The reason behind the interest behind quantum computers is they have the potential to be exponentially faster. Here's an example that I've read. You have to find a name in a phone book. A regular computer has to search through in a more linear maner. Like you are going from the first page and so on. A quantum computer's manner of getting the answer is based upon probability, what's the likelihood that you'll open the phone book to the right page. In other words, you skip the intermediate steps of searching.
Bad example. A regular computer can do it in log2(N) operations or less. Most people do it in less.
Next time read a whole post before responding and think before you write. You won't sound so dumb that way.
But we are a very long way from that. Right now it takes enormously more effort to do the job with a quantum computer and it can only be done at all with very small numbers like 15. And the results show that hardware is not scalable. It's supposed to get the answer right 50% of the time and it only gets 48% in 150,000 runs. The 2% difference is significant and whatever the cause of that is, it's almost certain to not scale well:
If a 4 bit number gives you a 48% correct rate, that means that it gets the wrong answer 2% more often than it theoretically should. So the hardware is failing to work correctly conservatively 4% of the time. (Since only half the time can you tell that the hardware didn't perform as expected.). The machine has to be massively scaled up to get into the class that might be able to solve lengthy computing problems, and the hardware-dependent error rate is going to scale up at least exponentially with the number of bits. (Looks like it might be 99%^N.) If it's only that bad, the hardware CAN be scaled up to useful problems, like breaking 128-bit encryption with fewer trials than traditional methods.
That may be so, but computing the prime factorization of 15 is not in that class.
I don't think you should even get to call something a middle-school dropout can figure in his head faster than he can say "Fries with that?" computation. So-called quantum computers still barely qualify as expensive but useless toys.
Post again when a quantum computer can solve a real mathematical puzzle at a speed comparable to what a traditional computer can do. That would be news.
Scientists have been touting the supposedly vast potential of quantum computing for decades now. D-E-C-A-D-E-S. But thanks to fundamental limitations of the nature of what they are, it's really hard to get them to barely work at all. It appears we could forever be stuck at the point where the qubits can be minimally processed but quantum decoherence can't be held off long enough to get a useful result. Meanwhile traditional methods of computing continue to forge ahead, although the rate of increase is slowing. Just keep in mind: quantum computing is 2500 years behind traditional computing methods in general, 175 years behind automated mechanical methods and more than 70 years behind electronic computers.
Electronic computing methods overtook all other methods extremely quickly, but they faced only technical challenges not challenges posed by the fundamental nature of what they were trying to do. You can regard them in some ways as fancy abacuses: they literally count chunks of charge the way an abacus uses the position of beads to represent numbers (or in principle anything else). With qubits, you are attempting to get definite results by exploiting the indefinite character of things like the spin states of electrons. That's not just hard. It may be intractably hard. But if somebody can get it to work it might be very valuable to the NSA and anybody else interested in cracking the security of computing systems.
But, pinko commie open source was going to kill the software industry and leave all of us software engineers starving. How could it actually contribute to the growth of the industry?
From the article:
"Open source software tools will continue to erode revenue for some AD categories in design, testing, and web development," said Mr. Raina. "This is being driven primarily by the success of Eclipse and NetBeans, as well as by overall revitalization of the market by new small software providers looking for technical and market-disruptive approaches for offering products. Limited budgets and economic conditions compelling enough to focus on cost reduction also fuel the use of open-source software in various development projects."
It says open source is eroding revenue. That's consistent with the general trend of not doing good things for the revenue side of the software industry. Nobody said open source would stop development. It just is making it harder for a lot of companies to make money. But it's enabling different people to make money. It's not clear to me that they are by and large making money at it without violating at least the spirit if not the letter of the open-source licenses they're using.
Here's an anecdotal data point to augment yours: Nobody I know under the age of 40 has bought a new PC in the last several years. When their old PCs die, they replace them with iPads.
You don't know any people in college or with kids in college, do you?
Also, Microsoft does operating systems, which are not counted as "applications" and services.
Oracle, which does pretty much only applications, had sales around $37B.
If mobile app development is at $9B it's still WAY behind desktop/laptop software sales.
I think this is largely because sales are hampered by the platforms (iOS and Android). You buy through their markets, which are dominated by shitty apps that with very limited functionality that no users will pay for, which is why they're offered free and financed either by spyware functionality or annoying web ads or both. How much are you willing to pay for an application that you assume is probably crapware, compared to how much people regularly shell out for Photoshop or Microsoft Office or enterprise applications from Oracle?
They're also hampered by the nature of the devices themselves. They're too small and not powerful enough for photo and video editing, have clumsy interfaces compared to even a laptop, are useless for coding and close to that for calculations. (You can barely work a spreadsheet on an iPad, let along a smart phone.) They have their uses, but the replacement for a laptop or a desktop computer, if you use them as general purpose computers and not ONLY as an ebook and portable web appliance, is another laptop or desktop computer.
It can be less than expenditures if you export. Say your worthy country has just one industry: making and exporting software. If you paid your staff 40% of gross receipts, paid 10% in taxes and operating expenses you've got 50% left in profit. As I said, the country has only one industry, so you import everything the citizens consume. That subtracts from GDP. Stash the rest of your of the money in offshore accounts. Voila!
The way I read it is that they skipped evaluating one particular patent because they thought it was probably invalid because of prior art and didn't think it was worth their time even considering that patent, so they went on to considering other patents where they could understand the claims and the prior art situation better. I didn't see a blanket statement that they ignored prior art.
It only affects the fossile fuel trade. That is a side effect, but a positive one.
Great. So everybody's fuel is more expensive. This is supposed by stupid little shit "hacktivists" to be a benefit. And you may get a copy of their shitty little virus on your computer or it may affect a computer with which you do business, interfering with your life and possibly compromising your data security.
Let these little asswipes come out of the closet, grow something useful on top of their brainstems and if they still feel like Aramco has something that needs to be dealt with, deal with it in a responsible way like adults instead of vandalizing computers anonymously.
Defining digital freedom isn't new, so maybe the GOP should look to the four freedoms of the GPL:
* the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
* the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
* the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
* the freedom to share the changes you make.
Of course that doesn't fit with controlling your neighbors morality or allowing corporations to own the internet.
It doesn't include much provision for software companies to exist at all. So no political party is going to support it. And no government is going to support it either, in any broad sense.
In various financial articles I read today, it said that the typical P/E ratio was market dependent. So if that's true, you can't reasonably compare the P/E of an electronics company with that of an oil company.
Great, you don't like them. So lets infect their computers with destructive viruses that can also damage the computers of other people we have no problem with. This is not like spraying Aramco Sux on a wall. It affects innocent third parties.
Its the same standard puritans have used for 400 years. Lance is a witch! We saw him do magic nd cast evil spells that made him fly on that abroomstick he calls a bicycle. Drug tests never found any results because he bewitched the testers with frog blood and bat urine.
Apples and oranges. You should compare sperm production to egg viability. Egg viability is best in young women. And as for women somehow sexually peaking in their late thirties, all that deserves is a big belly laugh. Every man knows different.
They're valued at $665/share. Their profit last year was $42.55/share. Invest your money in Apple and you have a good chance of making 6.4% ROI. That's not bad, but IMO Exxon is a better bet.
No. If Exxon stopped pumping oil, other companies would take up the slack. There would be a big price surge though and regional shortages before new supply chains could be implemented.
That presumes he knows when you wrote each line of code. If your boss knows that he's micromanaging you past the point of obsession. And you need a new job.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason behind the interest behind quantum computers is they have the potential to be exponentially faster. Here's an example that I've read. You have to find a name in a phone book. A regular computer has to search through in a more linear maner. Like you are going from the first page and so on. A quantum computer's manner of getting the answer is based upon probability, what's the likelihood that you'll open the phone book to the right page. In other words, you skip the intermediate steps of searching.
Bad example. A regular computer can do it in log2(N) operations or less. Most people do it in less.
Next time read a whole post before responding and think before you write. You won't sound so dumb that way.
Close enough for government work.
Did you count that with a quantum computer, because by traditional methods I get 5 words 100% of the time.
But we are a very long way from that. Right now it takes enormously more effort to do the job with a quantum computer and it can only be done at all with very small numbers like 15. And the results show that hardware is not scalable. It's supposed to get the answer right 50% of the time and it only gets 48% in 150,000 runs. The 2% difference is significant and whatever the cause of that is, it's almost certain to not scale well:
If a 4 bit number gives you a 48% correct rate, that means that it gets the wrong answer 2% more often than it theoretically should. So the hardware is failing to work correctly conservatively 4% of the time. (Since only half the time can you tell that the hardware didn't perform as expected.). The machine has to be massively scaled up to get into the class that might be able to solve lengthy computing problems, and the hardware-dependent error rate is going to scale up at least exponentially with the number of bits. (Looks like it might be 99%^N.) If it's only that bad, the hardware CAN be scaled up to useful problems, like breaking 128-bit encryption with fewer trials than traditional methods.
That may be so, but computing the prime factorization of 15 is not in that class.
I don't think you should even get to call something a middle-school dropout can figure in his head faster than he can say "Fries with that?" computation. So-called quantum computers still barely qualify as expensive but useless toys.
Post again when a quantum computer can solve a real mathematical puzzle at a speed comparable to what a traditional computer can do. That would be news.
Scientists have been touting the supposedly vast potential of quantum computing for decades now. D-E-C-A-D-E-S. But thanks to fundamental limitations of the nature of what they are, it's really hard to get them to barely work at all. It appears we could forever be stuck at the point where the qubits can be minimally processed but quantum decoherence can't be held off long enough to get a useful result. Meanwhile traditional methods of computing continue to forge ahead, although the rate of increase is slowing. Just keep in mind: quantum computing is 2500 years behind traditional computing methods in general, 175 years behind automated mechanical methods and more than 70 years behind electronic computers.
Electronic computing methods overtook all other methods extremely quickly, but they faced only technical challenges not challenges posed by the fundamental nature of what they were trying to do. You can regard them in some ways as fancy abacuses: they literally count chunks of charge the way an abacus uses the position of beads to represent numbers (or in principle anything else). With qubits, you are attempting to get definite results by exploiting the indefinite character of things like the spin states of electrons. That's not just hard. It may be intractably hard. But if somebody can get it to work it might be very valuable to the NSA and anybody else interested in cracking the security of computing systems.
But, pinko commie open source was going to kill the software industry and leave all of us software engineers starving. How could it actually contribute to the growth of the industry?
From the article:
"Open source software tools will continue to erode revenue for some AD categories in design, testing, and web development," said Mr. Raina. "This is being driven primarily by the success of Eclipse and NetBeans, as well as by overall revitalization of the market by new small software providers looking for technical and market-disruptive approaches for offering products. Limited budgets and economic conditions compelling enough to focus on cost reduction also fuel the use of open-source software in various development projects."
It says open source is eroding revenue. That's consistent with the general trend of not doing good things for the revenue side of the software industry. Nobody said open source would stop development. It just is making it harder for a lot of companies to make money. But it's enabling different people to make money. It's not clear to me that they are by and large making money at it without violating at least the spirit if not the letter of the open-source licenses they're using.
Here's an anecdotal data point to augment yours: Nobody I know under the age of 40 has bought a new PC in the last several years. When their old PCs die, they replace them with iPads.
You don't know any people in college or with kids in college, do you?
Also, Microsoft does operating systems, which are not counted as "applications" and services.
Oracle, which does pretty much only applications, had sales around $37B.
If mobile app development is at $9B it's still WAY behind desktop/laptop software sales.
I think this is largely because sales are hampered by the platforms (iOS and Android). You buy through their markets, which are dominated by shitty apps that with very limited functionality that no users will pay for, which is why they're offered free and financed either by spyware functionality or annoying web ads or both. How much are you willing to pay for an application that you assume is probably crapware, compared to how much people regularly shell out for Photoshop or Microsoft Office or enterprise applications from Oracle?
They're also hampered by the nature of the devices themselves. They're too small and not powerful enough for photo and video editing, have clumsy interfaces compared to even a laptop, are useless for coding and close to that for calculations. (You can barely work a spreadsheet on an iPad, let along a smart phone.) They have their uses, but the replacement for a laptop or a desktop computer, if you use them as general purpose computers and not ONLY as an ebook and portable web appliance, is another laptop or desktop computer.
It can be less than expenditures if you export. Say your worthy country has just one industry: making and exporting software. If you paid your staff 40% of gross receipts, paid 10% in taxes and operating expenses you've got 50% left in profit. As I said, the country has only one industry, so you import everything the citizens consume. That subtracts from GDP. Stash the rest of your of the money in offshore accounts. Voila!
The way I read it is that they skipped evaluating one particular patent because they thought it was probably invalid because of prior art and didn't think it was worth their time even considering that patent, so they went on to considering other patents where they could understand the claims and the prior art situation better. I didn't see a blanket statement that they ignored prior art.
Global warming is moving in from the seas over 100-300 years. Nobody dies.
More hurricanes, droughts, floods.
And wars over farmland and fresh water.
It only affects the fossile fuel trade. That is a side effect, but a positive one.
Great. So everybody's fuel is more expensive. This is supposed by stupid little shit "hacktivists" to be a benefit. And you may get a copy of their shitty little virus on your computer or it may affect a computer with which you do business, interfering with your life and possibly compromising your data security.
Let these little asswipes come out of the closet, grow something useful on top of their brainstems and if they still feel like Aramco has something that needs to be dealt with, deal with it in a responsible way like adults instead of vandalizing computers anonymously.
Defining digital freedom isn't new, so maybe the GOP should look to the four freedoms of the GPL:
* the freedom to use the software for any purpose, * the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, * the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and * the freedom to share the changes you make.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html
Of course that doesn't fit with controlling your neighbors morality or allowing corporations to own the internet.
It doesn't include much provision for software companies to exist at all. So no political party is going to support it. And no government is going to support it either, in any broad sense.
You forgot......
4. Profit!!!
Only ONE step to downmodding on Slashdot: fail to express sufficient contempt for any agency of the US government mentioned in any article.
In various financial articles I read today, it said that the typical P/E ratio was market dependent. So if that's true, you can't reasonably compare the P/E of an electronics company with that of an oil company.
Yet every investor DOES.
Great, you don't like them. So lets infect their computers with destructive viruses that can also damage the computers of other people we have no problem with. This is not like spraying Aramco Sux on a wall. It affects innocent third parties.
Mod up!
Its the same standard puritans have used for 400 years. Lance is a witch! We saw him do magic nd cast evil spells that made him fly on that abroomstick he calls a bicycle. Drug tests never found any results because he bewitched the testers with frog blood and bat urine.
Apples and oranges. You should compare sperm production to egg viability. Egg viability is best in young women. And as for women somehow sexually peaking in their late thirties, all that deserves is a big belly laugh. Every man knows different.
They're valued at $665/share. Their profit last year was $42.55/share. Invest your money in Apple and you have a good chance of making 6.4% ROI. That's not bad, but IMO Exxon is a better bet.
Apple runs at a PE of 15.63 currently. What multiple do you think investors ought to be willing to pay for a mature company?
Exxon trades at a multiple of 9.27. Very reasonable for a company that can't expect sales growth.
No. If Exxon stopped pumping oil, other companies would take up the slack. There would be a big price surge though and regional shortages before new supply chains could be implemented.
No, it's better to get him before he acts. He has already committed a crime by threatening his superior officers.
That presumes he knows when you wrote each line of code. If your boss knows that he's micromanaging you past the point of obsession. And you need a new job.