The reprocussions if this is proven to be true would be nothing short of revolutionary.
What Wolfram proposed is not neither new nor revolutionary. As a letter to Salon put it, Wolfram has a knack for appropriating ideas from others.
His "revolutionary" mathematica program was only a revolution of marketing, otherwise it was a copy of macsyma/maple.
Same with his cellular automata. He is rehashing the work of complexity theory a-la Santa Fe institute, and indeed much of the work of computer science, which does not care much for equational descriptions but rather searches for algorithmic descriptions/solutions.
Consider, for example, the Four Color Theorem [wolfram.com] - the only existing proof of which requires a lot of computer power to grind through cases. Is it a valid proof? Probably - but not to the standards of mathematicians who grew up in the pre-computer age, to whom an exhaustively checked list of cases does not look like mathematics at all.
This was a subject of debate twenty years ago. Currently the computer proof is generally well accepted by mathematicians. What Wolfram proposes is neither new nor revolutionary.
Computer Science itself has spent a good portion of its young life moving away from equation descriptions to constructive, computable descriptions. They are called algorithms. You don't need cellular automata to make a switch from equations to computing. Moreover, I was reading a famous physicist (whose name escapes me) state that physics had move beyond the equation as description and considers now computational descriptions as valid.
Luke is American?? I never knew the US was around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Blond, blue-eyed, working in a farm that could well be in Kansas and certainly not in Japan, or Russia or Brazil. Shotting rats in the canyon, just like farmers do in the USA (and pretty much nowhere else in the world).
You don't see the cultural references because they are transparent to you, but to a foreigner they are as obvious as a kimono would be for you.
Sorry, Lucas may have written a wonderful trilogy, but that's where it ended.
Oh puleeeze. The first three movies (Ep 4, 5 & 6) were not that great either. We were young and impressionable and were blown away by third rate actors which were so bad nobody ever hired them after that. The story line is vapid and cheesy, along the lines of zillion "American boy meets evil, American boy pulls together, American boy beats evil" that were so popular back then. People complain about Jar-Jar, but the Ewoks were no different...
While the market is certainly not as hot as a year and a half ago, when we were making $120K offers to some star candidates, the number of resumes we get for open position is still on the low side and quite often not one of them is qualified for the position.
This in contrast with eight years ago, when you had your choice of which expert to hire at a very affordable $50-60K per head...
IANAP but I once saw a student at a science fair who measured the charge of an electron using standard off the shelf high-school lab equipment.
Instead of the very pure oil used by Millikan she used cooking oil. This introduced a lot of noise in the system, but quite amazingly when you plot out the results you can clealry see the impure oil component and the electron charge component. Subtract the impure oil component from your data, average out and report the result. She got the charge of the electron right to three significant digits of precision IIRC.
How could software distributed under the GPL be any more free?
Simple: remove the condition that all mods have to be made public.
Finally, let me address the use of the term "viral" to describe the GPL.
Let me quote from devlinux.org: The GPL is "viral" in the sense that one cannot combine GPLed work with other work governed by different licenses. If one were to enhance a GPLed work, then your enhancements would also fall under the GPL terms. Like viral marketing.
One last thing. Please note that I'm not saying Open Source code or even the GPL are bad (in fact I have contributed to Open Source projects myself). My.sig simply points out that the marketing by-line of RMS is, shall we say, inexact.
Just to be clear, all processors out there have bugs. The pentium bug is in no way exceptional. The only reason it deserves to be there is beacuse the list is called "a collection of famous software bugs that caused large scale disasters".
The pentium bug is certainly famous because every idiot and its brother think it is rare for a CPU to be buggy. The second condition in the list is "caused a large scale disaster". This condition is, sadly, also met. It caused a large scale public relations disaster for Intel because once again said idiots thought that a CPU bug is rare.
PhDs are more about depth requirement than breadth requirement. The breadth requirements vary from university to university, and some places are famous for producing really skewed candidates ---word class experts in one area, unable to tell KDE from GRE in another.
"Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."
Don't sell old technology too short. While a fully playing chess computer was beyond their reach, there were genuine automata in the 18th and early 19th century that could play end-games mechanically. Another examples of amizingly advanced automaton is the Swiss scribe, which can be programed to write a persons name with a quilt in long-hand, including pausing to dip the quilt in the ink well.
That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today.
Lastly the entire mechanism that allowed the chessmen to be grasped by a person from inside the Tuks was not replicated until a few decades back, again by "advanced" robotic research.
Right on, but what brilliance-boy was saying in the parent was basically Linux is the best Unix. Period
Actually you are the idiot.
(1) The whole thread started by someone saying that Solaris beats Linux, something that in your brilliance you missed
(2) I stated that Linux is the best Unix(overall). The "Period" part was your own strawman. I would never say something that idiotic.
(3) It is difficult to compare complex systems, such as cars or OSes, with so many variables and applications. Yet it can be done, provided we keep in mind what the comparison means. If Nader says that a Honda Civic is better than a Ford Pinto, he means that for the average user (TM) under a reasonably common usage. However if your specialized application includes roadside fireworks, then no doubt go for the Ford Pinto.
- Microsoft releases product to great hype. - Product is buggy and not very successful. - Competition and Microsoft haters at/. take great comfort from this fact. - Microsoft develops new version of product fixing most flaws. - Competition is taken by surprise by much improved version. - Competition starts losing ground rapidly to Microsoft. - Competition sues Microsoft for predatory practices. - Competition gets bought over by AOL.
But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.
Pffft. The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0 ?
Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?
Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?
Or the simplicity and power of having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?
They gave him a page to reply, he wanted longer, which they refused.
Thanks for the clarification. If I were an editor (as if) of a scientific magazine I would have (1) asked the "under-the-collar" scientists to take a scientific approach to this and leave feelings aside (2) would have devoted substantial amounts of space to both sides to and fro (3) would've rejected nit-pick attacks on Lomborg's work and only let substantial criticisms go through (4) appoint a moderator to see if there are at least some points of agreement at least on the data, and possibly in some of the conclusions (5) be very weary (if not altogether drop) any comments from a scientist (on either side) who refuses to concede any point from the other side.
How is GNU non-free speech-wise? Seems to me it's as free as any other speech in the US, or anywhere else that has copyright laws.
Not even close. GNU forces you to make any modifications public. The freest-speech is public domain, which has no conditions on its (re)use.
Now one can argue that there are good reasons for the viral license. However it is nevertheless paradoxical that the RMS mantra of Free Software with Free as in "free speech" and not as in "free beer" is reality the complete opposite.
GNU software is gratis, but by no means fully unrestricted (freedom sense).
Almost no one lived near blast site, however, save a few hunters and trappers. No one studied the site until 1930. And while scientists have long presumed an asteroid or comet exploded just above the surface, no consensus has been reached. Some even suggested a miniature black hole did the work.
The object seems to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second), the BBC reported.
Why did the asteroid break apart in the air?
"Possibly because the object was like asteroid Mathilde, which was photographed by the passing Near-Shoemaker space probe in 1997," researcher Luigi Foschini told the BBC. "Mathilde is a rubble pile with a density very close to that of water. This would mean it could explode and fragment in the atmosphere with only the shock wave reaching the ground."
A scientific paper on the work will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
From bbc.co.uk:
They analysed seismic records from several Siberian monitoring stations, which combined with data on the directions of flattened trees gives information about the object's trajectory. So far, over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave.
Over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave
"We performed a detailed analysis of all the available scientific literature, including unpublished eye-witness accounts that have never been translated from the Russian," said Dr Foschini. "This allowed us to calculate the orbit of the cosmic body that crashed."
The object appears to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second). Using this data, the researchers were able to plot a series of possible orbits for the object.
Of the 886 valid orbits that they calculated, over 80% of them were asteroid orbits with only a minority being orbits that are associated with comets.
Contrary to Lomborg's assertions, very few of these attacks are ad hominem, and take issue only with his application of the scientific method, and selective, self-serving use of statistics.
Actually I read a random sample of them and most of them were, to a certain extent, ad hominem. Also the rebutals were not at all definitive. They left a lot of room for further debate, as Lomborg's reply in his website show. Quite strikingly, the magazine denied the right of reply to Lomborg.
All in all the scientific community has done a very shoddy job at debunking Lomborg (which is not to say he's right).
Everything is a file, says Unix. But that was 30 years ago.
That was a real cool feature back then. Since then we learned a lot. What the Unix designers really wanted to say but lacked the vocabulary for was:
Everything is a data stream object. The data stream object has four methods: open, close, read and write. Users may, through inheritance and specialization, provide other interfaces to a stream.
Whether you like Microsoft or not, you can't deny that they are willing to take risks and innovate, this being a perfect example.
There are two issues in this "innovation".
Computer Scientists in academia have been talking about file systems as databases for at least ten years (and quite possibly much longer). There is no innovation in that sense.
From the point of view of pioneering the work of actually converting the filesystem into a full fledged database, the first effort I'm aware of is the NT file sytem which had an SQL engine with triggers and all at its core. This is innovation in bringing to market.
IMHO, Linux is still at least five to ten years away from trying anything so bold as a completely new filesystem paradigm...
I read the article last year when it came out. The results are not as far reaching as they sound from a first reading of the abstract.
They proved that not every function is obfuscatable. However for all we know, it might be that most functions are obfuscatable, which is good enough. Also the notion of obfuscation is somewhat contrived (this is because of the lack of a generally well defined notion of what de-obfuscation is, they did the best given what is a new field).
Say, in general proving that a program terminates is impossible. Nevertheless millions of lines of code are put out every day which we are positive they terminate, as we restrict ourselves to designing programs that always do so (even though the occasional bug gets in the way).
Slashdot Mirror
Every time there is a virus attack the press rushes to report that the culprit likely "will never be found". Yet quite often, they are found.
Anybody care to explain the discrepancy?
The reprocussions if this is proven to be true would be nothing short of revolutionary.
What Wolfram proposed is not neither new nor revolutionary. As a letter to Salon put it, Wolfram has a knack for appropriating ideas from others.
His "revolutionary" mathematica program was only a revolution of marketing, otherwise it was a copy of macsyma/maple.
Same with his cellular automata. He is rehashing the work of complexity theory a-la Santa Fe institute, and indeed much of the work of computer science, which does not care much for equational descriptions but rather searches for algorithmic descriptions/solutions.
Consider, for example, the Four Color Theorem [wolfram.com] - the only existing proof of which requires a lot of computer power to grind through cases. Is it a valid proof? Probably - but not to the standards of mathematicians who grew up in the pre-computer age, to whom an exhaustively checked list of cases does not look like mathematics at all.
This was a subject of debate twenty years ago. Currently the computer proof is generally well accepted by mathematicians. What Wolfram proposes is neither new nor revolutionary.
Computer Science itself has spent a good portion of its young life moving away from equation descriptions to constructive, computable descriptions. They are called algorithms. You don't need cellular automata to make a switch from equations to computing. Moreover, I was reading a famous physicist (whose name escapes me) state that physics had move beyond the equation as description and considers now computational descriptions as valid.
Luke is American?? I never knew the US was around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Blond, blue-eyed, working in a farm that could well be in Kansas and certainly not in Japan, or Russia or Brazil. Shotting rats in the canyon, just like farmers do in the USA (and pretty much nowhere else in the world).
You don't see the cultural references because they are transparent to you, but to a foreigner they are as obvious as a kimono would be for you.
Sorry, Lucas may have written a wonderful trilogy, but that's where it ended.
Oh puleeeze. The first three movies (Ep 4, 5 & 6) were not that great either. We were young and impressionable and were blown away by third rate actors which were so bad nobody ever hired them after that. The story line is vapid and cheesy, along the lines of zillion "American boy meets evil, American boy pulls together, American boy beats evil" that were so popular back then. People complain about Jar-Jar, but the Ewoks were no different...
The emperor never had any clothes...
While the market is certainly not as hot as a year and a half ago, when we were making $120K offers to some star candidates, the number of resumes we get for open position is still on the low side and quite often not one of them is qualified for the position.
This in contrast with eight years ago, when you had your choice of which expert to hire at a very affordable $50-60K per head...
IANAP but I once saw a student at a science fair who measured the charge of an electron using standard off the shelf high-school lab equipment.
Instead of the very pure oil used by Millikan she used cooking oil. This introduced a lot of noise in the system, but quite amazingly when you plot out the results you can clealry see the impure oil component and the electron charge component. Subtract the impure oil component from your data, average out and report the result. She got the charge of the electron right to three significant digits of precision IIRC.
How could software distributed under the GPL be any more free?
.sig simply points out that the marketing by-line of RMS is, shall we say, inexact.
Simple: remove the condition that all mods have to be made public.
Finally, let me address the use of the term "viral" to describe the GPL.
Let me quote from devlinux.org: The GPL is "viral" in the sense that one cannot combine GPLed work with other work governed by different licenses. If one were to enhance a GPLed work, then your enhancements would also fall under the GPL terms. Like viral marketing.
One last thing. Please note that I'm not saying Open Source code or even the GPL are bad (in fact I have contributed to Open Source projects myself). My
The pentium bug is certainly famous because every idiot and its brother think it is rare for a CPU to be buggy. The second condition in the list is "caused a large scale disaster". This condition is, sadly, also met. It caused a large scale public relations disaster for Intel because once again said idiots thought that a CPU bug is rare.
PhDs are more about depth requirement than breadth requirement. The breadth requirements vary from university to university, and some places are famous for producing really skewed candidates ---word class experts in one area, unable to tell KDE from GRE in another.
"Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."
Don't sell old technology too short. While a fully playing chess computer was beyond their reach, there were genuine automata in the 18th and early 19th century that could play end-games mechanically. Another examples of amizingly advanced automaton is the Swiss scribe, which can be programed to write a persons name with a quilt in long-hand, including pausing to dip the quilt in the ink well.
That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today.
Lastly the entire mechanism that allowed the chessmen to be grasped by a person from inside the Tuks was not replicated until a few decades back, again by "advanced" robotic research.
Right on, but what brilliance-boy was saying in the parent was basically Linux is the best Unix. Period
Actually you are the idiot.
(1) The whole thread started by someone saying that Solaris beats Linux, something that in your brilliance you missed
(2) I stated that Linux is the best Unix(overall). The "Period" part was your own strawman. I would never say something that idiotic.
(3) It is difficult to compare complex systems, such as cars or OSes, with so many variables and applications. Yet it can be done, provided we keep in mind what the comparison means. If Nader says that a Honda Civic is better than a Ford Pinto, he means that for the average user (TM) under a reasonably common usage. However if your specialized application includes roadside fireworks, then no doubt go for the Ford Pinto.
Solaris scales to 106 processors last time I checked.
As if that was a common requirement, as in:
Gee, honey do you think is time to upgrade junior's 106 processor box?,
or
Mr. Smithers, get the CTO to the office. Its time to order another dozen 106 processor boxes.
The problem with Solaris for the x86 is that it was overpriced.
Sun should release the source code to Solaris x86 under the GPL. It'd squash linux like a bug.
Slowaris stopped being the best Unix about three years ago. Linux, with all its warts, is better now.
Here's the whole story, as it usually unravels
/. take great comfort from this fact.
- Microsoft releases product to great hype.
- Product is buggy and not very successful.
- Competition and Microsoft haters at
- Microsoft develops new version of product fixing most flaws.
- Competition is taken by surprise by much improved version.
- Competition starts losing ground rapidly to Microsoft.
- Competition sues Microsoft for predatory practices.
- Competition gets bought over by AOL.
But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.
Pffft. The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0 ?
Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?
Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?
Or the simplicity and power of having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?
They gave him a page to reply, he wanted longer, which they refused.
Thanks for the clarification. If I were an editor (as if) of a scientific magazine I would have (1) asked the "under-the-collar" scientists to take a scientific approach to this and leave feelings aside (2) would have devoted substantial amounts of space to both sides to and fro (3) would've rejected nit-pick attacks on Lomborg's work and only let substantial criticisms go through (4) appoint a moderator to see if there are at least some points of agreement at least on the data, and possibly in some of the conclusions (5) be very weary (if not altogether drop) any comments from a scientist (on either side) who refuses to concede any point from the other side.
How is GNU non-free speech-wise? Seems to me it's as free as any other speech in the US, or anywhere else that has copyright laws.
Not even close. GNU forces you to make any modifications public. The freest-speech is public domain, which has no conditions on its (re)use.
Now one can argue that there are good reasons for the viral license. However it is nevertheless paradoxical that the RMS mantra of Free Software with Free as in "free speech" and not as in "free beer" is reality the complete opposite.
GNU software is gratis, but by no means fully unrestricted (freedom sense).
From space.com:
Almost no one lived near blast site, however, save a few hunters and trappers. No one studied the site until 1930. And while scientists have long presumed an asteroid or comet exploded just above the surface, no consensus has been reached. Some even suggested a miniature black hole did the work.
The object seems to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second), the BBC reported.
Why did the asteroid break apart in the air?
"Possibly because the object was like asteroid Mathilde, which was photographed by the passing Near-Shoemaker space probe in 1997," researcher Luigi Foschini told the BBC. "Mathilde is a rubble pile with a density very close to that of water. This would mean it could explode and fragment in the atmosphere with only the shock wave reaching the ground."
A scientific paper on the work will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
From bbc.co.uk:
They analysed seismic records from several Siberian monitoring stations, which combined with data on the directions of flattened trees gives information about the object's trajectory. So far, over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave.
Over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave
"We performed a detailed analysis of all the available scientific literature, including unpublished eye-witness accounts that have never been translated from the Russian," said Dr Foschini. "This allowed us to calculate the orbit of the cosmic body that crashed."
The object appears to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second). Using this data, the researchers were able to plot a series of possible orbits for the object.
Of the 886 valid orbits that they calculated, over 80% of them were asteroid orbits with only a minority being orbits that are associated with comets.
Contrary to Lomborg's assertions, very few of these attacks are ad hominem, and take issue only with his application of the scientific method, and selective, self-serving use of statistics.
Actually I read a random sample of them and most of them were, to a certain extent, ad hominem. Also the rebutals were not at all definitive. They left a lot of room for further debate, as Lomborg's reply in his website show. Quite strikingly, the magazine denied the right of reply to Lomborg.
All in all the scientific community has done a very shoddy job at debunking Lomborg (which is not to say he's right).
Everything is a file, says Unix.
But that was 30 years ago.
That was a real cool feature back then. Since then we learned a lot. What the Unix designers really wanted to say but lacked the vocabulary for was:
Everything is a data stream object. The data stream object has four methods: open, close, read and write. Users may, through inheritance and specialization, provide other interfaces to a stream.
Whether you like Microsoft or not, you can't deny that they are willing to take risks and innovate, this being a perfect example.
There are two issues in this "innovation".
Computer Scientists in academia have been talking about file systems as databases for at least ten years (and quite possibly much longer). There is no innovation in that sense.
From the point of view of pioneering the work of actually converting the filesystem into a full fledged database, the first effort I'm aware of is the NT file sytem which had an SQL engine with triggers and all at its core. This is innovation in bringing to market.
IMHO, Linux is still at least five to ten years away from trying anything so bold as a completely new filesystem paradigm...
I read the article last year when it came out. The results are not as far reaching as they sound from a first reading of the abstract.
They proved that not every function is obfuscatable. However for all we know, it might be that most functions are obfuscatable, which is good enough. Also the notion of obfuscation is somewhat contrived (this is because of the lack of a generally well defined notion of what de-obfuscation is, they did the best given what is a new field).
Say, in general proving that a program terminates is impossible. Nevertheless millions of lines of code are put out every day which we are positive they terminate, as we restrict ourselves to designing programs that always do so (even though the occasional bug gets in the way).
Troll.