Heck, I already keep volatile nuclear material near my crotch all day every day.
See, somebody found me a tritium keychain. The soft glow emitted by the tritium (encased in very solid transparent plastic, which blocks beta radiation) makes it easy to find the keychain when it's dropped in the dark. Besides, it's cool-looking.
I worked at a research reactor for a while. Trust me: radioactive-wise, a small amount of tritium is one of the last things to be afraid of.
You can tell I'm not a statistician: I apparently can't even spell it (yeesh). And upon further investigation, it seems to me that you were right and I was wrong: if the scores are truly from a random distribution (uniform or otherwise), they should behave as the author says, apparently.
Nonetheless, I think there's reason to believe that the best in the competition have been there for years. There are certainly teams in our division that have been near the top year after year for 20 years. I can't think of so many latecomers who have turned out such consistently strong performances.
...the number of teams competing has grown nearly sevenfold from 1994 through 2005. In other words, for a team to finish at, say, third place, in 1994 would be equivalent to finishing 21st this year. So a hypothetical team that News.com would have lauded in 1994 would now be dismissed as having badly "slipped" in 2005, even though it would be of the same quality.
Uh, I don't think so. I think this makes the statistically bizarre assumption that the quality of the entrants is uniformly distributed. Even a quick glance at the standings sheet from previous years disabuses one of that notion. In other words, most of the new entrants are going to be worse (in fact, much worse) than the top entrants from previous years.
Actually, CR-LF was the ASCII (ANSI??) standard line ending: it made teletypes work right by returning the carriage and advancing the platen to feed a new line. Both ATT and Apple decided dealing with a character pair for line termination was too much of a PITA in a glass TTY world, and picked half of the standard for their line terminator---but each one picked a different half.
...are what we call NP-Hard. That has a technical meaning, but in short, it takes a *really* long time (far more than is practical) to compute the best solutions for these problems.
...unless P=NP. Almost no one thinks P=NP is true, but no one has yet proven it false.
Yeah, IRC was first deployed around 1988. Remember thinking at the time that it was an iffy implementation of a weak idea (relaying). Never would have guessed that it would take over the world to the extent that it did.
Numbers, friend? Last I looked, the spectral efficiency of NTSC was actually fairly high---about 30% of modern digital methods (see e.g. section 4.1 of this white paper, which makes pretty much the same case I'm making here). The whole point of this switchover is HDTV, not more channels or reduced bandwidth. I get the same lousy six channels over the air in somewhat more bandwidth, but now with way more pixels. Excuse me while I'm underwhelmed.
If you want to talk spectral efficiency, think about the audio bands. Traditional audio modulation schemes are really bad. There's potential for huge bandwidth savings and quality improvements in the incredibly technically valuable (due to propagation properties) commercial AM, commercial FM, and emergency bands by switching to digital modulation. I would love to repurpose those bands, but I can't see it happening any time soon---instead we get...satellite radio?
The era of memorized passwords is over. 15 random lowercase characters: write em down on a slip of paper and put it in your wallet. After a while, you may memorize the most commonly-used ones. In the meantime, you will be secure from everyone who doesn't have hand-in-your-pocket (or at least purse) privileges:-).
How do I get suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfolks to pay $250 for my 5 page speculations on computer science topics? Seriously. I'm an academic, and I write 20+ pages per month of
this stuff for free. If I could get even 100 people to pay $50 per page each for it, that would be $100K per month: that's way more than I make in a year at my current job. Leaving aside the question of the price of my immortal soul, it doesn't sound like too bad a gig.
I started to list my qualifications, but got tired of typing. Suffice it to say that they're way more than that Forrester guy has. Let me know folks: if 100 of you pay me $50 per page each, I'll research pretty much whatever you want.
Larry McVoy says in the interview that one problem with reverse-engineering BK is "Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it."
This would make me feel so good about using BK for my commercial project. Apparently, if anyone corrupts their own personal changeset store, the whole system is screwed.
I agree with McVoy at this point: Tridge shouldn't reverse-engineer BK. Instead, he should create a more robust and maintainable clone of Monotone or OpenCM, which attempt to handle distributed changesets in a trustworthy fashion using cryptographic signatures. Thank goodness the kernel is coming out of BK---I had no idea.
One possible point---you don't want to pay again, every 12 months or so. Another---you don't want to pay for apps, which can be way more expensive than the cost of the OS anyhow. A third---you want some of the things that are better than in OS X, such as modern X font rendering or Mozilla Firefox. A fourth---you want to be able to repair and upgrade your operating system; better yet, to have those fixes and changes integrated so that everyone can use them. A fifth---you're afraid of vendor lock-in, and want to make sure that your OS and apps are supported into the future. Shall I go on?
I think if I was willing to pay 1.5--2x for Mac hardware, I'd just run OS X. But some folks just like Apple hardware. I don't think the folks who choose to run a free OS on this hardware are insane: they have many viable reasons.
Uh, they removed the Guide entry for Earth. Two words. "Mostly Harmless". This would somehow have been impossible to introduce into the script without "pausing the film, doing a voice over, and then resuming the film"? It's the title of an Adams book, for petesake.
As the reviewer points out, the movie is titled "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". From the description, this title would be pretty inexplicable to viewers who haven't seen the movie.
The reviewer is not "the Comic Book Guy". For starters, he's written a biography of Douglas Adams, which gives him a bit of authority on the topic from my point of view. By his own description, he has basically liked every adaptation of the HHGTTG material to some degree---until this one. I'm taking his comments very seriously.
In particular, I'm not going to a movie which has, as a principal character, a NOKIA cellphone. Regardless of what else is in it.
There's some otherwise very smart people living and working in Austin on technology right now. For example, one of the two IBM Linux Technology Centers in the US is there. The other is in my hometown of Portland, Oregon---one of the most wireless-friendly cities in the nation.
I hope Texans pass this bill, and rigorously enforce it. It'd be good for the Oregon economy.
Here's the story
Of a silly patent
Granted to a sci-fi-sounding non-device.
It just might make you smell or feel---
It sure would be nice.
Here's the story
Posted here at Slashdot
By a poster who hates patenting mere dreams.
Thinks the Office
Should get a cluon
And kill these harebrained schemes.
And so today when this poster met this patent
We all saw that it was much more than a hunch
That the two were never meant to be together---
That's the way folks get their panties in a bunch!
Panties in a bunch!
Panties in a bunch!
That's the way folks get their panties in a bunch!
I don't get it. Who would the astronauts be smuggling it to? The ISS? At any rate, hiding it in a fuel tank isn't very original---no wonder they got caught. There was no mention of the size of the bust in the/. summary. I guess I could read the article, but why bother? I'll bet you can fit a lot of crack into a Shuttle tank, though!
Let's be clear. What Godel showed is roughly that no program can certify that every correct program handed to it is correct, unless it also certifies that some incorrect programs are correct (i.e. it is unsound). The standard statement of this is that any sufficiently powerful logical system is either unsound or undecidable.
What this means in practice is that for any sound correctness-proving program, if you're willing to wait only n seconds to finish, there are input programs on which it will not terminate before you lose patience. This is true for any n you choose.
The good news is that a given prover can normally be proven sound (but not complete) using itself. I think the confusion WRT Godel's Theorem is that the theorem proceeds by showing that for any given prover P there is a logical statement Q that is true but cannot be proven by P. This in turn is used to show the incompleteness of P. But P might still be able prove a lot of stuff, including everything you would care to know, and perhaps including the logical statement "P is sound".
Presumably because the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tag filter in Slashcode erases it, to prevent dangerous acronym expansions from slipping through. I learned something, though: thanks!
The student seeking a transfer to a more competently run University.
Indeed. Ask yourself these questions. (1) Am I an excellent-to-stellar student, the kind that the my academic dept. would really want to hold on to? (2) Have I used the network only in legal ways? (3) Am I liked by my academic dept., having treated them well during my time there? If the answer to all three of these is yes, I would contact my dept. head for a personal meeting where I would politely discuss/explain the situation and ask for them to correct it.
Explain, not as a threat but as a statement of fact, that there are plenty of good universities in the country, that you value theirs and would like to stay on, but that the situation you find yourself in makes you nervous and that you may have to consider moving on if they can't find a higher degree of clue.
I switched colleges from a badly-run large mess to a small, friendly campus after my Freshman year. I don't honestly think anyone at the old place missed me, but the new place really appreciated me for the most part and gave me great opportunities. If I had it to do over again, I'd switch again in a second, even though it cost me about one semester of earned credit in the long run.
...the phrase "begging the question" means something else entirely.
Nope, not anymore. The English language has changed, but its documentation hasn't yet caught up. Words mean what people agree they mean, and the vast majority of English speakers agree on this one these days. Sorry.
See also the comment above, where it clarifies that signing up for iTMS through pymusique means that you never see the TOS in the first place. This should make it harder for Apple to argue that you are bound by the click-wrap contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, I already keep volatile nuclear material near my crotch all day every day.
See, somebody found me a tritium keychain. The soft glow emitted by the tritium (encased in very solid transparent plastic, which blocks beta radiation) makes it easy to find the keychain when it's dropped in the dark. Besides, it's cool-looking.
I worked at a research reactor for a while. Trust me: radioactive-wise, a small amount of tritium is one of the last things to be afraid of.
You can tell I'm not a statistician: I apparently can't even spell it (yeesh). And upon further investigation, it seems to me that you were right and I was wrong: if the scores are truly from a random distribution (uniform or otherwise), they should behave as the author says, apparently.
Nonetheless, I think there's reason to believe that the best in the competition have been there for years. There are certainly teams in our division that have been near the top year after year for 20 years. I can't think of so many latecomers who have turned out such consistently strong performances.
But thanks for making me think harder!
Uh, I don't think so. I think this makes the statistically bizarre assumption that the quality of the entrants is uniformly distributed. Even a quick glance at the standings sheet from previous years disabuses one of that notion. In other words, most of the new entrants are going to be worse (in fact, much worse) than the top entrants from previous years.
Disclaimer: I am not a statistician.
Actually, CR-LF was the ASCII (ANSI??) standard line ending: it made teletypes work right by returning the carriage and advancing the platen to feed a new line. Both ATT and Apple decided dealing with a character pair for line termination was too much of a PITA in a glass TTY world, and picked half of the standard for their line terminator---but each one picked a different half.
Doh.
You can tell you're on /. when dividing 1e5 by 1e2 to get 1e3 gets modded up to +5 insightful. :-)
...unless P=NP. Almost no one thinks P=NP is true, but no one has yet proven it false.
Yeah, IRC was first deployed around 1988. Remember thinking at the time that it was an iffy implementation of a weak idea (relaying). Never would have guessed that it would take over the world to the extent that it did.
Numbers, friend? Last I looked, the spectral efficiency of NTSC was actually fairly high---about 30% of modern digital methods (see e.g. section 4.1 of this white paper, which makes pretty much the same case I'm making here). The whole point of this switchover is HDTV, not more channels or reduced bandwidth. I get the same lousy six channels over the air in somewhat more bandwidth, but now with way more pixels. Excuse me while I'm underwhelmed.
If you want to talk spectral efficiency, think about the audio bands. Traditional audio modulation schemes are really bad. There's potential for huge bandwidth savings and quality improvements in the incredibly technically valuable (due to propagation properties) commercial AM, commercial FM, and emergency bands by switching to digital modulation. I would love to repurpose those bands, but I can't see it happening any time soon---instead we get...satellite radio?
US spectral allocation is hopeless.
The era of memorized passwords is over. 15 random lowercase characters: write em down on a slip of paper and put it in your wallet. After a while, you may memorize the most commonly-used ones. In the meantime, you will be secure from everyone who doesn't have hand-in-your-pocket (or at least purse) privileges :-).
How do I get suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfolks to pay $250 for my 5 page speculations on computer science topics? Seriously. I'm an academic, and I write 20+ pages per month of this stuff for free. If I could get even 100 people to pay $50 per page each for it, that would be $100K per month: that's way more than I make in a year at my current job. Leaving aside the question of the price of my immortal soul, it doesn't sound like too bad a gig.
I started to list my qualifications, but got tired of typing. Suffice it to say that they're way more than that Forrester guy has. Let me know folks: if 100 of you pay me $50 per page each, I'll research pretty much whatever you want.
Larry McVoy says in the interview that one problem with reverse-engineering BK is "Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it."
This would make me feel so good about using BK for my commercial project. Apparently, if anyone corrupts their own personal changeset store, the whole system is screwed.
I agree with McVoy at this point: Tridge shouldn't reverse-engineer BK. Instead, he should create a more robust and maintainable clone of Monotone or OpenCM, which attempt to handle distributed changesets in a trustworthy fashion using cryptographic signatures. Thank goodness the kernel is coming out of BK---I had no idea."This film is rated X: the unknown. Positively no one is admitted." --The Firesign Theatre
One possible point---you don't want to pay again, every 12 months or so. Another---you don't want to pay for apps, which can be way more expensive than the cost of the OS anyhow. A third---you want some of the things that are better than in OS X, such as modern X font rendering or Mozilla Firefox. A fourth---you want to be able to repair and upgrade your operating system; better yet, to have those fixes and changes integrated so that everyone can use them. A fifth---you're afraid of vendor lock-in, and want to make sure that your OS and apps are supported into the future. Shall I go on?
I think if I was willing to pay 1.5--2x for Mac hardware, I'd just run OS X. But some folks just like Apple hardware. I don't think the folks who choose to run a free OS on this hardware are insane: they have many viable reasons.
Uh, they removed the Guide entry for Earth. Two words. "Mostly Harmless". This would somehow have been impossible to introduce into the script without "pausing the film, doing a voice over, and then resuming the film"? It's the title of an Adams book, for petesake.
As the reviewer points out, the movie is titled "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". From the description, this title would be pretty inexplicable to viewers who haven't seen the movie.
The reviewer is not "the Comic Book Guy". For starters, he's written a biography of Douglas Adams, which gives him a bit of authority on the topic from my point of view. By his own description, he has basically liked every adaptation of the HHGTTG material to some degree---until this one. I'm taking his comments very seriously.
In particular, I'm not going to a movie which has, as a principal character, a NOKIA cellphone. Regardless of what else is in it.
Oooh---there's an attractive offer. Quit your job, but receive a free BitKeeper license. I wonder if Larry would make me the same generous offer?
There's some otherwise very smart people living and working in Austin on technology right now. For example, one of the two IBM Linux Technology Centers in the US is there. The other is in my hometown of Portland, Oregon---one of the most wireless-friendly cities in the nation.
I hope Texans pass this bill, and rigorously enforce it. It'd be good for the Oregon economy.
[sung, of course, to the Brady Bunch theme]
Best spit take ever! I knew there was a reason you were on my friends list around here. Thanks.
I don't get it. Who would the astronauts be smuggling it to? The ISS? At any rate, hiding it in a fuel tank isn't very original---no wonder they got caught. There was no mention of the size of the bust in the /. summary. I guess I could read the article, but why bother? I'll bet you can fit a lot of crack into a Shuttle tank, though!
Let's be clear. What Godel showed is roughly that no program can certify that every correct program handed to it is correct, unless it also certifies that some incorrect programs are correct (i.e. it is unsound). The standard statement of this is that any sufficiently powerful logical system is either unsound or undecidable.
What this means in practice is that for any sound correctness-proving program, if you're willing to wait only n seconds to finish, there are input programs on which it will not terminate before you lose patience. This is true for any n you choose.
The good news is that a given prover can normally be proven sound (but not complete) using itself. I think the confusion WRT Godel's Theorem is that the theorem proceeds by showing that for any given prover P there is a logical statement Q that is true but cannot be proven by P. This in turn is used to show the incompleteness of P. But P might still be able prove a lot of stuff, including everything you would care to know, and perhaps including the logical statement "P is sound".
"If you don't like living in the United STATES then LEAVE."
In the words of a comedian whose name currently escapes me: "I WOULD, but I don't want to be VICTIMIZED by our FOREIGN POLICY."
Presumably because the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tag filter in Slashcode erases it, to prevent dangerous acronym expansions from slipping through. I learned something, though: thanks!
The student seeking a transfer to a more competently run University.
Indeed. Ask yourself these questions. (1) Am I an excellent-to-stellar student, the kind that the my academic dept. would really want to hold on to? (2) Have I used the network only in legal ways? (3) Am I liked by my academic dept., having treated them well during my time there? If the answer to all three of these is yes, I would contact my dept. head for a personal meeting where I would politely discuss/explain the situation and ask for them to correct it.
Explain, not as a threat but as a statement of fact, that there are plenty of good universities in the country, that you value theirs and would like to stay on, but that the situation you find yourself in makes you nervous and that you may have to consider moving on if they can't find a higher degree of clue.
I switched colleges from a badly-run large mess to a small, friendly campus after my Freshman year. I don't honestly think anyone at the old place missed me, but the new place really appreciated me for the most part and gave me great opportunities. If I had it to do over again, I'd switch again in a second, even though it cost me about one semester of earned credit in the long run.
Nope, not anymore. The English language has changed, but its documentation hasn't yet caught up. Words mean what people agree they mean, and the vast majority of English speakers agree on this one these days. Sorry.
(-1 offtopic)
See also the comment above, where it clarifies that signing up for iTMS through pymusique means that you never see the TOS in the first place. This should make it harder for Apple to argue that you are bound by the click-wrap contract.