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/erics_commentary.html .
I would completely agree with you. I think the ideal programming environment would still allow these unsafe practices, but provide enough other tools so that these unsafe practices would only be used in exeptional circumstances.
Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you found and fixed every single flaw [in your program]?
Of course not :-)
I am only a recreational programmer. But recently I have been writing code, and in the middle of the night, I suddenly think of a security hole. I write in C, and it is just too easy for buffer overflows and such like to slip through, even if you are thinking about them as you program. In the end, it was not that hard for me to batten down the hatches in my code, but it was a small program, and I had no time pressure.
It seems to me that we need a new approach to designing code - an approach where things like checks for buffer overflows are automatic in the program design. I have heard of an approach (I heard this maybe 20 years ago) where you "prove" the correctness of the program as you go along. The approach of "proving" the program cannot work for all programs, because of Turing's halting theorem. But most programming tasks could be written in such a way that they could be proven.
As applications become more and more complicated, it seems to me that some very clever person needs to rethink the whole way in which we designed programs. Possibly a very creative breakthrough approach is required.
Duke Mathematical Journal is a pretty good journal, so it must be a good paper.
My theory is that it is ethics that makes a difference. I am talking about the kind of ethics where is you see someone drop his or her wallet, you chase after that person to return it.
Certainly during its founding, and indeed for quite large parts of its history, the USA enjoyed a comparitively high degree of ethical standards from its population.
Ethics in the general population is important. It is what stops new businesses going under because the Mafia steps in. It is what creates the kinds of laws that this chap is talking about. It is what causes the degree of trust that is required to conduct business transactions in an easy manner.
It seems to me that if one looks at the various nations, that there is a high degree of correlation between the economic strength, and the general level of ethics.
In the options for 'religion', it includes GNU/Linux. What do I put if I am only one of these (GNU not Linux, or Linux not GNU)?
Man's understanding of radio waves is - how old? - a little over 100 years. Before Maxwell, people had no conception that such things might even be there?
If aliens are actually out there, chances are they either are way behind radio, or have found a communication method far superior to radio, something of which we have no concept whatsoever.
My Onkyo has the same problem. But the salesman informed me of this before I bought it, and I accept this fault.
Give him/her a good grounding in Math. After that anything else is much easier to learn.
What was so good about Hilbert's problems is that they were just the right degree of hardness - not so easy as to be solved the next day, but not so hard as to be totally unsolvable. The fact that so many of his problems were solved in the twentieth century shows that they really were the problems for the twentieth century.
Having worked on the Navier Stokes equation for about three years, I can say that this is a very interesting problem. Actually, the Navier Stokes equation is the equation governing an incompressible flow - that is, it is an equation that very closely approximates the flow of water. Thus to gain any understanding of this equation is to make a lot of progress in understanding turbulance. This will have great practical applications.
I know a little about some of the other problems, the Poincare conjecture, P=NP, and the Riemann hypothesis. Although these problems are hard, not too many people work on them. Basically, for an untenured professor, these are career destroyers. If one works on these problems as obsessively as a solution will require, you can kiss goodbye to tenure (unless you actually solve it).
In contrast, there are many many researchers the world over working on the Navier-Stokes problem, from graduate students to top mathematicians (like Charles Fefferman who wrote on the claymath website). One may not solve the real problem, but there is progress to be made, and many other easier problems to work on. One can make a reasonable career, while still having a dream of fame.
----
Another poster said that whoever solves this problem will probably already be very rich, working for some rich institute. This really is not the case - probably the solution will come from a moderately paid university professor. The money will be very handy, although then his/her career will be so certain that he/she will be comfortable without it. In any case, the motivation will probably be prestige rather than the money, but the amount of money raises the prestige.
Another poster commented that there are no Good Will's out there. I personally did not like the movie. I think that there are unfound genius's out there - Ramanujan is an example. But noone can solve these kinds of problems without being to some extent obsessive. Good Will did math as an afterthought, and no person can do great work like that. All the great genius's of history, in all creative endeviours, were not just brilliant, but also worked extremely hard.
Excuse my ignorance, but what is "auditing"?
"That's cool, now I can finally play minesweeper !"
Actually, there are a bunch of open source mine sweepers around. IMHO, the nicest is the one that comes with kde (and you don't have to run kde to run it.)
It does it all; printed tax return (as a P.D.F. file), electronic returns (both federal and state). It is free to use it, but you have to pay about $15 to print it out. But the electronic filing is then no extra charge.
Oh, oh - I just looked at their web page, and they have been bought by Intuit. So I don't know what it will be like this year. The last two years it has been superb.
Shouldn't you also have a couple of pro-censorship people to ask questions of?
Otherwise this is hardly a debate, and we only get a one-sided view of things.
A lot of people are proposing censorship, and it's supporters seem rather successful in Autralia. They must have some coherent arguments. Let's hear them.
(Do I get first post?)
I am really glad that RedHat is going to invest a lot of effort in Mozilla. I think that Microsoft were very wise when they realised how important the browser is. I think it is key to being a successful OS. I am glad that RedHat will work to make Mozilla successful. I think that the success of Mozilla (or some other browser) is very important if Linux is going to succeed in the desktop market.
My Father runs a computer company that made use of this idea since the early or mid 80's. Does their patent go back that far?
(Yes - we really did consider the Y2K problem then - like everyone else should have !)
My impression of world history is that the greatest freedoms for humanity have because of the influence of christianity. Historically, most cultures and civilizations are somewhat oppressive. The move towards freedom has come mostly from predominantly Christian cultures.
Example: women's rights are most prominant in the western world, in post christian cultures such as Europe and the USA. One of the ways in which Jesus was radical was in the way he respected and valued women, in a culture that was male dominated. The early church attracted many women for this reason.
Example: a major force in the abolition of slavery were Christians such as Wilberforce. A major American player in this movement was Lincoln, and while one cannot be sure if he was a Christian, he was certainly strongly influenced by Christianity. More recently, one of the most powerful persons in the Civil Rights movement was Martin Luther King. His message is universal precisely because of its Christian heritiage ("I have a dream ...").
Example: The American war of independence was fought by people who were Christians, or strongly influenced by Christianity. The result is a society that has endured two centuries, and has led the world in fighting for human freedoms. At about the same time, there was also the more atheist led French Revolution. This was filled with atrocities. The society it spawned quickly turned into a dictatorship under Napoleon, leading France into a series of bloody revolutions for many years to follow.
Example: Today it is largely Christians who defend the rights of the unborn. It is largely Christians who seek to expose and destroy the slave trade in the Sudan. The Catholic Church plays a prominant role in countries like Cuba in pressing for political freedoms, and those who desire freedom are always exited when the Pope comes to visit their country, simply because his influence for freedom is so strong.
Example: when the Catholic Church lost for a while some of its direction, becoming a money maker, and a political player, rather than a spiritual leader, it was Christians such as Martin Luther who led the way towards freedom of religious expression.
Indeed the example of Galileo is an example of when the church lost its way, choosing to follow Aristotlean ideals instead of Christian ideals. Galileo's ideas have no conflict with the Bible.
Oppression and denial of freedom is spawned not by true religion, but by the greed of men and women. One only has to look at the Communist Soviet Block, and present day Indonesia, to see this. People may use religion, or any other ideals, as a cover for their political ambitions, but it is their selfishness and inner wickedness that causes the evil.
I have no sympathy for the woman who lost the $70,000 in debt. But I think that the ruling is a very good ruling, because it spikes the gambling industry, an industry that I see as largely parasitic.
Also, it is good that loan companies will be discouraged from giving loans for the purpose of gambling, because a loan company has a responsibility to make sure that they are making a responsible loan, and a loan for the purpose of gambling can never be responsible, since it clearly is not a good investment.
Also, in some cases, it really is the case that the gambler should not be held responsible for their debts, for example, if the gambler suffers from altheismers disease, or is in some other way mentally impaired. For they will lose a lot of money, and in many cases it will be their loving relatives who will have to pick up the tab for their debts.
The first ammendment allows people to express unpopular viewpoints, and not get put in jail or ostracised for doing so.
It is not supposed to force people to provide funding to allow people to express themselves in an obscene manner (as in the Brooklyn Museum case).
It is not supposed to guarantee a job to a polition if he expresses viewpoints that others in his political party disagree with (as in the example of Jesse Ventura or Pat Buchanan.)
It is definitely not supposed to protect speakers from being reviled (because otherwise you attack the revilers freedom of speech), as in the example of Peter Singer. And if as an employer, I am hiring a person to come up with different viewpoints (as in hiring a professor), and I find his viewpoints repulsive, I can say that he is failing at his job, and if the contract allows, fire the guy.
(Now if Peter Singer worked as a computer operator, I would not have just cause to fire him for his views, as his views would not affect his job. Although I think I might have cause to fire him if he was working in a children's hospital, if I had good cause to think that he might actually follow through with his ideas.)
America is free - it is very free. Try publically critisising the President in Indonesia. Really, that is the kind of freedom of expression that the founding fathers were talking about. When I listen to the news, I get very angry when I hear of the heavy censorship in other countries. But I also get very angry when I read of the idiots in the USA who think that their freedom of speech is surpressed when they cannot, fr example, publically display obscene material. Those people should try moving to a dictatorship for a while, and then they will see how abstract their former concerns were, and what lack of freedom of speech really means.
On my FreeBSD box, I find that netscape 4.05 (linux version) with Linux emulation works the best. Later versions do very badly.
I gotta say that this looks like very shrewd work on the part of Microsoft.
1. I believe that a primary reason that people leave Windows to go to Linux/*BSD etc is reliability. By accounts of other posters, it seems that their new Win 2000 is far more reliable. As such, it will stem a lot of the flow away from their products.
2. It seems like they have aimed their guns at web servers, seeming to recognise that this is where they have been losing to Linux and other free OS. The Mindcraft benchmarks were good scores for them in the publicity battles, and they did well to pick a battle they could win, even if the results are somewhat irrelevant.
3. Some posters suggest that Microsoft could use Apache for their free web server. From a technical and immediate sales point of view, this might be a good way for them to go. But from the mindshare perspective, this would be admitting defeat. I don't believe they will do this.
4. Some are saying - why cannot we coexist. I think that it would be great if there were a proliferation of operating systems out there. I would have no problems if Microsoft were a large player in the market. But they seem to be not content with this, desiring not a large share, but total share. I think that this is why so many people hate Microsoft, not because they want to have high sales, nor because their products are buggy, but because they poison the others' wells, and seek to destroy.
The fourth reason is why it is important for the DOJ's and others' lawsuites to prevail.
The first point, if valid, shows the importance of competition. If Microsoft produces good products, that is good for all of us.
Oops, I misunderstood what you were saying. Sorry. You were talking, in effect, about 2 3D programs going at once, the interface, and the application.
I tried running 5 flightgears at once - definitely slowed things down.