WEP is complicated. You need to be able to shell in (sometimes even to a port other than 80) from within the LAN. Then you need to know an admin ID/password. Then you need to know what on earth hex/ascii/etc mean, and 56/128/etc bits (and how the security ranslates to a number of characters). Then you need to set it all up using complex menus, and then you need to figure out how to set up all PC's (which call it something else).
By this time we would have lost the typical buyer, oh, 5 times over. That is why it is shipped open by default - the support would cost a fortune, otherwise. WEP is way too complex in its consumer implementation.
Very true.
I wonder if it would be possible to create a feature that allows you to "auto sync" a WAP and a device over a wired network. This would allow you to connect your (say) laptop to the WAP over a local wired connection and the software would automatically configure encryption to allow the laptop to access the WAP wirelessly. It could auto-generate a random key each time the sync was performed.
Basically anyone with physical access to the WAP could be authorized to use it, everyone else is locked out. Most consumers understand the concept of physically securing a box better than the intricacies of WEP.
I don't know enough about the TCP/IP stack to know if software can guarantee that two devices are directly physically connected. If you can, this might be a good approach.
Not secure enough for every situation, but it might overcome the current difficulty of using WEP or other encryption/security?
Do they have a no-compete clause in his contract? If not, they're going to lose, as that's standard practice in cases like this.
And even if they do, its not clear what the legal standing of non-compete clauses is. It is state law that regulates the legality of non-compete clauses. For example here's a good page discussing the confusing situation in California.
...the review mentioned Hare 1.5.1. The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase, 10% FPS increase in 3D games, automatic RAM preservation and even a wizard that automatically cleans and optimizes Windows. It also had AntiCrash 3.6.1 a program to prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes.
Hmmm... "prevents absolutely no windows crashes" meets the criteria of "prevents up to 95.8% of windows crashes". Strike one - plus what's up with the obviously made-up 95.8% statistic with its meaningless but important-sounding precision?
After a little research I found that download.com didn't have it and there are precious few reviews of this revolutionary software online, but that it was endorsed by McAfee
So by now we've decided its "revolutionary". Good to see an unbiased starting point. Also, since when does "sold by" mean "endorsed" in all but the loosest sense? Strike Two. Oh, and notice that McAfee only sell one of these products, and not the one that the reviewer makes the most claims about...
Still suspicious, I gathered all my courage and installed both programs... truth be told, after several minutes I was blown away. Obviously I can't tell how well every promised features works, but disk caching (and pre-fetching) that Hare does is outstanding and display performance improved enough to scare me.
Ah well, that's okay then. Asked and answered. And absolutely no signs of bias in this result . Absolutely no signs of any attempt at objective measurement of results either. Not one benchmark or even stopwatch timing showing any improvement at all? Strike Three.
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
The problem is with the mere idea of patenting software. Software is protected by trade secrets and copyrights. Patents should apply to things, not virtual things.
Why? I don't necessarily disagree but I also believe this is a point that needs to be explained, not just stated. Is it the fact that software can be easily and perfectly reproduced that means it shouldn't be patentable?
Hell, I'd like to see the end of patents altogether ( in their current form) - I hate the idea that it's first to the patent office who gets the monopoly. Independent works should also get protection because they put equally hard work into their invention too. As long as they didn't copy, then that would be fine by me.
The trouble with this is how do you prove that you worked independently? Most (all?) ideas are the result of complex interaction with previously known ideas anyway. Showing what is novel is hard. Showing that you had no interaction with a parallel invention would be harder. This would just make the law surrounding patents even more complex, costly and probably unfair.
The one thing that gets me from the article (yes, I actually read it...go figure) is that you have to use Avaya access points. That right there could be the deal killer because there are already thousands of access points installed around the country. I don't see that many companies tearing apart their infrastructure simply for this functionality. Think of all the national rollout plans (McDonalds, Panera Breads, airports, Barnes & Noble, etc) that would have to redo everything. It would be like starting from scratch for them and for the WiFi companies that installed everything.
But the main use would be within a company, not for public WiFi access points. Replacing the APs within a building, or throughout a hospital (as discussed in the article... natch) is a much smaller task and could easily pay for itself if the calling costs were suitably low.
For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.
Ah, but the museum is at the Swindon campus of the University of Bath. Swindon is between Bath and London, about 1.5 hours west of the capital. The glorious Eddie Izzard once described Swindon as being like Fresno without the charm. Which is about right.
Anyone have some suggestions of writers who come close to Vinge for great sci-fi? (I've already read most of Gibson, Stephenson, Simmons, Bear, Sagan, Haldeman)
Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and Tiger, Tiger (aka The Stars My Destination). Classic sci-fi from a genuine writer.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Deep, interesting and beatufully written. Not what you expect from a book whose plot summary (a Jesuit mission to the first alien civilization discovered via SETI) sounds, um, odd. The best description of a truly alien society I've read.
James Tiptree Jr's short story collection Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Hard to find, but worth hunting for. This is an extraordinary collection, simply breathtaking.
Also try J.G. Ballard and of course Philip K. Dick.
...but, as if anyone were interested, I regularly read:
The Economist - intelligent political and economic coverage with a distinct UK/European background. Smart enough to make you think even if you disagree with its editorial slant, as I often do.
The New Yorker - good writing, often thought provoking and cartoons.
Atlantic Monthly - more intelligent current affairs writing.
Granta - excellent if sometimes inconsistent modern fiction.
GQ - decent men's magazine, although the US edition is noticebly dumbed down in comparison with the UK edition.
Premiere - movie reviews and in-depth articles on the entertainment industry; think Entertainment Weekly with brains and a staff of almost journalists:-)
Of the computer-related magazines, I used to subscribe to Wired, but it has descended into mediocrity in the last few years. At least it had verve during the dotcom years. I also enjoyed Byte and have issues going back to the early 80's. It was beginning to head towards just another PC review magazine before it folded, but in its heyday it really was a hobbyist's delight.
The competition is open to UK residents only, of 18 years or over. Overseas players are not eligible. You do not have to be a registered member of h2g2 to enter.
You have to be a resident of the UK. I'm British but not a UK resident, so I can't enter. A Frenchman (say) or an American who lived in London would be eligable. That's several million people who you've just misinformed...
Well, yes, but the GUI issues are something completely different -- specifically, that Sun has no clue how to write a decent widget set, and insists on going either too far in one direction (AWT -- only supplying widgets available natively on every supported platform) or too far in another (Swing -- emulating every widget even on platforms where they're available natively).
I have to disagree. I've worked on both a commercial OS-level widget set and inside the Java/Swing widget source code. Swing widgets are actualy pretty well architected and coded, as widget sets go.
The real performance problem is that Swing (and all the J2SE libraries) are essentially monolothic. Even a primitive "Hello world" requires you to load pretty much all the runtime library into memory. This leads to horrible startup times for Swing apps, and often forces systems deep into swap. This really, really doesn't help performance.
On the server-side this is actually a good attribute - since you typically have machines with lots of memory so everything can live in real memory and all functionality is available.
But Java/Swing apps will never be acceptable for desktop applications because they can't partially load the Java libraries. This is an architectural flaw because the components are intrinsically intertwined. Decoupling the various units of functionality is theoretically possible but in practice would be an enormous undertaking that I don't believe Sun is interested in.
Agreed. Of course, this doesn't mean they're wrong.
I want to know where the C++ overhead comes from, which Java manages to avoid - does the JVM do better optimization because it is given a better intermediate code (bytecode)? Is it better at doing back/front end optimizations (unlikely given gcc's maturity).
I believe the answer is this: statically compiled languages like C++ are limited in the range of optimizations they can perform - the optimizer knows the structure of the program (classes, objects etc.) but not how code segments are used at runtime.
A language like Java is compiled at runtime. One of the things the JIT does is optimize the code path that runs most frequently (this is the "hotspot" capability in Sun's JVM) regardless of where that code lies within objects. Because the common execution path may cross object boundaries optimizing for that should in theory lead to better performance. The claim is that these runtime cross-object optimizations produce significant performance gains that more than cancel out the overhead of a JVM.
Of course this will only work in certain cases, but it does have at least some theoretical appeal.
Of course I haven't RTFB, so maybe this is answered, but I don't believe that randomness is a property of a number, its a property of the method used to generate the number. The reviewer's example of flipping a coin to generate a random binary number is an example of this. I could flip a coin and generate the number 000000 - the method of generation is random, the number itself is clearly reducible and therefore not "random" in the sense described in the review.
I would reserve the term "random" to talk about the generation method, and use more precise terms like "irreducible" for the numbers themselves.
To go further, it may even be that what we mean by a "random" generation scheme is: "a scheme whose generation method I can't predict". This makes randomness a property of a system's knowledge of the generation system. For example, in many situations a computer's psuedo-random number generator is a sufficiently random generation scheme, in some cases (for example cryptography) it is not. psuedo-RNGs are not random (they are deterministic, thus the use of the term "pseudo") but for some uses they effectively are, because the system using the numbers output from them can't (or doesn't need to) predict the next number generated.
So I would propose that "random" refers to the process of generating a number that is in practice non-deterministic in the specific context in which the number is used.
I should have said predict. I'm so used to the theory I say "detect in advance".
Fair enough, but seriously, can you point to a link to this theory? As I understand it the issue with predicting major quakes isn't being able to gather enough evidence (though more evidence is usually good) but being able to determine what patterns in the evidence fortell a large magnitude event. Modern seismology is pretty good at detecting minor and/or deep quakes that can't be felt at the surface. Just gathering better information - which I assume is what using piezoelectric detection would do - doesn't solve the problem.
...to hear whether piezoelectricity can be used to detect quakes as well. With all of the smashing and crashing going on, one would think it would have the potential to generate radio waves such that a properly tuned instrument could receive|detect the signal.
It usually isn't too difficult to detect earthquakes. Trying to stand up and failing is a perfectly good indicator that (a reasonably large) one is going on:-)
Plus there's seismographs and whatnot that are really pretty good now.
The much more interesting problem is how to predict earthquakes. For this, piezoelectric mechanisms offer no advantage over "conventional" methods.
Naturally it will take some time, but as for the titles and the XHTML and the CSS, it would seem we are slowly getting there, wouldn't it?
I work with ontology construction and application professionally. Its hard. If we are "slowly getting there" solving the problem of titles on web pages, we are generations away from seeing any tiny fraction of web pages having consistent meta-tagging.
Instead of thinking how the semantic web may be abused and misused, think of the situations it may be beneficial.
I gave three. There are many places where the Semantic Web would be a huge benefit. But the project thinks it has solved the hard part (what does the meta-content structure look like and how what benefits does it bring) and has ignored the really difficult problem (okay we've got RDF, how do we get people to adopt it and use it consistently).
If only a little bit of information , say for example academic or public information is associated with metadata that define mening, we will have come a long way.
Agreed but not a useful way. The web works because it is simple for anyone to put information there, so everyone does. The Semantic Web as currently defined is very hard to use. It does, as nother poster observed, require a graduate degree from Stanford to make it work. Note that this is not "just a tools problem", though the current tools do suck. Its a fundamentally complex cognitive skill to categorise information in a consistent and meaningful way. That's why your brain has to be wired a certain way to be a librarian. You either have to restrict Semantic Web creation to those few individuals who can do it, or rewire the human race so everyone who wants to create a web page has the right skills to also create the meta-tags. Both are poor approaches.
By the way I agree that having a little academic information correctly meta-tagged is useful, but that's not the vision for the Semantic Web. Berners-Lee wants it to be the next generation of the general web. That's a pipedream, IMHO.
This is why groups come up with schemas and ontologies to share.
But that doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to a different place. In this case we're just moving the "software engineer" vs. "computer programmer" problem up to the ontology level. How do I map between ontologies? Unless there is a single unified ontology that everyone agrees to use, you have to explain how to map between disparate ontologies declared by different groups. The ontologies will overlap, try to define the same underlying concept in different ways in different contexts and so on.
Let's assume we have one universal ontology that everyone agreed to use (by the way the Cyc Project has been working on this problem for 25 years and isn't close to creating the complete ontology you'd need). Then all we have to do is assume that every web developer was skilled and disciplined enough to accurately tag their content with the right meta-content from the ontology. It also requires the ontology to be unambiguous and obviously applicable. I'll not be holding my breath.
This all rests on the assumption that the world can be unambiguously described and that meta-tagging is a context-independent operation. This is a obviously unreliable assumption. A much better approach would be to make context-dependence and ambiguity core assumptions and try to deal with those issues at the most fundamental level. Until the Semantic Web addresses these issues head-on its going to remain an interesting academic project that has no real-world applicability or adoption.
The Semantic Web is a great idea. Having consistent, wide-spread meta-tagging of information on web pages we enable a slew of very, very cool technologies. For example:
Intelligent search engines that produce much better results than Google etc. because they can index the meaning of documents, not the words they contain.
Agent technology that can retrieve information for you, price compare items you are shopping for and automate a number of interesting processes.
Automatic clustering of website around subjects of interest to create much richer knowledge-oriented navigation.
But the Semantic Web project can't succeed as it is currently specified. It is working towards standards for storing and managing the meta-content required for this Brave New World but doesn't tackle the much harder problem of how to create meta-content that is consistent and pervasive. At present this is left to individual web page authors with no mechanism to ensure consistency. Without consistency, the Semantic Web is doomed. If I tag a web page as being about "software engineering" and another person uses the tag "computer programming" the Semantic Web can't tell they are about the same thing.
In a world where an estimated 70% of web pages don't even have a title isn't it rather unrealistic to expect most web page authors will learn a complex new representation like RDF and consistently tag their pages with it?
Clay Shirky has a very good article on this. I recommend reading it before you get too excited about the Semantic Web.
I've passed by the building a few times on my way back home from the MIT Swapfest. Not only is the architecture itself pretty ugly, but it's surrounded by typical buildings. It's incredibly annoying to be walking down a street full of brick and stone buildings, and then, out of nowhere, you come upon this thing with random chunks of metal coming out at all angles. The design may be "modern" and "chic" (or whatever you want to call it), but I wish they'd picked a design that fit in better.
Whatever you think about the building, I'd hate to have a rule that all new buildings must "fit in" to their immediate environment. This is the ultimate conservative, anti-progress idea. What if we'd done that with software? In 1983 all GUIs are outlawed because they don't "fit in" with the prevailing command line interface style? That would have been a disaster. Why should architecture be any different?
Bold, challenging new styles are one way that we move forward. The Sydney Opera House, the Transamerica pyramid and countless other dramatic and now beloved buildings were originally despised because they were "modern" and "chic". I'd rather live in a world filled with innovation and experiment, even if it sometimes fails, than eternally stick with the status quo.
What do you expect from a totalitarian government?
What makes this interesting is that China is taking small steps away from totalitarianism as it begins to allow (limited) free markets and some small steps towards freedom of religion and political thought. Sure it has a long way to go, but it isn't anymore the totalitarian state it was 20 or even 10 years ago. That's why these attempts to allow some freedom (at least there are internet cafes) while also attempting to maintain political control is so fascinating.
On the contrary, I think the pengiun is an easily recognizable and very memorable symbol for Linux.
I didn't say that Tux was not a memorable symbol. I agree with you, it is. That's because it doesn't look like most corporate logos (because its cartoonish etc.) I said that the message it conveyed was one of childishness and amateurishness. It is memorable for the same reasons that it doesn't convey professionalism and a commitment to quality. There's a reason corporations don't choose logos like Tux: they want to convey an impression of professionalism. So there's a tradeoff - a more memorable logo that looks amateurish or a less memorable one that positions Linux as a viable alternative to Microsoft.
The mascot coolness factor alone makes Linux a superior competitor!
Yes, yes I know the post is meant to be funny, and it is. But there's a serious point here. The Tux mascot may have a high geek coolness factor, but its a small but real impediment to acceptance of Linux by the broader business community. The logo is cartoonish and childish. It says that this project is the opposite of professional, competent and reliable. It says the software is built by a bunch of amateurs who think a fat, funny penguin is an appropriate logo for promoting their work and the values it represents. Linux is none of these things, but the logo aint helping anyone overcome that prejudice.
That doesn't stretch the definition of a portable. This stretches the definition. Those things weighed in at nearly 40lbs. I remember hauling IBM's Portable across London in 1985. It stretched not just the definition of a portable, but also my arms.
Eh, this is really outside their area of expertise. They should pass this problem off to the French and instead work on making email flavorless and rubbery.
I was going to point out that British food is really pretty good, and its poor reputation stems from the very low quality of ingredients and food shortages suffered during the second World War and for decades afterwards. But man, that's a funny, funny email, so I think I'll just sit here and LMAO instead.
Slashdot Mirror
WEP is complicated. You need to be able to shell in (sometimes even to a port other than 80) from within the LAN. Then you need to know an admin ID/password. Then you need to know what on earth hex/ascii/etc mean, and 56/128/etc bits (and how the security ranslates to a number of characters). Then you need to set it all up using complex menus, and then you need to figure out how to set up all PC's (which call it something else).
By this time we would have lost the typical buyer, oh, 5 times over. That is why it is shipped open by default - the support would cost a fortune, otherwise. WEP is way too complex in its consumer implementation.
Very true.
I wonder if it would be possible to create a feature that allows you to "auto sync" a WAP and a device over a wired network. This would allow you to connect your (say) laptop to the WAP over a local wired connection and the software would automatically configure encryption to allow the laptop to access the WAP wirelessly. It could auto-generate a random key each time the sync was performed.
Basically anyone with physical access to the WAP could be authorized to use it, everyone else is locked out. Most consumers understand the concept of physically securing a box better than the intricacies of WEP.
I don't know enough about the TCP/IP stack to know if software can guarantee that two devices are directly physically connected. If you can, this might be a good approach.
Not secure enough for every situation, but it might overcome the current difficulty of using WEP or other encryption/security?
Do they have a no-compete clause in his contract? If not, they're going to lose, as that's standard practice in cases like this.
And even if they do, its not clear what the legal standing of non-compete clauses is. It is state law that regulates the legality of non-compete clauses. For example here's a good page discussing the confusing situation in California.
...the review mentioned Hare 1.5.1. The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase, 10% FPS increase in 3D games, automatic RAM preservation and even a wizard that automatically cleans and optimizes Windows. It also had AntiCrash 3.6.1 a program to prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes.
Hmmm... "prevents absolutely no windows crashes" meets the criteria of "prevents up to 95.8% of windows crashes". Strike one - plus what's up with the obviously made-up 95.8% statistic with its meaningless but important-sounding precision?
After a little research I found that download.com didn't have it and there are precious few reviews of this revolutionary software online, but that it was endorsed by McAfee
So by now we've decided its "revolutionary". Good to see an unbiased starting point. Also, since when does "sold by" mean "endorsed" in all but the loosest sense? Strike Two. Oh, and notice that McAfee only sell one of these products, and not the one that the reviewer makes the most claims about...
Still suspicious, I gathered all my courage and installed both programs... truth be told, after several minutes I was blown away. Obviously I can't tell how well every promised features works, but disk caching (and pre-fetching) that Hare does is outstanding and display performance improved enough to scare me.
Ah well, that's okay then. Asked and answered. And absolutely no signs of bias in this result . Absolutely no signs of any attempt at objective measurement of results either. Not one benchmark or even stopwatch timing showing any improvement at all? Strike Three.
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
The problem is with the mere idea of patenting software. Software is protected by trade secrets and copyrights. Patents should apply to things, not virtual things.
Why? I don't necessarily disagree but I also believe this is a point that needs to be explained, not just stated. Is it the fact that software can be easily and perfectly reproduced that means it shouldn't be patentable?
Hell, I'd like to see the end of patents altogether ( in their current form) - I hate the idea that it's first to the patent office who gets the monopoly. Independent works should also get protection because they put equally hard work into their invention too. As long as they didn't copy, then that would be fine by me.
The trouble with this is how do you prove that you worked independently? Most (all?) ideas are the result of complex interaction with previously known ideas anyway. Showing what is novel is hard. Showing that you had no interaction with a parallel invention would be harder. This would just make the law surrounding patents even more complex, costly and probably unfair.
The one thing that gets me from the article (yes, I actually read it...go figure) is that you have to use Avaya access points. That right there could be the deal killer because there are already thousands of access points installed around the country. I don't see that many companies tearing apart their infrastructure simply for this functionality. Think of all the national rollout plans (McDonalds, Panera Breads, airports, Barnes & Noble, etc) that would have to redo everything. It would be like starting from scratch for them and for the WiFi companies that installed everything.
But the main use would be within a company, not for public WiFi access points. Replacing the APs within a building, or throughout a hospital (as discussed in the article... natch) is a much smaller task and could easily pay for itself if the calling costs were suitably low.
I believe you could build your own robot too. Perhaps we could use these facilities to build our own robot dupe checker for the Slashdot crew?
For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.
Ah, but the museum is at the Swindon campus of the University of Bath. Swindon is between Bath and London, about 1.5 hours west of the capital. The glorious Eddie Izzard once described Swindon as being like Fresno without the charm. Which is about right.
Anyone have some suggestions of writers who come close to Vinge for great sci-fi? (I've already read most of Gibson, Stephenson, Simmons, Bear, Sagan, Haldeman)
Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and Tiger, Tiger (aka The Stars My Destination). Classic sci-fi from a genuine writer.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Deep, interesting and beatufully written. Not what you expect from a book whose plot summary (a Jesuit mission to the first alien civilization discovered via SETI) sounds, um, odd. The best description of a truly alien society I've read.
James Tiptree Jr's short story collection Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Hard to find, but worth hunting for. This is an extraordinary collection, simply breathtaking.
Also try J.G. Ballard and of course Philip K. Dick.
...but, as if anyone were interested, I regularly read:
:-)
The Economist - intelligent political and economic coverage with a distinct UK/European background. Smart enough to make you think even if you disagree with its editorial slant, as I often do.
The New Yorker - good writing, often thought provoking and cartoons.
Atlantic Monthly - more intelligent current affairs writing.
Granta - excellent if sometimes inconsistent modern fiction.
GQ - decent men's magazine, although the US edition is noticebly dumbed down in comparison with the UK edition.
Premiere - movie reviews and in-depth articles on the entertainment industry; think Entertainment Weekly with brains and a staff of almost journalists
Of the computer-related magazines, I used to subscribe to Wired, but it has descended into mediocrity in the last few years. At least it had verve during the dotcom years. I also enjoyed Byte and have issues going back to the early 80's. It was beginning to head towards just another PC review magazine before it folded, but in its heyday it really was a hobbyist's delight.
oh and be British
No, that's not true:
The competition is open to UK residents only, of 18 years or over. Overseas players are not eligible. You do not have to be a registered member of h2g2 to enter.
You have to be a resident of the UK. I'm British but not a UK resident, so I can't enter. A Frenchman (say) or an American who lived in London would be eligable. That's several million people who you've just misinformed...
Well, yes, but the GUI issues are something completely different -- specifically, that Sun has no clue how to write a decent widget set, and insists on going either too far in one direction (AWT -- only supplying widgets available natively on every supported platform) or too far in another (Swing -- emulating every widget even on platforms where they're available natively).
I have to disagree. I've worked on both a commercial OS-level widget set and inside the Java/Swing widget source code. Swing widgets are actualy pretty well architected and coded, as widget sets go.
The real performance problem is that Swing (and all the J2SE libraries) are essentially monolothic. Even a primitive "Hello world" requires you to load pretty much all the runtime library into memory. This leads to horrible startup times for Swing apps, and often forces systems deep into swap. This really, really doesn't help performance.
On the server-side this is actually a good attribute - since you typically have machines with lots of memory so everything can live in real memory and all functionality is available.
But Java/Swing apps will never be acceptable for desktop applications because they can't partially load the Java libraries. This is an architectural flaw because the components are intrinsically intertwined. Decoupling the various units of functionality is theoretically possible but in practice would be an enormous undertaking that I don't believe Sun is interested in.
The results are very non-intuitive.
Agreed. Of course, this doesn't mean they're wrong.
I want to know where the C++ overhead comes from, which Java manages to avoid - does the JVM do better optimization because it is given a better intermediate code (bytecode)? Is it better at doing back/front end optimizations (unlikely given gcc's maturity).
I believe the answer is this: statically compiled languages like C++ are limited in the range of optimizations they can perform - the optimizer knows the structure of the program (classes, objects etc.) but not how code segments are used at runtime.
A language like Java is compiled at runtime. One of the things the JIT does is optimize the code path that runs most frequently (this is the "hotspot" capability in Sun's JVM) regardless of where that code lies within objects. Because the common execution path may cross object boundaries optimizing for that should in theory lead to better performance. The claim is that these runtime cross-object optimizations produce significant performance gains that more than cancel out the overhead of a JVM.
Of course this will only work in certain cases, but it does have at least some theoretical appeal.
Of course I haven't RTFB, so maybe this is answered, but I don't believe that randomness is a property of a number, its a property of the method used to generate the number. The reviewer's example of flipping a coin to generate a random binary number is an example of this. I could flip a coin and generate the number 000000 - the method of generation is random, the number itself is clearly reducible and therefore not "random" in the sense described in the review.
I would reserve the term "random" to talk about the generation method, and use more precise terms like "irreducible" for the numbers themselves.
To go further, it may even be that what we mean by a "random" generation scheme is: "a scheme whose generation method I can't predict". This makes randomness a property of a system's knowledge of the generation system. For example, in many situations a computer's psuedo-random number generator is a sufficiently random generation scheme, in some cases (for example cryptography) it is not. psuedo-RNGs are not random (they are deterministic, thus the use of the term "pseudo") but for some uses they effectively are, because the system using the numbers output from them can't (or doesn't need to) predict the next number generated.
So I would propose that "random" refers to the process of generating a number that is in practice non-deterministic in the specific context in which the number is used.
I should have said predict. I'm so used to the theory I say "detect in advance".
Fair enough, but seriously, can you point to a link to this theory? As I understand it the issue with predicting major quakes isn't being able to gather enough evidence (though more evidence is usually good) but being able to determine what patterns in the evidence fortell a large magnitude event. Modern seismology is pretty good at detecting minor and/or deep quakes that can't be felt at the surface. Just gathering better information - which I assume is what using piezoelectric detection would do - doesn't solve the problem.
Or am I missing something?
...to hear whether piezoelectricity can be used to detect quakes as well. With all of the smashing and crashing going on, one would think it would have the potential to generate radio waves such that a properly tuned instrument could receive|detect the signal.
:-)
It usually isn't too difficult to detect earthquakes. Trying to stand up and failing is a perfectly good indicator that (a reasonably large) one is going on
Plus there's seismographs and whatnot that are really pretty good now.
The much more interesting problem is how to predict earthquakes. For this, piezoelectric mechanisms offer no advantage over "conventional" methods.
Naturally it will take some time, but as for the titles and the XHTML and the CSS, it would seem we are slowly getting there, wouldn't it?
I work with ontology construction and application professionally. Its hard. If we are "slowly getting there" solving the problem of titles on web pages, we are generations away from seeing any tiny fraction of web pages having consistent meta-tagging.
Instead of thinking how the semantic web may be abused and misused, think of the situations it may be beneficial.
I gave three. There are many places where the Semantic Web would be a huge benefit. But the project thinks it has solved the hard part (what does the meta-content structure look like and how what benefits does it bring) and has ignored the really difficult problem (okay we've got RDF, how do we get people to adopt it and use it consistently).
If only a little bit of information , say for example academic or public information is associated with metadata that define mening, we will have come a long way.
Agreed but not a useful way. The web works because it is simple for anyone to put information there, so everyone does. The Semantic Web as currently defined is very hard to use. It does, as nother poster observed, require a graduate degree from Stanford to make it work. Note that this is not "just a tools problem", though the current tools do suck. Its a fundamentally complex cognitive skill to categorise information in a consistent and meaningful way. That's why your brain has to be wired a certain way to be a librarian. You either have to restrict Semantic Web creation to those few individuals who can do it, or rewire the human race so everyone who wants to create a web page has the right skills to also create the meta-tags. Both are poor approaches.
By the way I agree that having a little academic information correctly meta-tagged is useful, but that's not the vision for the Semantic Web. Berners-Lee wants it to be the next generation of the general web. That's a pipedream, IMHO.
This is why groups come up with schemas and ontologies to share.
But that doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to a different place. In this case we're just moving the "software engineer" vs. "computer programmer" problem up to the ontology level. How do I map between ontologies? Unless there is a single unified ontology that everyone agrees to use, you have to explain how to map between disparate ontologies declared by different groups. The ontologies will overlap, try to define the same underlying concept in different ways in different contexts and so on.
Let's assume we have one universal ontology that everyone agreed to use (by the way the Cyc Project has been working on this problem for 25 years and isn't close to creating the complete ontology you'd need). Then all we have to do is assume that every web developer was skilled and disciplined enough to accurately tag their content with the right meta-content from the ontology. It also requires the ontology to be unambiguous and obviously applicable. I'll not be holding my breath.
This all rests on the assumption that the world can be unambiguously described and that meta-tagging is a context-independent operation. This is a obviously unreliable assumption. A much better approach would be to make context-dependence and ambiguity core assumptions and try to deal with those issues at the most fundamental level. Until the Semantic Web addresses these issues head-on its going to remain an interesting academic project that has no real-world applicability or adoption.
- Intelligent search engines that produce much better results than Google etc. because they can index the meaning of documents, not the words they contain.
- Agent technology that can retrieve information for you, price compare items you are shopping for and automate a number of interesting processes.
- Automatic clustering of website around subjects of interest to create much richer knowledge-oriented navigation.
But the Semantic Web project can't succeed as it is currently specified. It is working towards standards for storing and managing the meta-content required for this Brave New World but doesn't tackle the much harder problem of how to create meta-content that is consistent and pervasive. At present this is left to individual web page authors with no mechanism to ensure consistency. Without consistency, the Semantic Web is doomed. If I tag a web page as being about "software engineering" and another person uses the tag "computer programming" the Semantic Web can't tell they are about the same thing.In a world where an estimated 70% of web pages don't even have a title isn't it rather unrealistic to expect most web page authors will learn a complex new representation like RDF and consistently tag their pages with it?
Clay Shirky has a very good article on this. I recommend reading it before you get too excited about the Semantic Web.
...I read the headline as "Trained Rats for Mime Detection" which sounded about right; no human should have to suffer such an indignity.
Damn you, Marcelle Marceau, you are not trapped in an invisible box.
I've passed by the building a few times on my way back home from the MIT Swapfest. Not only is the architecture itself pretty ugly, but it's surrounded by typical buildings. It's incredibly annoying to be walking down a street full of brick and stone buildings, and then, out of nowhere, you come upon this thing with random chunks of metal coming out at all angles. The design may be "modern" and "chic" (or whatever you want to call it), but I wish they'd picked a design that fit in better.
Whatever you think about the building, I'd hate to have a rule that all new buildings must "fit in" to their immediate environment. This is the ultimate conservative, anti-progress idea. What if we'd done that with software? In 1983 all GUIs are outlawed because they don't "fit in" with the prevailing command line interface style? That would have been a disaster. Why should architecture be any different?
Bold, challenging new styles are one way that we move forward. The Sydney Opera House, the Transamerica pyramid and countless other dramatic and now beloved buildings were originally despised because they were "modern" and "chic". I'd rather live in a world filled with innovation and experiment, even if it sometimes fails, than eternally stick with the status quo.
What do you expect from a totalitarian government?
What makes this interesting is that China is taking small steps away from totalitarianism as it begins to allow (limited) free markets and some small steps towards freedom of religion and political thought. Sure it has a long way to go, but it isn't anymore the totalitarian state it was 20 or even 10 years ago. That's why these attempts to allow some freedom (at least there are internet cafes) while also attempting to maintain political control is so fascinating.
On the contrary, I think the pengiun is an easily recognizable and very memorable symbol for Linux.
I didn't say that Tux was not a memorable symbol. I agree with you, it is. That's because it doesn't look like most corporate logos (because its cartoonish etc.) I said that the message it conveyed was one of childishness and amateurishness. It is memorable for the same reasons that it doesn't convey professionalism and a commitment to quality. There's a reason corporations don't choose logos like Tux: they want to convey an impression of professionalism. So there's a tradeoff - a more memorable logo that looks amateurish or a less memorable one that positions Linux as a viable alternative to Microsoft.
The mascot coolness factor alone makes Linux a superior competitor!
Yes, yes I know the post is meant to be funny, and it is. But there's a serious point here. The Tux mascot may have a high geek coolness factor, but its a small but real impediment to acceptance of Linux by the broader business community. The logo is cartoonish and childish. It says that this project is the opposite of professional, competent and reliable. It says the software is built by a bunch of amateurs who think a fat, funny penguin is an appropriate logo for promoting their work and the values it represents. Linux is none of these things, but the logo aint helping anyone overcome that prejudice.
That doesn't stretch the definition of a portable. This stretches the definition. Those things weighed in at nearly 40lbs. I remember hauling IBM's Portable across London in 1985. It stretched not just the definition of a portable, but also my arms.
Eh, this is really outside their area of expertise. They should pass this problem off to the French and instead work on making email flavorless and rubbery.
I was going to point out that British food is really pretty good, and its poor reputation stems from the very low quality of ingredients and food shortages suffered during the second World War and for decades afterwards. But man, that's a funny, funny email, so I think I'll just sit here and LMAO instead.
Thanks, that really brightened my day.