The term was meant to be pejorative. As in, "this group who thinks the universe started in some sort of big bang is just ridiculous". The proponents of the theory happened to like the name!
Nits too big to ignore
on
Flatterland
·
· Score: 3
I hate to nitpick, but this one's a whopper. My hackles hit the ceiling when I read it.
Shortly after the start of the new century, Albert Einstein proved the relationship between time and space adding a forth dimension.
Ignoring the misspelling and poor grammar, this is just plain wrong.
If the reviewer is referring to Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" paper of 1905, that one has no references to geometry at all. It was Minkowski's 1907 lecture entitled "Time and space" that showed that considering time (as clarified by Einstein's formulation) to be a fourth coordinate axis simplifies and unifies many calculations greatly. But it did not prove the relationship--you can't prove a relationship.
You could make a case that the reviewer is referring to Einstein's 1915 "Foundations of general relativity" paper, since that one does make an advance in geometry by constructing what is now known as the Einstein tensor. But though it's solidly grounded in geometry, the true impact of that paper is Einstein's demonstration of the significance of that tensor in physics.
However you cut it, nothing in that sentence holds up.
This is so confusing. Just the sight of @_[0] to mean a scalar, the second argument to a sub, makes me feel dizzy, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Please, find Damian and Larry and wake them up somehow. Cold water, dope slap, whatever it takes!
...
Whew. I hate those early-morning nightmares. Both Larry Wall and Damian Conway were in this dream, wearing dark suits and Ray-Bans, and, and....
I have to give the writer credit, he got a lot of things basically right. But the biggest thing he missed is that while technology changes quickly, people change slowly -- or stay the same.
For example, even if you had "plastic dishes that melted under hot water", it's unlikely you'd be comfortable with having 250 degree water coming out of your faucets. Or that a "telegraph company" can exist that "never makes a mistake, only the sender".
The original poster's article referred to tax credits. You're crossing the line into deductions for charitable contributions, which are very different things.
You can donate cars and get a receipt for the blue-book value of the car, even if it doesn't run.
The difference is that you (presumably) paid money for the car at some point. Your deduction is not your cost basis, but the fair market value. It works the same way with some other things which you bought, not created, such as stocks and bonds.
If you're a Linux consultant and donate hours to a non-profit and get a receipt for the time you spent there, and the time is in line with the other customers you have, why can't you deduct that time?
Get IRS Publication 526. Time and services contributed to a charity are never deductible.
However, I agree with you 100%:
Go talk to your tax lawyer/accountant.
Not even the most well-meaning Slashdot post can take the place of professional advice.
Actually, Cray was working on quantum computers and biological computers way back in 1996. Read this fascinating interview from that year.
I agree with you that Cray was not only about pushing the limits of technology--he was working on the Gallium Arsenide Cray-5 at the time of this death--but also about innovation in computer architecture.
A great example is the CDC 6600, his first parallel computer for Control Data Corporation. It had many innovations that only later came into popular use. It was a parallel processor, essentially a pipelined machine. It had a pure register load/store architecture, with a hardwired zero register, similar to many future RISC designs. There are many more, but I gotta run....
The correct title of the series is The Art of Computer Programming, although Volume I is named Fundamental Algorithms. You can read the details about it, and other forthcoming volumes, on this part of Knuth's home page.
As for MIX, the new editions will continue to use something similar to it, an assembly language for a machine called MMIX. Knuth explains why he continues to use a low-level language on his home page also. There are several reasons, and I can't do justice to them by trying to summarizing them here.
Funny side note: MMIX will have an operating system, NNIX. But the system is open, so
Other alternatives are also possible; for example, somebody at the Free Software Foundation might decide to come up with an alternative system called GNNIX.
Knuth's way with bad puns is one of his endearing qualities....
So the discs are the size of a 25-cent piece, but the package will be the size of a jewel case?
Talks continue with retailers, who may be amenable to stocking a new format that fits in current racks --
DataPlay discs can be bundled in CD-size packages -- and that offers them a cut of future electronic sales.
If they choose to "bundle" one in a package, that sounds even more wasteful than the old double-high music CD packages.
--
No matter how much scientific evidence is presented, those who prefer religion over science will continue not to listen to it. They will always find some objection, reasonable or not.
Still, for those of us for whom religion and science co-exist, it's nice to put yet another brick in the edifice.
This review says very little about the book itself. The majority of it is about the reviewer's disagreements with the author. After reading it, I still don't know whether it would be useful for, say, an administrator, a developer, or just curious about FreeBSD.
How about listing the table of contents, or describing which areas are covered in how much depth, are there any examples with source, are the examples accurate, and so on.
My meta-review: this review is (-1, uninformative)!
"Send $24.95 to the human genome project for a printed copy of Linus Torvalds' complete genome! Straight from the sources! Only takes 2000 hours to render on an average Postscript printer."
Come to think of it, a clone of Linus would really speed up development, wouldn't it? Or would we have to clone Alan Cox too?
Not sure it's specific to the field. Is the proportion more or less than in, say, musicians, biologists, or politicians? Any large group of people will have some number of homosexuals; among intellectuals who become used to speaking their minds, maybe a larger number will be "out".
Continuing in the same vein, take the fact that Lynn Conway, one of the true pioneers in computing, had gender reassignment. (She's probably best known as co-author of "Introduction to VLSI systems".) Is that higher or lower than other fields? Does it say anything about computer scientists or engineers in general? I don't think so.
Statistics of homosexuality across different fields may be interesting, but wouldn't say anything profound.
...it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
TeX can even find bugs in hardware.
TeX has a test suite called "TripTeX", which your installation must pass for you to call it "TeX". When I went to compile the whole thing on DECStation 5000 series (in 1989), I got a series of failures, involving discrepancies in the last decimal place of several measurements. The problem turned out to be with the custom floating-point hardware on the DECStations. (I didn't determine the bug, I think it was DEC engineers themselves.)
Now that's a test suite!
Used a pdp-8? I built one!
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 1
I went to college at Indiana University Computer Science in the years (*cough, cough*). Professor Frank Prosser, now Emeritus, taught a hardware design course around constructing an "LD-14", which was essentially a cleaned-up PDP-8I, out of basic NAND/NOR gates (although we got to use an ALU chip!). Part of the exam was to bring up FOCAL, which was a DEC BASIC-ish language, and calculate 300! (factorial). Loading FOCAL required fat-fingering in the primary loader, then bringing in the main loader and FOCAL off paper tape at 110.5 baud. In the later years, we had a cassette interface that loaded at 1200 baud. We considered this a huge leap forward in technology!
As part of the course requirements, you had to extend the machine in some fashion: make an 8E, for example. I ended up adding a boot PROM, which was tricky, since all 8K (12-bit words, not bytes) were needed by FOCAL to run.
Prosser co-wrote the textbook for the course, which described how to build the thing, with Dave Winkel. Not surprisingly, it seems to be out of print.
Thank you for bringing back those years. That was one of the best courses I ever took!
No, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect. It was awarded in 1921, six years after he published "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" and its corollary, which deduced from the results of the first paper that light must carry away inertia. Later this turned into the E=mc formula. Here is a good bunch of links to follow for details on the Nobel.
The premise of your point is valid IMO, as is your list of questions. The problem in my view is that once development teams find out the answers, they have no guidelines for carrying them out.
Here's what I mean: Suppose I figure out my reliability requirement to be 99.999% or better. What then? How does that affect my design and coding? Does that mean I write a catch for every possible exception? Provide a global "re-initialize and start over" routine? Pre-allocate all my memory at the beginning of the program? All of these?
If I were designing hardware in the same circumstances, I would have some standard tools at my disposal for increasing reliability: use redundancy, use highly-tested (read "old") parts, and so on. I still need knowledge and experience in circuit design, of course, but I have guidelines that can help. In the software world, I don't have a lot of support like that. The software patterns movement is going in the right direction, but still has a ways to go.
Wish they packaged it differently....
on
KDE 2.0.1 is out
·
· Score: 1
I tried to install KDE 2 on Mandrake 7.1 from downloaded RPMs (took me a couple of days), and soon found myself in RPM hell. With my slow modem connection, I decided to save myself more work and ordered the Mandrake 7.2 CDs. Came up beautifully! Konqueror works great, though KOffice still has some stability problems.
My gripe: I just went to look at the KDE 2.0.1 upgrade, and found I wouldd have to download everything again! I don't know if it's possible, but it would have been nice to just be able to grab the changes. At this rate, I'm going to wait for KDE 2.1 -- should be just around the corner.
Proving the conjecture false would mean that modern encryption technology, the foundation of electronic commerce, would be open to easy attack.
Wrong. It would do nothing of the kind. Proving Riemann's Zeta hypothesis would do that.
Even if you proved prime factorization of large numbers can be done in polynomial time, you would need an algorithm that accomplished it in a reasonable amount of time (seconds). An algorithm that had time complexity O(n^100) would still be polynomial, but useless in practice.
After reading the article, take a look at the high-quality discussion on
this page.
Some of the same issues raised here are discussed there, but by physicians and other people in medicine (what about support, whom do you blame when it fails, and so on). The author of the article also posts some clarifications by RMS.
Slashdot Mirror
The term was meant to be pejorative. As in, "this group who thinks the universe started in some sort of big bang is just ridiculous". The proponents of the theory happened to like the name!
If the reviewer is referring to Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" paper of 1905, that one has no references to geometry at all. It was Minkowski's 1907 lecture entitled "Time and space" that showed that considering time (as clarified by Einstein's formulation) to be a fourth coordinate axis simplifies and unifies many calculations greatly. But it did not prove the relationship--you can't prove a relationship.
You could make a case that the reviewer is referring to Einstein's 1915 "Foundations of general relativity" paper, since that one does make an advance in geometry by constructing what is now known as the Einstein tensor. But though it's solidly grounded in geometry, the true impact of that paper is Einstein's demonstration of the significance of that tensor in physics.
However you cut it, nothing in that sentence holds up.
This is so confusing. Just the sight of @_[0] to mean a scalar, the second argument to a sub, makes me feel dizzy, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Please, find Damian and Larry and wake them up somehow. Cold water, dope slap, whatever it takes!
Whew. I hate those early-morning nightmares. Both Larry Wall and Damian Conway were in this dream, wearing dark suits and Ray-Bans, and, and....
I looked in the usual-suspect places but didn't turn up anything. I mean, you can't really "search" for this.
For example, even if you had "plastic dishes that melted under hot water", it's unlikely you'd be comfortable with having 250 degree water coming out of your faucets. Or that a "telegraph company" can exist that "never makes a mistake, only the sender".
"Bones, this man is hurt. Can you help him?" ... Oh yeah"
"Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a
I'm almost all the way through the document, and it still hasn't degenerated into name-calling....
However, I agree with you 100%:
Not even the most well-meaning Slashdot post can take the place of professional advice.I agree with you that Cray was not only about pushing the limits of technology--he was working on the Gallium Arsenide Cray-5 at the time of this death--but also about innovation in computer architecture.
A great example is the CDC 6600, his first parallel computer for Control Data Corporation. It had many innovations that only later came into popular use. It was a parallel processor, essentially a pipelined machine. It had a pure register load/store architecture, with a hardwired zero register, similar to many future RISC designs. There are many more, but I gotta run....
The correct title of the series is The Art of Computer Programming, although Volume I is named Fundamental Algorithms. You can read the details about it, and other forthcoming volumes, on this part of Knuth's home page.
As for MIX, the new editions will continue to use something similar to it, an assembly language for a machine called MMIX. Knuth explains why he continues to use a low-level language on his home page also. There are several reasons, and I can't do justice to them by trying to summarizing them here.
Funny side note: MMIX will have an operating system, NNIX. But the system is open, so
Knuth's way with bad puns is one of his endearing qualities....
--
For those of us who don't read Japanese, is there a price (hopefully USD) mentioned somewhere in the page?
--
--
No matter how much scientific evidence is presented, those who prefer religion over science will continue not to listen to it. They will always find some objection, reasonable or not.
Still, for those of us for whom religion and science co-exist, it's nice to put yet another brick in the edifice.
This review says very little about the book itself. The majority of it is about the reviewer's disagreements with the author. After reading it, I still don't know whether it would be useful for, say, an administrator, a developer, or just curious about FreeBSD.
How about listing the table of contents, or describing which areas are covered in how much depth, are there any examples with source, are the examples accurate, and so on.
My meta-review: this review is (-1, uninformative)!
"Send $24.95 to the human genome project for a printed copy of Linus Torvalds' complete genome! Straight from the sources! Only takes 2000 hours to render on an average Postscript printer."
Come to think of it, a clone of Linus would really speed up development, wouldn't it? Or would we have to clone Alan Cox too?
;-)
Not sure it's specific to the field. Is the proportion more or less than in, say, musicians, biologists, or politicians? Any large group of people will have some number of homosexuals; among intellectuals who become used to speaking their minds, maybe a larger number will be "out".
Continuing in the same vein, take the fact that Lynn Conway, one of the true pioneers in computing, had gender reassignment. (She's probably best known as co-author of "Introduction to VLSI systems".) Is that higher or lower than other fields? Does it say anything about computer scientists or engineers in general? I don't think so.
Statistics of homosexuality across different fields may be interesting, but wouldn't say anything profound.TeX can even find bugs in hardware.
TeX has a test suite called "TripTeX", which your installation must pass for you to call it "TeX". When I went to compile the whole thing on DECStation 5000 series (in 1989), I got a series of failures, involving discrepancies in the last decimal place of several measurements. The problem turned out to be with the custom floating-point hardware on the DECStations. (I didn't determine the bug, I think it was DEC engineers themselves.)
Now that's a test suite!
I went to college at Indiana University Computer Science in the years (*cough, cough*). Professor Frank Prosser, now Emeritus, taught a hardware design course around constructing an "LD-14", which was essentially a cleaned-up PDP-8I, out of basic NAND/NOR gates (although we got to use an ALU chip!). Part of the exam was to bring up FOCAL, which was a DEC BASIC-ish language, and calculate 300! (factorial). Loading FOCAL required fat-fingering in the primary loader, then bringing in the main loader and FOCAL off paper tape at 110.5 baud. In the later years, we had a cassette interface that loaded at 1200 baud. We considered this a huge leap forward in technology!
As part of the course requirements, you had to extend the machine in some fashion: make an 8E, for example. I ended up adding a boot PROM, which was tricky, since all 8K (12-bit words, not bytes) were needed by FOCAL to run.
Prosser co-wrote the textbook for the course, which described how to build the thing, with Dave Winkel. Not surprisingly, it seems to be out of print.
Thank you for bringing back those years. That was one of the best courses I ever took!
No, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect. It was awarded in 1921, six years after he published "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" and its corollary, which deduced from the results of the first paper that light must carry away inertia. Later this turned into the E=mc formula. Here is a good bunch of links to follow for details on the Nobel.
The premise of your point is valid IMO, as is your list of questions. The problem in my view is that once development teams find out the answers, they have no guidelines for carrying them out.
Here's what I mean: Suppose I figure out my reliability requirement to be 99.999% or better. What then? How does that affect my design and coding? Does that mean I write a catch for every possible exception? Provide a global "re-initialize and start over" routine? Pre-allocate all my memory at the beginning of the program? All of these?
If I were designing hardware in the same circumstances, I would have some standard tools at my disposal for increasing reliability: use redundancy, use highly-tested (read "old") parts, and so on. I still need knowledge and experience in circuit design, of course, but I have guidelines that can help. In the software world, I don't have a lot of support like that. The software patterns movement is going in the right direction, but still has a ways to go.
I tried to install KDE 2 on Mandrake 7.1 from downloaded RPMs (took me a couple of days), and soon found myself in RPM hell. With my slow modem connection, I decided to save myself more work and ordered the Mandrake 7.2 CDs. Came up beautifully! Konqueror works great, though KOffice still has some stability problems.
My gripe: I just went to look at the KDE 2.0.1 upgrade, and found I wouldd have to download everything again! I don't know if it's possible, but it would have been nice to just be able to grab the changes. At this rate, I'm going to wait for KDE 2.1 -- should be just around the corner.
Here it is.
No annoying pop-ups either.
Wrong. It would do nothing of the kind. Proving Riemann's Zeta hypothesis would do that.
Even if you proved prime factorization of large numbers can be done in polynomial time, you would need an algorithm that accomplished it in a reasonable amount of time (seconds). An algorithm that had time complexity O(n^100) would still be polynomial, but useless in practice.
Some of the same issues raised here are discussed there, but by physicians and other people in medicine (what about support, whom do you blame when it fails, and so on). The author of the article also posts some clarifications by RMS.