Any winner that has less than a 5% margin with the runner-up is suspect. The only solution for that is a re-election. This is how they do presidential elections in France. A president is only elected after he won the vote with a sufficient margin. No, 3 votes won't do and neither would 536.
No big deal. Just print the exact vote in human readable form on the ballot as well and as soon as someone finds a single ballot where the barcode result (as displayed on a screen) differs from the readable form, throw the entire staff of the company that produces the machines in jail for twenty years.
Don't count on being able to sing any song you want to in the future.
Currently, you cannot record and distribute any song you want to, not even if you perform it yourself. The original writer of the song (or the corporation as the writer is dead for > 50 years) have the rights. These rights are neigh perpetual.
However, luckily we're still able to present and publish the theorems of calculus without paying royalties to the publishing houses that own these theorems. No doubt this will change soon. What use is a theorem if you can't charge for it? Welcome to a brave new world of intellectual property where everything you hear, feel or think is owned by someone. Music, movies, books, algorithms, sounds, smells, genes and undoubtedly in the future theorems.
Yep, right on the money. This is how a paper gets published: Researcher A writes paper, Editor B gets the paper, distributes it to Referees C,D,E. Paper gets reviewed and accepted (say). Publisher F runs Researchers A's source (latex) through his own style file and wraps it into a little journal. This journal gets sold for a high fee to libraries so that Researchers G-Z can actually read it.
Note that only F is not funded by the government, and only F gets paid for this work. Because Journal titles live mostly on reputation, holding a crucial journal in a field is for publisher F a gold-mine, as they can charge whatever they want. The authors will keep on writing for free, the editor will keep on working for free, the referees will keep on working for free, the libraries will still be paying F for actually putting it in print. There are some isolated cases where the complete editorial board of a journal got rid of the middle-man F, but generally this does not happen.
Ah right, that explains that when I tried to install this webcam the instructions specifically stated to override the driver that windows by default installed? Explicit instructions to go through some kind of Config/services/yadi/yada menu sequence, delete some specific item that windows put there, put in the installation cd that came with the webcam, and install the driver manually, only to find out that after a suspend and subsequent resume, windows detected new hardware again and overrode the right driver with its own best guess.[*]
Needless to say, no problem under linux with the same hardware. Autodetected and working without a glitch. So can we now conclude that windows is not ready for the desktop?
[*] Funny corollary and displaying my ignorance about windows, in that same display, I came across an 'unknown driver' item. I thought that maybe I should get rid of that. Obviously I only later figured out that all drivers start out as 'unknown drivers' and thus in the infinitely subtle logic of ms-ware it proceeded to delete any and all drivers on my system. So back to the OEM CD's to install all drivers as windows wasn't even able to automatically find a proper driver for the screen, let alone sound, modem, ethernet, touchpad. Almost none of the hardware on that notebook was recognized by windows itself. It was all OEM programming that did the job.
Oh yes, and especially nice when getting an out of space message when editing a file. Obviously, you go and purge the old revisions, only to find out right away that the latest revision of your all-important file (the only one left on your filesystem) is the one that failed to write: 0 bytes, AAARGH!
Not really, how can you determine that the plain English or pseudo-code algorithm actually implements the things that are claimed? For anything but completely trivial stuff, you need to be able to run it to see if it actually does what is claimed.
Check the words of Knuth:
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
. Maybe a mandatory reference implementation in a publically available language should become a prerequisite?
Historically, yes. Democratic wins tend to have a negative effect on the market. Likely this time? no. The reason is that usually Democrats are spenddrifts and Wallstreet doesn't like that. This time however, the Republican is the big spender and Wallstreet does not like a combined budget and trade deficit. Big government combined with tax-cuts is lethal. Republican victory this time would probably mean a big drop of the market as four more years of this policy could kill what's left of the economy. The Democrat couldn't conceivably do worse (though he might surprise us), so I would expect a reversal of the D/R reaction this year.
Hmm, funny this. Terrorists are simply criminals and should be tried in a regular court.
Most of the people at Gitmo are picked up in Afghanistan and were often involved in the fighting. According to the definitions you gave them --- as long as they carried their arms openly --- that makes them prisoners of war. If they are also terrorists, that makes them criminals as well and they should additionally be tried in a regular court. No need to invent a whole new category of illegal combatants which you can torture as if they were spies. That indeed violates, if not invalidates, the Geneva convention.
You seem to misunderstand, the grandparent asks if it is necessary that the government needs to put restrictions on "banning free speech", not on "free speech" itself. The way internet abuse is handled currently, it is not unimaginable that in the not so far future you can effectively kick someone of the internet with one anonymous phonecall to a non-accountable agency, with the victim not having any recourse than to switch providers. Rinse, lather, repeat.
However, if your version of "free speech" includes the freedom to prevent speech (such as Comcast is doing), then we're at the end of the discussion I think.
-O3 Optimize yet more. -O3 turns on all optimizations specified by -O2 and also turns on the -finline-functions and -frename-registers options.
None of the -O options in gcc allow for unsafe optimizations. For that you have to look at -ffast-math. And yes, math error checks are still done. Inlining can be very good but does lead to larger executables and thus a caching penalty. It's often not worth it. For math-heavy stuff it's usually better to rewrite your code so that the intesive stuff is vectorized.
Actually, I have the real article here (not the New Scientist rubbish), the one they published at a conference, and what they do is evolve a function that takes the input data and computes a priority for that page. Pages with low priority are flushed, pages with high priority stay cached. One of the interesting expressions they found was:
\
This was on data where the distance the document had travelled was taken into account. So, given some available input data they evolved a priority function (using GP) that servers as the center for a caching strategy. This with apparent great success.
Easy: consider an amoeba sitting in a soup with millions of its cousins. Now consider an amoeba starting to huddle closer and closer to these cousins. Now it starts to cuddle with its children. Finally consider an amoeba that makes identical copies to cuddle up to. Cousins, children, self. Gradual evolution from a lot of related single cellular organisms to a single multi-cellular one.
You seem to have missed out on Gecco in Seattle this year, where the guys in the article presented their paper. They nearly got the first prize in the GP track, but were beating by some researchers doing quantum programming using GP. What it boils down is that they evolved the priority function that was used in caching, i.e., the thing that makes the caching tick. So it was not a parameter optimization method they used, but a true induction of a priority function.
Interesting way to paraphrase it, but unfortunately hopelessly wrong. Natural selection is not about what survives, that is totally irrelevant. What reproduces is what it's about. There's still a tautology lurking there, granted: the one that reproduces best will have the most offspring. Still, also this needs some extra qualification. Reproduction alone is not enough: the children themselves need to be able to reproduce, otherwise reproduction is again a dead end street (creating only sterile offspring will not go far). So now we are at the definition of lifetime fecundity: the organism that gets most offspring that reach sexually (or reproductionally) mature age will take over. Only here the exponential starts taking off, and it has a less tautological ring to it.
Darwin himself went to great length in his Origin to explain the existence of ants. Having the majority of the population as sterile workers seems to contradict the theory of natural selection. Tautologies cannot be contradicted by evidence, yet ants seem to contradict natural selection. Maybe it's a theory and not a tautology? Darwin found an elegant way out of this by explaining that even though the ants themselves do not reproduce, they do create the environment in which their nieces (future queens) can.
Natural selection is not a tautology. When a few baseline ingredients are there it 'just happens'. Once these ingredients are absent, it doesn't. Some interesting experiments with self-replicators have been performed that identified that for natural selection to take off, initial diversity needs to be there. If not, the first replicator, for a large part irrespective of how inefficient it is, will take over the world. This you can call 'Survival of the firstest'. Also experiments have performed where a diverse set of self-replicators are competing: there you will see 'Survival of the fastest', i.e., the fastest self-replicator wins. Both phenomenon do not point at the open-endedness of evolution as we see in nature. Survival of the first would preclude evolution; survival of the fastest would preclude the existence of complex beings like mammals. For a tautology, it seems to be awfully hard to implement.
In effect: even at this point it is unclear how to make open-ended, self-diversifying evolution work. Genetic algorithms are too simple to do that, and even a system like Tierra stopped at some point.
What genetic algorithms do is indeed mimic the exponential growth that is present in the definition of lifetime fecundity; that is what makes the thing perform different from random search. Above average performing individuals will receive more offspring. If and only if this offspring is above average performing, the exponential will take off and the genetic material will take over the resources. Note that both the parents and the offspring need to be fit, implying that also the reproduction mechanism itself needs to be sensible. This is what most EC research is about. It is hardly tautological, but an interesting way to search. Truly open-endedness is not there in the algorithm, and in effect, using lots of degrees of freedom in representational flexibility usually doesn't pay off in solving a single problem.
Still, it's one hell of an optimizer: there's no necessity that the fitness (cost) function is continuous, let alone differentiable; it's 'embarassingly parallel', meaning it can run at a highly parallel machine without any significant overhead (linear scaling), and simply performs well for an astonishing range of applications.
Indeed, though Moore's law, combined with massively parallel hardware can make up for this. Evolutionary optimization is 'embarrasingly parallel', much unlike most other methods out there. Imagine a world in 10 years time with CPUs abiding Moore's law. Now imagine a beowulf cluster of these CPUs:). Now think of your heavy duty fitness function by today's standards running on such a machine. The problems with the complexity of the fitness function have dissappeared, simply because we can run it (a) faster, and (b) on many computers simultanuously.
I've seen this happen: I entered the EC field in 1994, was involved in a nuclear plant optimization project in 1996 (nothing fancy, just a question of efficient stacking). Evaluation of a single solution took 30 seconds back then. I reran the experiment half a year ago: time was down to half a second per evaluation, due to both speed increase of the processor and better optimization of the simulation software. I ran it on a cluster: results were there in half an hour while our initial experiments took a couple of weeks. It would be interesting to see what speed it runs 8 years from now, but I bet that what was barely feasible 8 years ago, and is reasonably tough now, is going to be a breeze a few years from now.
John Koza, from genetic programming fame, performs electrical circuit design. The simulator he uses, SPICE, takes quite a bit time to run. A few years ago Koza got himself a 1000 pentium cluster to run the experiments. Evaluation is run in parallel. He gets things done, even though every evaluation takes around 10 seconds. By today's standards, he could get the same computation power with 250 machines, or four times that power at the same cost. Remember that this power still does not even come close to the raw processing power of a human brain.
DE is hardly classic, considering that Evolution Strategies (working with floats) have their roots in the early sixties, developed before the bitstring Genetic Algorithm.
Next Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference in Seattle starting next week will have a special session focussed on Human Competitive Results obtained with evolutionary algorithms. In recent years, a number of results have been obtained with evolutionary computation that equal or exceed the performance of dedicated individuals applying itself to the task. One I saw recently is that with genetic programming a satellite antenna was designed that hopefully will gets its launch next January. Genetic Programming is also used to create quantum programs, a task humans have great difficulty with. There are a number of such results.
Interestingly enough, Peter Bentley's group results on car racing would not be considered human competitive, unless the results obtained in the simulation will be tried in the real world, or if the simulator is something experts actually use to shave of seconds. In any case, it seems the Evolutionary Computation world is starting to obtain very strong results, for a part due to Moore's law. It's possible that this is caused by the fact that the field simply tries to solve things, instead of first proving that it works (AI/ML), or proving that it doesn't work (Operations Research).
Knowing the Free University network, I highly doubt that it is slashdotted, more likely that someone just pulled the plug after the unwashed masses of/. came along. No fear, I've got a login onto the machine and got the following from ast's www dir. This is the text version, I've also got the html, but given that my homepage is on the same machine as Andy's, I doubt that it will be of much use for me to mirror it.
Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.1
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28 (and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then was compilers, since I was the chief designer of the the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (see Commun. of the ACM, vol. 26, pp. 654-660, Sept. 1983.). I spent some time there discussing compilers with Steve Johnson, networking with Greg Chesson, writing tools with Lorinda Cherry, and book authoring with Bri
You're absolutely right, but note however that what the grandparent calls 'Bayesian filtering' is referring to something that is more commonly known as 'naive Bayes': Bayesian inference with a set of extremely limiting assumptions. This technique is known in information retrieval as both the 'multinomial' and the 'multivariate' model of word frequency manipulation (which is which depends on how you store the evidence: only word occurrences or also word counts). In this sense, 'Bayesian filtering' is a very narrow subset of 'Bayesian inference' and its completely possible, and even quite likely, that latent semantical analysis subsumes it.
Not entirely true afaik. The enigma was the German encryption machine. He cracked the code (with help from those who captured these machines in the field). Funnily enough, the British, having access to the codes, didn't do much with the information that it provided, for fear that the Germans would figure out that they cracked it.
It wasn't exactly the removal of access that increased his depression, it probably had more to do with the forceful administration of hormones to cure his 'disease'. Due to these hormones he grew breasts. Not fun. That's the thanks he got for his war efforts and contributions to science.
Right, sure, warfare is a mess. But please tell me, who is it the US are actually at war at in Iraq currently? Saddam has been defeated for over a year now, officially declared so by the US president. There is no war, there's an occupation. There are no POW being tortured, they are civilians, picked up semi-randomly from the streets. Indeed, far worse has happened in the past, yet seldomly from the moral highground that
the US is claiming to occupy. Democracy and freedom by force and torture, now that's a weird experiment.
All depends on how long you're willing to pay these people to click adds. Once you have the script, you're done. Pay for electricity for one computer (instead of dozens), and for the next few years you are set. In the long run, the script is cheaper. Computer programs work like that: solve the problem once, and suddenly marginal costs dissapear. No matter how cheap labour is, it's hard to beat a single script on a single computer with a single connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Any winner that has less than a 5% margin with the runner-up is suspect. The only solution for that is a re-election. This is how they do presidential elections in France. A president is only elected after he won the vote with a sufficient margin. No, 3 votes won't do and neither would 536.
No big deal. Just print the exact vote in human readable form on the ballot as well and as soon as someone finds a single ballot where the barcode result (as displayed on a screen) differs from the readable form, throw the entire staff of the company that produces the machines in jail for twenty years.
Currently, you cannot record and distribute any song you want to, not even if you perform it yourself. The original writer of the song (or the corporation as the writer is dead for > 50 years) have the rights. These rights are neigh perpetual.
However, luckily we're still able to present and publish the theorems of calculus without paying royalties to the publishing houses that own these theorems. No doubt this will change soon. What use is a theorem if you can't charge for it? Welcome to a brave new world of intellectual property where everything you hear, feel or think is owned by someone. Music, movies, books, algorithms, sounds, smells, genes and undoubtedly in the future theorems.
Note that only F is not funded by the government, and only F gets paid for this work. Because Journal titles live mostly on reputation, holding a crucial journal in a field is for publisher F a gold-mine, as they can charge whatever they want. The authors will keep on writing for free, the editor will keep on working for free, the referees will keep on working for free, the libraries will still be paying F for actually putting it in print. There are some isolated cases where the complete editorial board of a journal got rid of the middle-man F, but generally this does not happen.
Needless to say, no problem under linux with the same hardware. Autodetected and working without a glitch. So can we now conclude that windows is not ready for the desktop?
[*] Funny corollary and displaying my ignorance about windows, in that same display, I came across an 'unknown driver' item. I thought that maybe I should get rid of that. Obviously I only later figured out that all drivers start out as 'unknown drivers' and thus in the infinitely subtle logic of ms-ware it proceeded to delete any and all drivers on my system. So back to the OEM CD's to install all drivers as windows wasn't even able to automatically find a proper driver for the screen, let alone sound, modem, ethernet, touchpad. Almost none of the hardware on that notebook was recognized by windows itself. It was all OEM programming that did the job.
Ah well, you do that once and then you learn.
Not really, how can you determine that the plain English or pseudo-code algorithm actually implements the things that are claimed? For anything but completely trivial stuff, you need to be able to run it to see if it actually does what is claimed. Check the words of Knuth: Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. . Maybe a mandatory reference implementation in a publically available language should become a prerequisite?
Historically, yes. Democratic wins tend to have a negative effect on the market. Likely this time? no. The reason is that usually Democrats are spenddrifts and Wallstreet doesn't like that. This time however, the Republican is the big spender and Wallstreet does not like a combined budget and trade deficit. Big government combined with tax-cuts is lethal. Republican victory this time would probably mean a big drop of the market as four more years of this policy could kill what's left of the economy. The Democrat couldn't conceivably do worse (though he might surprise us), so I would expect a reversal of the D/R reaction this year.
Hmm, funny this. Terrorists are simply criminals and should be tried in a regular court. Most of the people at Gitmo are picked up in Afghanistan and were often involved in the fighting. According to the definitions you gave them --- as long as they carried their arms openly --- that makes them prisoners of war. If they are also terrorists, that makes them criminals as well and they should additionally be tried in a regular court. No need to invent a whole new category of illegal combatants which you can torture as if they were spies. That indeed violates, if not invalidates, the Geneva convention.
However, if your version of "free speech" includes the freedom to prevent speech (such as Comcast is doing), then we're at the end of the discussion I think.
None of the -O options in gcc allow for unsafe optimizations. For that you have to look at -ffast-math. And yes, math error checks are still done. Inlining can be very good but does lead to larger executables and thus a caching penalty. It's often not worth it. For math-heavy stuff it's usually better to rewrite your code so that the intesive stuff is vectorized.
\ This was on data where the distance the document had travelled was taken into account. So, given some available input data they evolved a priority function (using GP) that servers as the center for a caching strategy. This with apparent great success.
Easy: consider an amoeba sitting in a soup with millions of its cousins. Now consider an amoeba starting to huddle closer and closer to these cousins. Now it starts to cuddle with its children. Finally consider an amoeba that makes identical copies to cuddle up to. Cousins, children, self. Gradual evolution from a lot of related single cellular organisms to a single multi-cellular one.
You seem to have missed out on Gecco in Seattle this year, where the guys in the article presented their paper. They nearly got the first prize in the GP track, but were beating by some researchers doing quantum programming using GP. What it boils down is that they evolved the priority function that was used in caching, i.e., the thing that makes the caching tick. So it was not a parameter optimization method they used, but a true induction of a priority function.
Darwin himself went to great length in his Origin to explain the existence of ants. Having the majority of the population as sterile workers seems to contradict the theory of natural selection. Tautologies cannot be contradicted by evidence, yet ants seem to contradict natural selection. Maybe it's a theory and not a tautology? Darwin found an elegant way out of this by explaining that even though the ants themselves do not reproduce, they do create the environment in which their nieces (future queens) can.
Natural selection is not a tautology. When a few baseline ingredients are there it 'just happens'. Once these ingredients are absent, it doesn't. Some interesting experiments with self-replicators have been performed that identified that for natural selection to take off, initial diversity needs to be there. If not, the first replicator, for a large part irrespective of how inefficient it is, will take over the world. This you can call 'Survival of the firstest'. Also experiments have performed where a diverse set of self-replicators are competing: there you will see 'Survival of the fastest', i.e., the fastest self-replicator wins. Both phenomenon do not point at the open-endedness of evolution as we see in nature. Survival of the first would preclude evolution; survival of the fastest would preclude the existence of complex beings like mammals. For a tautology, it seems to be awfully hard to implement. In effect: even at this point it is unclear how to make open-ended, self-diversifying evolution work. Genetic algorithms are too simple to do that, and even a system like Tierra stopped at some point.
What genetic algorithms do is indeed mimic the exponential growth that is present in the definition of lifetime fecundity; that is what makes the thing perform different from random search. Above average performing individuals will receive more offspring. If and only if this offspring is above average performing, the exponential will take off and the genetic material will take over the resources. Note that both the parents and the offspring need to be fit, implying that also the reproduction mechanism itself needs to be sensible. This is what most EC research is about. It is hardly tautological, but an interesting way to search. Truly open-endedness is not there in the algorithm, and in effect, using lots of degrees of freedom in representational flexibility usually doesn't pay off in solving a single problem. Still, it's one hell of an optimizer: there's no necessity that the fitness (cost) function is continuous, let alone differentiable; it's 'embarassingly parallel', meaning it can run at a highly parallel machine without any significant overhead (linear scaling), and simply performs well for an astonishing range of applications.
I've seen this happen: I entered the EC field in 1994, was involved in a nuclear plant optimization project in 1996 (nothing fancy, just a question of efficient stacking). Evaluation of a single solution took 30 seconds back then. I reran the experiment half a year ago: time was down to half a second per evaluation, due to both speed increase of the processor and better optimization of the simulation software. I ran it on a cluster: results were there in half an hour while our initial experiments took a couple of weeks. It would be interesting to see what speed it runs 8 years from now, but I bet that what was barely feasible 8 years ago, and is reasonably tough now, is going to be a breeze a few years from now.
John Koza, from genetic programming fame, performs electrical circuit design. The simulator he uses, SPICE, takes quite a bit time to run. A few years ago Koza got himself a 1000 pentium cluster to run the experiments. Evaluation is run in parallel. He gets things done, even though every evaluation takes around 10 seconds. By today's standards, he could get the same computation power with 250 machines, or four times that power at the same cost. Remember that this power still does not even come close to the raw processing power of a human brain.
DE is hardly classic, considering that Evolution Strategies (working with floats) have their roots in the early sixties, developed before the bitstring Genetic Algorithm.
Interestingly enough, Peter Bentley's group results on car racing would not be considered human competitive, unless the results obtained in the simulation will be tried in the real world, or if the simulator is something experts actually use to shave of seconds. In any case, it seems the Evolutionary Computation world is starting to obtain very strong results, for a part due to Moore's law. It's possible that this is caused by the fact that the field simply tries to solve things, instead of first proving that it works (AI/ML), or proving that it doesn't work (Operations Research).
Knowing the Free University network, I highly doubt that it is slashdotted, more likely that someone just pulled the plug after the unwashed masses of /. came along. No fear, I've got a login onto the machine and got the following from ast's www dir. This is the text version, I've also got the html, but given that my homepage is on the same machine as Andy's, I doubt that it will be of much use for me to mirror it.
Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.1
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28 (and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then was compilers, since I was the chief designer of the the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (see Commun. of the ACM, vol. 26, pp. 654-660, Sept. 1983.). I spent some time there discussing compilers with Steve Johnson, networking with Greg Chesson, writing tools with Lorinda Cherry, and book authoring with Bri
You're absolutely right, but note however that what the grandparent calls 'Bayesian filtering' is referring to something that is more commonly known as 'naive Bayes': Bayesian inference with a set of extremely limiting assumptions. This technique is known in information retrieval as both the 'multinomial' and the 'multivariate' model of word frequency manipulation (which is which depends on how you store the evidence: only word occurrences or also word counts). In this sense, 'Bayesian filtering' is a very narrow subset of 'Bayesian inference' and its completely possible, and even quite likely, that latent semantical analysis subsumes it.
Not entirely true afaik. The enigma was the German encryption machine. He cracked the code (with help from those who captured these machines in the field). Funnily enough, the British, having access to the codes, didn't do much with the information that it provided, for fear that the Germans would figure out that they cracked it.
It wasn't exactly the removal of access that increased his depression, it probably had more to do with the forceful administration of hormones to cure his 'disease'. Due to these hormones he grew breasts. Not fun. That's the thanks he got for his war efforts and contributions to science.
Funny, you know that even today he replies in the same rude manner?
Right, sure, warfare is a mess. But please tell me, who is it the US are actually at war at in Iraq currently? Saddam has been defeated for over a year now, officially declared so by the US president. There is no war, there's an occupation. There are no POW being tortured, they are civilians, picked up semi-randomly from the streets. Indeed, far worse has happened in the past, yet seldomly from the moral highground that the US is claiming to occupy. Democracy and freedom by force and torture, now that's a weird experiment.
All depends on how long you're willing to pay these people to click adds. Once you have the script, you're done. Pay for electricity for one computer (instead of dozens), and for the next few years you are set. In the long run, the script is cheaper. Computer programs work like that: solve the problem once, and suddenly marginal costs dissapear. No matter how cheap labour is, it's hard to beat a single script on a single computer with a single connection.