Yes. Industry still uses mathematical estimation techniques similar to AWE (asymptotic waveform analysis), but they are considerably inferior. We used a far better algorithm in this patent. Since then, we've advanced well beyond this algorithm, but the fact is, backwards trapezoid can be computed exactly for the future point in time very fast in a near RCL tree. A 100 point actual simulation, taking into account nonlinear effects at the driver as well as non-linear capacitance, is simultaneously the most accurate (better than SPICE because of it's target error), and fastest approach. Universities studying this topic are in the dark.
You are quite right. One thing I've learned over the years is that I should have learned to write well in college, rather than trying to pick it up while being paid to program. I've written SBIR grant proposals (all were funded), various statement of work proposals, and a number of patents. It was damned hard for me, but it had to be one. I'm steering my 10 year old son towards taking writing more seriously, and hopefully he'll not have the same writing handicap I had when entering the workforce.
I will dispute one point. In EDA at least, results are what counts. Once algorithms are written and benchmarks performed showing yours beats other well known algorithms in some area, IMO, you have data worth sharing. This is not how it works today. I put my own hobby research on the web, but as I've said, I gave up on dealing with the PITA journals ages ago. Here's a great algorithm for better speech frequency analysis. Here's a better speech speedup algorithm for > 2X. Promoting algorithms I develop for free is also painful. Getting sonic into Debian was not fun at all, though it seems to have been adopted in Android and several TTS engines almost magically. I believe it's now even in the Android Audible client, which is now far superior than the iOS client for high speed. I can't get either algorithm linked to on Wikipedia because my web pages don't pass their test as a credible source.
That's the thing... I wouldn't get any money. I'd have to do all the effort on my own time, as there's not any time allocated for writing papers at work. On the other hand, I used to get $2K for each patent, and a couple of weeks to write them. Papers in my field, EDA, are almost exclusively published by universities, while the vast majority of advances are made in industry, and generally kept trade secret or patented.
I'm simply suggesting that the reason the best papers are first rejected is that most of the best ideas don't come from universities.
I just finished both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". I think the ideal romantic industrialist Rand describe fits one person well: Steve Jobs. Now, Steve by his own admission was an ass hole. I've never heard of a dime he contributed to anything. He had what he wanted to do to the world, and that's where he put 100% of his effort. That pure drive turned Ayn on, and the books were fabulously written. Do they make me any more valuable in my work? NO!
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would have been villains in any Ayn Rand book. Leaving stupid (especially this election cycle on the GOP side) politics beside, Ayn Rand books have no value at all in my work.
As for the Bible, I'll agree that you can't count on reading delivering higher pay. I read it in high school (just the old testament - the new one is too repetitive for me to get through). However, I read it last year and it blew me away. Again, no pay increase, but a profoundly better understanding of the world can be had through reading this book as an adult.
I feel that I should be able to offer insightful advice to this question. After all, I spent the first 14 years after college working in Silicon Valley, though I have now worked 12 years for a company I founded in NC. I always had difficulty reading, but lately I've read about a book a week, by converting them to text, converting them to sound with the Mary TTS text-to-speech system, and blasting them into my ears at 3X speedup. While not literary for most of my life, I am now in a position where I've read far more than most people. It's weird, but now I'm "literary".
I would have to say that the fact that previously I could not read well had the most profound influence on my life. I also could not remember stuff. So, for example, this morning my daughter asked me how fast she'd be going if she launched down the zip-line I helped put together last weekend. This insane device drops about 23 feet over a 100 foot run, but has an industrial strength break to stop you before slamming into the tree at the bottom of the hill. I can't remember sh-t, especially formulas like how fast things go. So, I integrated in my head to get v = Gt, then D = 1/2 Gt^2, which is about 16 t^2, in feet/second. So, t^2 = 23/16 ~= 24/16 = 1.5. Since speed = integral(acceleration), and then I made a mistake and guessed you'd be going about 1.5*32 feet per second, or 48 fps, instead of 39fps. I told her after a few seconds that she'd be going 33 mph, or enough to be really really sorry if you hit that tree. Close enough to the 29 mph more accurate number. This is what I do normally in a few seconds, mistakes and all.
My point is I didn't get any of that analytical skill through reading. Just the opposite. Now that I'm reading like a fiend doesn't seem to really help my value as a geek. I'd recommend ditching books for a couple years, and seeing what you can do with your brain on the problems in front of you.
It looks pretty scary. I've seen some of the crap profs will pull to get published, and it's not pretty. I get paid to patent rather than publish, being in industry.
Interesting view. If we say that the status quo means professors at well known universities get to publish most "advances", then I agree. Back in the 1990's I attended every FPGA algorithms conference available, and here's what I found. At least 90% of the papers published were total crap, because the researchers had no clue about where the state of the art in FPGAs was. They were still trying to adapt ASIC detailed routers, for example, when we'd already leaped ahead to integrated global/detail a-star routers, or in the case of QuickLogic, separate global/detail because the detail router was optimally solvable, 100% of the time, with a simple linear algorithm after global routing.
I think the reason rejected papers get more citations is simply because there is a system in place designed to publish professors, regardless of whether they have a clue. The cheapest and easiest way to get a great idea published is the patent system.
There are two kinds of papers: invited papers and papers where professors do the peer review thing. I've published some invited papers, but in my experience, there's always at least one a-hole on the review committee who will shoot down my work. The worst example is Professor Larry Pillage, who QuickLogic paid $20K to review my work which I did based on a paper called RICE. He never got it working properly like I did, but after reviewing my work, he claimed it as his own and published it at DAC the next year for a best paper in show award, and then made a mint selling it to all our competitors. That guys is a serious a-hole. He was on most committees I ever tried to publish a paper in, and while I don't get names with the reviews, the psychotic analysis I did sometimes receive seemed 100% Prof Larry Pillage. He stole ideas from great guys like Prof. Ronald Rohrer, who told me once, "We don't tell Larry anything!"
If publishing papers were more important to me, I'd do something about it, but the reality is people with ideas don't get to publish. People with the right connections and background do. This explains why Nature would do better with rejected papers.
My problem with this system is that only people who get paid to publish papers wind up getting heard. For example, the entire EDA industry continues to use interconnect delay estimation algorithms that have been obsolete for 15 years, because a paper I tried to publish on how to do it right was rejected. Sure, it would be a better paper if I put in the work you talk about, but I don't get paid for that. I just get paid to deliver better implemented solutions. You could read patents I have in the area, owned by QuckLogic, but good luck finding a sensible paper in the field.
I'm bitter about having ALL of my submitted papers (about 9) rejected, other than those where I was invited to present. You forgot to list the MOST important factor: what professor you list as an author, regardless of whether he contributed or not.
Now, my writing does comparatively suck, and I've never had the patience to do all the leg work as you're suggesting. I don't get paid to write papers after all. Instead I just find out where algorithms can be improved and work on that. In a sane world, publishing algorithmic breakthroughs wouldn't require sucking up to a famous prof. So, my companies patent the stuff, and it's valuable to them, but sharing ideas is what conferences and journals should be all about. They suck.
I think this close to the election, presidential politics is relevant on slashdot. Which administration do you think would be better for the tech sector?
Now, we should remember that Al Gore "invented the Internet", and that Bush thought it was a "series of tubes". A big plus for Obama: he can describe Bubble Sort!!!
Seriously, tech was better off before Washington DC got all hot and heavy in their face when they started to make money. And, by the way, Ryan is a total waste of carbon.
One thing we can be sure of: any company earning less than $1B/year is going to be shut out of future intellectual property rights. It'll all be owned by the oldest, least innovative firms, and the rest will have to pack up and go home, because they wont be allowed to legally innovate.
I agree. I also support continued research at NIF. The problem with large government funded projects like this, however, are that they tend to draw funding away from a lot of other novel approaches. For example, we haven't funded any molten salt reactor research since the early 1970's. The point of research is to investigate all the most promising leads, but when congress chooses to run with a specific technology, it shuts down competing research. I'm not saying there's potential in the Bussard Polywell, but when a novel approach like that gets shut down to save a couple million a year, while we spend billions on NIF, there's something wrong.
Now the guys on the House Science Committee really shouldn't be allowed to worry about things like NIF funding. They should leave that to smarter people, who just might know a thing or two about real science.
There's soooo much to say on this topic. This is doable, on the cheap if not free, but it'll be a LOT of work. First, this system has to be made more modular to contain complexity and allow it to become more useful over time than Facebook. The bottom layer should be a generic peer-to-peer platform, one that makes writing peer-to-peer apps as simple as client/server apps. On top of that, I'd want an open-source social networking app. Games and such could be simple peer-to-peer apps that work with the social network app when present. This structure would promote security, flexibility, and enable expermentation with a whole new world of potential social applications.
Applications could be developed to help answer many (all?) of the challenges described. For example, who pays for this thing to run? Most users will simply host their data on the most popular server, privacy be damned. An advertising app could enable hosts to make a profit. How do you deal with payments? A Paypal-like service (possibly actually Paypal) could be a known identity on the system, and deal with credit card and e-money transactions. Accepting money from people should be as easy as connecting to a web site. Add a web-of-trust app to the social network, and you can do more. A super-cool P2P money system called Ripple could run on such a network. If successful, it could enable micropayments between peers for just about everything. Want to send me an e-mail, but I don't know your P2P identity? Just pay me $0.01. Goodbye spam. Want to support legal content, while discouraging copyright violation? Sign up to remove content declared illegal by a source of my choice, similar to how Ad Block Plus and spam blacklists work.
With a solid base layer managing the P2P network and applications, a lot more than social networking could move from the "cloud" onto servers we trust (like the one in my closet). Such services include gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, multi-player gaming, group voice chat, remote backup, and website hosting. Done right, it would work with ISPs to improve network caching, reduce latency, save money, make self-hosting services easier, and enable discovery and delivery of applications under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Android (all the GPL3 compliant platforms). It could support freedom of speech with secret identities, like Superman/Clark Kent, without requiring a network like Tor that primarily supports illegal file sharing, and malicious attacks.
The individual pieces are involved. However, solid separation between the P2P platform, and the social apps that will run on top, is key. Lack of such system partitioning is why I lost interest in Diaspora early on. This is an idea I've been fleshing out, which is why I recently retained the PeerWeb.net domain. I've got maybe 1/4 of a peer-to-peer scripting/debugging tool written which I'm imagining embedding in the P2P platform layer. If anyone is interested in discussing the topic, email me at waywardgeek@gmail.com, and put "social networking" in the subject. I'd love to help free services from the clould, and put our data where it belongs: on our own machines. Diaspora is cool, but it's not going to get us there. It wasn't built right.
I'd definitely got for the Tesla Model S if I wanted American, or if I cared about the environment, energy independence, or (and his is closer to reality) are just a vain auto buff who likes a quality powerful car that looks great. Heck, it's even a decent value.
The Kindle Paper White sounds like the best e-book reader yet. I go for the B&N versions normally, though, for e-Ink. As for your questions about Google, the answer is yes. I have the Kindle app, and it does everything a Kindle does. I still see exactly zero reason to opt for a Kindle HD 7". My Nexus 7 rocks.
Amazon's walled garden is the #1 strength of the Nexus 7. Also, the latest Android is nice. I have the Amazon Kindle app, the B&N Nook app, Google's Play Books app, and of course an audio-book player which is what I use most often. I was wondering what Amazon could offer that would make me wish I had a Kindle Fire HD. Looks like nothing.
On the positive side, the $300 price point for the larger device is eye-opening, though I'm pretty happy with my 7". My family keeps stealing it, and my wife travels with it, even though she has an iPad. The Nexus 7 is simply a better e-book reader than any current iPad.
I agree that developers should be more entrepreneurial. As my uncle always said, you'll never get rich working for someone else, and the worst that can happen starting a company is you wind up where you started: broke. So what? You can always try again or give up and get a regular job.
However, a lot of great coders are just not cut out to start businesses. Starting a business requires many different skill sets to be present in the initial founders and employees. For example, you're not likely to grow a business without hiring good people and then managing them well, so founders without decent experience in this area are likely to learn through repeated failure. You'd also be quite surprised at how many regular guys become psychotic a-holes as soon as real money is involved. In general, the larger the founding team, the more likely one of the founders will sabotage the company. My favorite number of founders is 1 or 2, which means the founders need to be jacks of all trades. They need to be the CEO, marketing VP, sales VP, CTO, CFO, IT support, human resources, office manager, receptionist, and all the worker bees all rolled into one. If a good programmer happens to fail in a major skill required for his startup, it likely wont work out. If he needs funding, yet isn't good at raising it, he'll fail. If he's got great ideas and is awesome at implementing them, yet couldn't sell free dog food to dogs, he'll likely learn a valuable lesson in how not to start a company.
So, do entrepreneurs need to learn to code? If code has to be written, and the number of founders is 1, and there's no money to hire coders, then yes. Otherwise, probably not. In my experience, the reason so many tech startups are started by techies is the people building this generation of tech are the ones who most easily see the implications of where technology is heading. A business major learning to program in Java isn't going to gain that insight. However, a guy with all those other skills partnered with the right geek could make a great 2-person team. Techie: Bill Hewlett Biz-head: David Packard. Techie: Woz Biz-head:Jobs. There are tons of techie/biz-head teams. The other way to go is if you can do it all yourself, but you should start out in tech, not learn it as an after-thought.
Nonsense. The scammer just needs to find easily verifiable information in Mitt's tax returns that is not easily found otherwise. For example, I doubt Romney has multiple wives stuffed away in various towns in Utah, but the names and addresses of those wives would make it simple for reporters to prove he does. The scammer could for publish a list of bills of sale for vehicles, houses, and other property Mitt bought and sold over the years, and the taxes he paid on them each year. Like the secret wives, It should be far easier to prove Mitt owned property once you know where to look.
Of course, it's trivial to convince the owner of the private information that you have a copy. That's what the SHA-1 is for, to prove to the Romney team that the theft of the tax returns is real. The scammer would never have needed to post his letter publicly. Simply a private letter to Romney containing the SHA-256 hash codes of every file involved would probably have been enough to force Romney to pay $1M. God only knows just how much of that sort of blackmail actually goes on.
Yes, you're correct. I'm familiar with the BTC protocol. People can send the scammer BTC while he's off line, and he can join the network to see how much he's got without anyone in the world having any information about who or where he is. The ledger is public and he can see if he's been paid just the same as I can. By the way, he hasn't been paid much - just 0.35BTC so far for hiding the returns, and 1.14BTC for releasing them. He can verify that a payment has been made without risk of any kind, other than belonging to the world-wide bitcoin P2P network, which while suspicious is no crime.
This is a scam. I read the letter here. If the scammer really has Romney's signature scanned, he'd post it somewhere, along with just enough interesting facts for reporters to verify that they really do have Romney's returns. It's fun talking about this scam, but it's just some young dork across the pond who thought this up and is having some fun. I checked his two bitcoin accounts. As of now, the account for releasing the returns is a bit over 1.1BTC, or about $11, and that's almost all from one transaction. The account for not releasing the returns has 0.33BTC, with 33 tiny transactions.
I really do want to know what's in those returns, but any BTC sent to this hack is a waste of BTC.
I don't agree this post is insightful. Interesting, maybe, but being wrong is not insightful. You said:
1. If he does have the real document how will he prove it? I mean all Romney will need to say is Those are not my returns but a forgery made by some crazed radical liberal who is willing to lie and cheat to get his party to win. The main stream democrats will not use this information because it is not from legal means, If they do you can get the republican conspiracy theory linking the democrats to an event similar to Watergate.
The reason the scammers probably don't have any real tax return information is that none seems to have been leaked. Proving you have information can be done in many ways, such as releasing the exact amount of a certain deduction, or the SHA-1 hash of a whole electronic document. Proving they have the real thing is so easy, we can assume it's a scam if they didn't. Now, having Romney lie and deny it's genuine would quickly end his chances of winning the election. Reporters would come out of the woodwork to verify random facts from the returns. I could probably verify a few from home using Google. They lie would be almost instantly exposed.
2. Bit coins? Really? here is a guy who is publicly saying he committed a crime. FBI goes to the Bit Coin Servers with a warrant sends the million and tracks every Bit to see who finally receives it. Oh it goes to a PO Box... That is OK, you get an FBI agent waiting right next to that PO Box to arrest anyone who opens it.
Here you're simply ignorant of how bit coins work. There are no "servers", it's P2P. The other end receiving the bitcoins would likely be a Tor node in Russia, where our FBI couldn't even trace the packets. The FBI could watch as the bitcoins get traded through many transactions, but they couldn't even identify what nation those trades occur in, and certainly not who owns the various bitcoin destinations. That's why bitcoins are valuable. They enable criminals to launder money.
3. How politically damaging is the truth anyways? It seems like the only people who really care will not vote for Romney anyways. He already admits that he pays less percentage in tax then most Americans. After months of digging you may find that he missed the rule here and there. But then the other side will find that he could have benefited from other areas where it balanced out.
This issue is severely damaging his credibility and may cost him the election. The one thing we know about Romney is he is quite willing to change his behavior and even stated beliefs in order to maximize his likelihood of being elected. Therefore, the information in his returns is more damaging than Mitt's estimated fallout from not revealing them.
There is the argument If Romney doesn't have anything to hide then why isn't he releasing his taxes. This is on the same vane the only people who should opposed to airport searches are people with something to hide. Why would he not want to release taxes? Because his taxes are long and complex, it isn't like our W2 done on the simple form. His opponents will distract his discussion of what he considers important issue and bogged down defending every line item in his taxes that he probably paid a team of accountants to do for him.
Are you really comparing the need Americans have for trusting their future president to a guy who doesn't want to be groped at the airport? Romney's greatest argument for the presidency is his business background, yet he refuses to reveal what sort of business he's been doing. To continue with the airport analogy, before I'd let that guy trying to get on the plane take control of our country, I'd do a full body cavity search. I'd take blood samples and have them tested for drugs. I'd get a stool sample and check for parasites.
I personalty don't care for Romney and I don't think I will vote for him. But I am
Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention, that's just funny, and probably has nothing to do with anything. Both his mother and father were identical twins, and their twins married each other, making two (nearly) identical couples genetically. There's even more, but it starts to get too personal. Ken's story blows me away. I assume many readers will have come to the very reasonable conclusion that either I'm pulling your leg or am dillusional, but this is a case of reality cooler than fiction. Here's a link about Synplicity, and here's one about Ken.
Now days, SFAIK, he's devoting his brain cycles to physics as a Ph. D. student at UC Berkeley. I keep waiting to hear about the mysteries of the universe he's decoded. One more thing about Ken: he rarely would read papers in our field. He would say that reading other people's solutions to hard problems would bias is own thinking, causing him to get trapped in the same solution space as everyone else. I read a few of his best algorithms, and I have to say he seemed to be able to consistently out-invent the combined rest of the world.
Ken calculated how much time he put into making his code understandable to others. Over the long term, he switched gradually to more commenting and a coding style that was easier to follow. He always traded that off with his own lost productivity, so nothing he ever wrote came across like reading a book.
Here's a bit more to the story. As a boy he fell and broke his skull on a rock. He lost his sense of smell, and his body runs two degrees colder than normal. His damaged brain had to rewire itself, and however it did that turned him into an inhuman coder. It's a bit like Spider Man and that radioactive spider. What are the odds that bashing your head against a rock would make you smarter?
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Ken's code was so brilliant, yet hard to understand, that Synplicity had to hire many of the best coders around, because average guys wouldn't be able to deal with the complexity. So, it cost the company in terms of excessive programmer salaries.
OTHO, before the IPO, Ken still owned around 50% of the company. I have not seen anyone pull that off before. Also, Ken did adapt. Once we had several coders, the call for better commenting and longer variable names, and God forbid, more functions got too loud. It slowed Ken down to document code and make it more readable, but the team more than made up for his lost productivity.
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Yes. Industry still uses mathematical estimation techniques similar to AWE (asymptotic waveform analysis), but they are considerably inferior. We used a far better algorithm in this patent. Since then, we've advanced well beyond this algorithm, but the fact is, backwards trapezoid can be computed exactly for the future point in time very fast in a near RCL tree. A 100 point actual simulation, taking into account nonlinear effects at the driver as well as non-linear capacitance, is simultaneously the most accurate (better than SPICE because of it's target error), and fastest approach. Universities studying this topic are in the dark.
You are quite right. One thing I've learned over the years is that I should have learned to write well in college, rather than trying to pick it up while being paid to program. I've written SBIR grant proposals (all were funded), various statement of work proposals, and a number of patents. It was damned hard for me, but it had to be one. I'm steering my 10 year old son towards taking writing more seriously, and hopefully he'll not have the same writing handicap I had when entering the workforce.
I will dispute one point. In EDA at least, results are what counts. Once algorithms are written and benchmarks performed showing yours beats other well known algorithms in some area, IMO, you have data worth sharing. This is not how it works today. I put my own hobby research on the web, but as I've said, I gave up on dealing with the PITA journals ages ago. Here's a great algorithm for better speech frequency analysis. Here's a better speech speedup algorithm for > 2X. Promoting algorithms I develop for free is also painful. Getting sonic into Debian was not fun at all, though it seems to have been adopted in Android and several TTS engines almost magically. I believe it's now even in the Android Audible client, which is now far superior than the iOS client for high speed. I can't get either algorithm linked to on Wikipedia because my web pages don't pass their test as a credible source.
How are you supposed to share great ideas?
That's the thing... I wouldn't get any money. I'd have to do all the effort on my own time, as there's not any time allocated for writing papers at work. On the other hand, I used to get $2K for each patent, and a couple of weeks to write them. Papers in my field, EDA, are almost exclusively published by universities, while the vast majority of advances are made in industry, and generally kept trade secret or patented.
I'm simply suggesting that the reason the best papers are first rejected is that most of the best ideas don't come from universities.
I just finished both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". I think the ideal romantic industrialist Rand describe fits one person well: Steve Jobs. Now, Steve by his own admission was an ass hole. I've never heard of a dime he contributed to anything. He had what he wanted to do to the world, and that's where he put 100% of his effort. That pure drive turned Ayn on, and the books were fabulously written. Do they make me any more valuable in my work? NO!
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would have been villains in any Ayn Rand book. Leaving stupid (especially this election cycle on the GOP side) politics beside, Ayn Rand books have no value at all in my work.
As for the Bible, I'll agree that you can't count on reading delivering higher pay. I read it in high school (just the old testament - the new one is too repetitive for me to get through). However, I read it last year and it blew me away. Again, no pay increase, but a profoundly better understanding of the world can be had through reading this book as an adult.
I feel that I should be able to offer insightful advice to this question. After all, I spent the first 14 years after college working in Silicon Valley, though I have now worked 12 years for a company I founded in NC. I always had difficulty reading, but lately I've read about a book a week, by converting them to text, converting them to sound with the Mary TTS text-to-speech system, and blasting them into my ears at 3X speedup. While not literary for most of my life, I am now in a position where I've read far more than most people. It's weird, but now I'm "literary".
I would have to say that the fact that previously I could not read well had the most profound influence on my life. I also could not remember stuff. So, for example, this morning my daughter asked me how fast she'd be going if she launched down the zip-line I helped put together last weekend. This insane device drops about 23 feet over a 100 foot run, but has an industrial strength break to stop you before slamming into the tree at the bottom of the hill. I can't remember sh-t, especially formulas like how fast things go. So, I integrated in my head to get v = Gt, then D = 1/2 Gt^2, which is about 16 t^2, in feet/second. So, t^2 = 23/16 ~= 24/16 = 1.5. Since speed = integral(acceleration), and then I made a mistake and guessed you'd be going about 1.5*32 feet per second, or 48 fps, instead of 39fps. I told her after a few seconds that she'd be going 33 mph, or enough to be really really sorry if you hit that tree. Close enough to the 29 mph more accurate number. This is what I do normally in a few seconds, mistakes and all.
My point is I didn't get any of that analytical skill through reading. Just the opposite. Now that I'm reading like a fiend doesn't seem to really help my value as a geek. I'd recommend ditching books for a couple years, and seeing what you can do with your brain on the problems in front of you.
It looks pretty scary. I've seen some of the crap profs will pull to get published, and it's not pretty. I get paid to patent rather than publish, being in industry.
Interesting view. If we say that the status quo means professors at well known universities get to publish most "advances", then I agree. Back in the 1990's I attended every FPGA algorithms conference available, and here's what I found. At least 90% of the papers published were total crap, because the researchers had no clue about where the state of the art in FPGAs was. They were still trying to adapt ASIC detailed routers, for example, when we'd already leaped ahead to integrated global/detail a-star routers, or in the case of QuickLogic, separate global/detail because the detail router was optimally solvable, 100% of the time, with a simple linear algorithm after global routing.
I think the reason rejected papers get more citations is simply because there is a system in place designed to publish professors, regardless of whether they have a clue. The cheapest and easiest way to get a great idea published is the patent system.
There are two kinds of papers: invited papers and papers where professors do the peer review thing. I've published some invited papers, but in my experience, there's always at least one a-hole on the review committee who will shoot down my work. The worst example is Professor Larry Pillage, who QuickLogic paid $20K to review my work which I did based on a paper called RICE. He never got it working properly like I did, but after reviewing my work, he claimed it as his own and published it at DAC the next year for a best paper in show award, and then made a mint selling it to all our competitors. That guys is a serious a-hole. He was on most committees I ever tried to publish a paper in, and while I don't get names with the reviews, the psychotic analysis I did sometimes receive seemed 100% Prof Larry Pillage. He stole ideas from great guys like Prof. Ronald Rohrer, who told me once, "We don't tell Larry anything!"
If publishing papers were more important to me, I'd do something about it, but the reality is people with ideas don't get to publish. People with the right connections and background do. This explains why Nature would do better with rejected papers.
My problem with this system is that only people who get paid to publish papers wind up getting heard. For example, the entire EDA industry continues to use interconnect delay estimation algorithms that have been obsolete for 15 years, because a paper I tried to publish on how to do it right was rejected. Sure, it would be a better paper if I put in the work you talk about, but I don't get paid for that. I just get paid to deliver better implemented solutions. You could read patents I have in the area, owned by QuckLogic, but good luck finding a sensible paper in the field.
I'm bitter about having ALL of my submitted papers (about 9) rejected, other than those where I was invited to present. You forgot to list the MOST important factor: what professor you list as an author, regardless of whether he contributed or not.
Now, my writing does comparatively suck, and I've never had the patience to do all the leg work as you're suggesting. I don't get paid to write papers after all. Instead I just find out where algorithms can be improved and work on that. In a sane world, publishing algorithmic breakthroughs wouldn't require sucking up to a famous prof. So, my companies patent the stuff, and it's valuable to them, but sharing ideas is what conferences and journals should be all about. They suck.
I think this close to the election, presidential politics is relevant on slashdot. Which administration do you think would be better for the tech sector?
Now, we should remember that Al Gore "invented the Internet", and that Bush thought it was a "series of tubes". A big plus for Obama: he can describe Bubble Sort!!!
Seriously, tech was better off before Washington DC got all hot and heavy in their face when they started to make money. And, by the way, Ryan is a total waste of carbon.
One thing we can be sure of: any company earning less than $1B/year is going to be shut out of future intellectual property rights. It'll all be owned by the oldest, least innovative firms, and the rest will have to pack up and go home, because they wont be allowed to legally innovate.
I agree. I also support continued research at NIF. The problem with large government funded projects like this, however, are that they tend to draw funding away from a lot of other novel approaches. For example, we haven't funded any molten salt reactor research since the early 1970's. The point of research is to investigate all the most promising leads, but when congress chooses to run with a specific technology, it shuts down competing research. I'm not saying there's potential in the Bussard Polywell, but when a novel approach like that gets shut down to save a couple million a year, while we spend billions on NIF, there's something wrong.
Now the guys on the House Science Committee really shouldn't be allowed to worry about things like NIF funding. They should leave that to smarter people, who just might know a thing or two about real science.
There's soooo much to say on this topic. This is doable, on the cheap if not free, but it'll be a LOT of work. First, this system has to be made more modular to contain complexity and allow it to become more useful over time than Facebook. The bottom layer should be a generic peer-to-peer platform, one that makes writing peer-to-peer apps as simple as client/server apps. On top of that, I'd want an open-source social networking app. Games and such could be simple peer-to-peer apps that work with the social network app when present. This structure would promote security, flexibility, and enable expermentation with a whole new world of potential social applications.
Applications could be developed to help answer many (all?) of the challenges described. For example, who pays for this thing to run? Most users will simply host their data on the most popular server, privacy be damned. An advertising app could enable hosts to make a profit. How do you deal with payments? A Paypal-like service (possibly actually Paypal) could be a known identity on the system, and deal with credit card and e-money transactions. Accepting money from people should be as easy as connecting to a web site. Add a web-of-trust app to the social network, and you can do more. A super-cool P2P money system called Ripple could run on such a network. If successful, it could enable micropayments between peers for just about everything. Want to send me an e-mail, but I don't know your P2P identity? Just pay me $0.01. Goodbye spam. Want to support legal content, while discouraging copyright violation? Sign up to remove content declared illegal by a source of my choice, similar to how Ad Block Plus and spam blacklists work.
With a solid base layer managing the P2P network and applications, a lot more than social networking could move from the "cloud" onto servers we trust (like the one in my closet). Such services include gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, multi-player gaming, group voice chat, remote backup, and website hosting. Done right, it would work with ISPs to improve network caching, reduce latency, save money, make self-hosting services easier, and enable discovery and delivery of applications under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Android (all the GPL3 compliant platforms). It could support freedom of speech with secret identities, like Superman/Clark Kent, without requiring a network like Tor that primarily supports illegal file sharing, and malicious attacks.
The individual pieces are involved. However, solid separation between the P2P platform, and the social apps that will run on top, is key. Lack of such system partitioning is why I lost interest in Diaspora early on. This is an idea I've been fleshing out, which is why I recently retained the PeerWeb.net domain. I've got maybe 1/4 of a peer-to-peer scripting/debugging tool written which I'm imagining embedding in the P2P platform layer. If anyone is interested in discussing the topic, email me at waywardgeek@gmail.com, and put "social networking" in the subject. I'd love to help free services from the clould, and put our data where it belongs: on our own machines. Diaspora is cool, but it's not going to get us there. It wasn't built right.
I'd definitely got for the Tesla Model S if I wanted American, or if I cared about the environment, energy independence, or (and his is closer to reality) are just a vain auto buff who likes a quality powerful car that looks great. Heck, it's even a decent value.
The Kindle Paper White sounds like the best e-book reader yet. I go for the B&N versions normally, though, for e-Ink. As for your questions about Google, the answer is yes. I have the Kindle app, and it does everything a Kindle does. I still see exactly zero reason to opt for a Kindle HD 7". My Nexus 7 rocks.
Amazon's walled garden is the #1 strength of the Nexus 7. Also, the latest Android is nice. I have the Amazon Kindle app, the B&N Nook app, Google's Play Books app, and of course an audio-book player which is what I use most often. I was wondering what Amazon could offer that would make me wish I had a Kindle Fire HD. Looks like nothing.
On the positive side, the $300 price point for the larger device is eye-opening, though I'm pretty happy with my 7". My family keeps stealing it, and my wife travels with it, even though she has an iPad. The Nexus 7 is simply a better e-book reader than any current iPad.
I agree that developers should be more entrepreneurial. As my uncle always said, you'll never get rich working for someone else, and the worst that can happen starting a company is you wind up where you started: broke. So what? You can always try again or give up and get a regular job.
However, a lot of great coders are just not cut out to start businesses. Starting a business requires many different skill sets to be present in the initial founders and employees. For example, you're not likely to grow a business without hiring good people and then managing them well, so founders without decent experience in this area are likely to learn through repeated failure. You'd also be quite surprised at how many regular guys become psychotic a-holes as soon as real money is involved. In general, the larger the founding team, the more likely one of the founders will sabotage the company. My favorite number of founders is 1 or 2, which means the founders need to be jacks of all trades. They need to be the CEO, marketing VP, sales VP, CTO, CFO, IT support, human resources, office manager, receptionist, and all the worker bees all rolled into one. If a good programmer happens to fail in a major skill required for his startup, it likely wont work out. If he needs funding, yet isn't good at raising it, he'll fail. If he's got great ideas and is awesome at implementing them, yet couldn't sell free dog food to dogs, he'll likely learn a valuable lesson in how not to start a company.
So, do entrepreneurs need to learn to code? If code has to be written, and the number of founders is 1, and there's no money to hire coders, then yes. Otherwise, probably not. In my experience, the reason so many tech startups are started by techies is the people building this generation of tech are the ones who most easily see the implications of where technology is heading. A business major learning to program in Java isn't going to gain that insight. However, a guy with all those other skills partnered with the right geek could make a great 2-person team. Techie: Bill Hewlett Biz-head: David Packard. Techie: Woz Biz-head:Jobs. There are tons of techie/biz-head teams. The other way to go is if you can do it all yourself, but you should start out in tech, not learn it as an after-thought.
Nonsense. The scammer just needs to find easily verifiable information in Mitt's tax returns that is not easily found otherwise. For example, I doubt Romney has multiple wives stuffed away in various towns in Utah, but the names and addresses of those wives would make it simple for reporters to prove he does. The scammer could for publish a list of bills of sale for vehicles, houses, and other property Mitt bought and sold over the years, and the taxes he paid on them each year. Like the secret wives, It should be far easier to prove Mitt owned property once you know where to look.
Of course, it's trivial to convince the owner of the private information that you have a copy. That's what the SHA-1 is for, to prove to the Romney team that the theft of the tax returns is real. The scammer would never have needed to post his letter publicly. Simply a private letter to Romney containing the SHA-256 hash codes of every file involved would probably have been enough to force Romney to pay $1M. God only knows just how much of that sort of blackmail actually goes on.
Yes, you're correct. I'm familiar with the BTC protocol. People can send the scammer BTC while he's off line, and he can join the network to see how much he's got without anyone in the world having any information about who or where he is. The ledger is public and he can see if he's been paid just the same as I can. By the way, he hasn't been paid much - just 0.35BTC so far for hiding the returns, and 1.14BTC for releasing them. He can verify that a payment has been made without risk of any kind, other than belonging to the world-wide bitcoin P2P network, which while suspicious is no crime.
This is a scam. I read the letter here. If the scammer really has Romney's signature scanned, he'd post it somewhere, along with just enough interesting facts for reporters to verify that they really do have Romney's returns. It's fun talking about this scam, but it's just some young dork across the pond who thought this up and is having some fun. I checked his two bitcoin accounts. As of now, the account for releasing the returns is a bit over 1.1BTC, or about $11, and that's almost all from one transaction. The account for not releasing the returns has 0.33BTC, with 33 tiny transactions.
I really do want to know what's in those returns, but any BTC sent to this hack is a waste of BTC.
I don't agree this post is insightful. Interesting, maybe, but being wrong is not insightful. You said:
1. If he does have the real document how will he prove it? I mean all Romney will need to say is Those are not my returns but a forgery made by some crazed radical liberal who is willing to lie and cheat to get his party to win. The main stream democrats will not use this information because it is not from legal means, If they do you can get the republican conspiracy theory linking the democrats to an event similar to Watergate.
The reason the scammers probably don't have any real tax return information is that none seems to have been leaked. Proving you have information can be done in many ways, such as releasing the exact amount of a certain deduction, or the SHA-1 hash of a whole electronic document. Proving they have the real thing is so easy, we can assume it's a scam if they didn't. Now, having Romney lie and deny it's genuine would quickly end his chances of winning the election. Reporters would come out of the woodwork to verify random facts from the returns. I could probably verify a few from home using Google. They lie would be almost instantly exposed.
2. Bit coins? Really? here is a guy who is publicly saying he committed a crime. FBI goes to the Bit Coin Servers with a warrant sends the million and tracks every Bit to see who finally receives it. Oh it goes to a PO Box... That is OK, you get an FBI agent waiting right next to that PO Box to arrest anyone who opens it.
Here you're simply ignorant of how bit coins work. There are no "servers", it's P2P. The other end receiving the bitcoins would likely be a Tor node in Russia, where our FBI couldn't even trace the packets. The FBI could watch as the bitcoins get traded through many transactions, but they couldn't even identify what nation those trades occur in, and certainly not who owns the various bitcoin destinations. That's why bitcoins are valuable. They enable criminals to launder money.
3. How politically damaging is the truth anyways? It seems like the only people who really care will not vote for Romney anyways. He already admits that he pays less percentage in tax then most Americans. After months of digging you may find that he missed the rule here and there. But then the other side will find that he could have benefited from other areas where it balanced out.
This issue is severely damaging his credibility and may cost him the election. The one thing we know about Romney is he is quite willing to change his behavior and even stated beliefs in order to maximize his likelihood of being elected. Therefore, the information in his returns is more damaging than Mitt's estimated fallout from not revealing them.
There is the argument If Romney doesn't have anything to hide then why isn't he releasing his taxes. This is on the same vane the only people who should opposed to airport searches are people with something to hide. Why would he not want to release taxes? Because his taxes are long and complex, it isn't like our W2 done on the simple form. His opponents will distract his discussion of what he considers important issue and bogged down defending every line item in his taxes that he probably paid a team of accountants to do for him.
Are you really comparing the need Americans have for trusting their future president to a guy who doesn't want to be groped at the airport? Romney's greatest argument for the presidency is his business background, yet he refuses to reveal what sort of business he's been doing. To continue with the airport analogy, before I'd let that guy trying to get on the plane take control of our country, I'd do a full body cavity search. I'd take blood samples and have them tested for drugs. I'd get a stool sample and check for parasites.
I personalty don't care for Romney and I don't think I will vote for him. But I am
Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention, that's just funny, and probably has nothing to do with anything. Both his mother and father were identical twins, and their twins married each other, making two (nearly) identical couples genetically. There's even more, but it starts to get too personal. Ken's story blows me away. I assume many readers will have come to the very reasonable conclusion that either I'm pulling your leg or am dillusional, but this is a case of reality cooler than fiction. Here's a link about Synplicity, and here's one about Ken.
Now days, SFAIK, he's devoting his brain cycles to physics as a Ph. D. student at UC Berkeley. I keep waiting to hear about the mysteries of the universe he's decoded. One more thing about Ken: he rarely would read papers in our field. He would say that reading other people's solutions to hard problems would bias is own thinking, causing him to get trapped in the same solution space as everyone else. I read a few of his best algorithms, and I have to say he seemed to be able to consistently out-invent the combined rest of the world.
Ken calculated how much time he put into making his code understandable to others. Over the long term, he switched gradually to more commenting and a coding style that was easier to follow. He always traded that off with his own lost productivity, so nothing he ever wrote came across like reading a book.
Here's a bit more to the story. As a boy he fell and broke his skull on a rock. He lost his sense of smell, and his body runs two degrees colder than normal. His damaged brain had to rewire itself, and however it did that turned him into an inhuman coder. It's a bit like Spider Man and that radioactive spider. What are the odds that bashing your head against a rock would make you smarter?
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Ken's code was so brilliant, yet hard to understand, that Synplicity had to hire many of the best coders around, because average guys wouldn't be able to deal with the complexity. So, it cost the company in terms of excessive programmer salaries.
OTHO, before the IPO, Ken still owned around 50% of the company. I have not seen anyone pull that off before. Also, Ken did adapt. Once we had several coders, the call for better commenting and longer variable names, and God forbid, more functions got too loud. It slowed Ken down to document code and make it more readable, but the team more than made up for his lost productivity.