but has anyone taken into consideration that the earth has been warming up steadily for the past several thousand years?...the Earth fluctuates quite frequently (geologic time) in temperature... We very well may be causing this, which would be bad, but what if we are not?
Yes, the earth has been warming. The issue that is being raised here, however, is not the general warming trend, but the rate of warming. The claim (and there is an slowly increasing amount of data to back it up) is that the rate of warming has undergone a very dramatic increase in the last 100 years that is unprecendented in recent history (last 1000 years or so). The sudden rise correlates well with dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 from the industrial revolution onward, and there are studies on the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere that lend creedence to a causal rather than just correlated relationship.
Yes the planet goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, and over time it can indeed fluctuate over huge temperatures. The risk is that we are disturbing the natural fluctuation and pushing the system out of its rough equilibrium. Systems often have tipping (bifurcation) points that can radically alter the behaviour of the system. A pendulum naturally swings back and forth steadily, but give it a hard enough push and it just starts spinning round and round. In essence we are giving the pendulum of warming and cooling a very strong push. Whether the pendulum will simply swing a little higher then settle back, or go over the top and start spinning in just one direction is certainly up for debate. Possibilities for feedback systems and induced dampening given the manner of warming are almost innumerable, and we are still working to understand the most obvious candidates well. There isn't reason to panic yet, but there is most certainly reason for concern.
COSA solves the nastiest problem of complex software programs: blind code or unresolved data dependencies. That is, something is modified in one part of the program unbeknownst to another. This makes it almost impossible to modify complex code without introducing dangerous and unforeseen side effects. The second greatest cause of unreliability is non-deterministic timing. COSA solves this problem through synchronicity.
I'm pretty sure a purely functional language like Haskell or ML will solve both those problems for you very elegantly while still remaining much more amenable to explicit analysis, and using the same sort of programming methods currently in use. Neither Haskell nor ML claim to provide 100% reliability (because they don't). They do claim (justifiably) to reduce errors somewhat.
All other programming problems are, as Fred Brooks put it, are accidental and can be easily dealt with using traditional methods.
Yes, traditional methods are doing a fabulous job of eliminating all accidental bugs from software - no wait, they aren't. Not handling side effects or execution order can be "accidents" too - if you do it "right" you won't have a problem.
I don't see any real guarantees of reliability here, and the points you do cite are already well covered by other programming techniques.
COSA is revolutionary because it guarantees 100% reliability. No other model comes close.
Can you provide me the link that actually justifies this claim. Reading through the page doesn't offer anything that would seem to justify this other than claims that programs "will be simple" if COSA is used - for which there seem to be absolutely no guarantees.
Compare that to CCS or CSP which actually provides an algebra via which you can logially reason about the system and hence formally mathematically prove things about the system... I don't see how COSA offers anything comparable - unless I've missed something.
He has a point actually: If you don't really understand the problem, or can't really explain or define what is needed then "building one to throw away" is actually a worthwhile process (of course you want to use a rapid prototyping language for that). It's just a potential phase of the design process (step 1 - work out what the hell it is you want to be designing anyway). I wouldn't advocate throwing said prototype into production, but as a model to better understand what it is you're actually trying to create, and what requirements should eb specified, it has some value. If you can't clearly articulate the problem, then carefully designing the "solution" isn't really going to get you very far.
If you think I'm advocating slapdash programming then please read the link in my sig.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against formal methods (click the link in my sig and read my journal if you don't believe me). I'm just trying to point out that formal methods are not a solution to everything. They're great, and a very powerful tool to have on hand. I'm just trying to argue that they can and should be used where appropriate rather than as a "fix everything" hammer.
Formal method advocates (and I am one!) need to realise that claiming formal methods as the ultimate solution is actually counterproductive. I would suggest you'll find far more converts by simply arguing that formal methods and formal specification is a faulous tool that developers ought to learn for those projects that happen to need or benefit from it. Once people actually learn a bit about it they'll see how many projects could benefit from some level of formal specification that aren't currently using it.
"Formal methods aren't right for everything, but if you're a serious software engineer you owe it to yourself to learn how to use them for when you strike a project that can benefit"
Why not have the specification be primarily graphical, as in interface builders, flowcharts and object relationship diagrams, then go directly to a low-level representation such as object code, machine language or bytecode with no traditional semi-readable character-based language at all?
Because at its heart programming and computing is just mathematics, and hence requirements for a program or computation are mathematical requirements. While you can do a lot with category theoretic diagrams some things are just more easily expressed in terms of algebraic and logical symbolic expressions. There is a reason most specification langauges ground themselves in terms of foundational mathematics: Z uses axiomatic set theory, CASL uses universal algebra. Diagrams are nice, and category theory is useful, for instance, in defining logic extensions for CASL, but in the end mathematical symbol pushing is still required on some level.
From a quick reading it sounds a lot like (in terms of stucture - not the visual development method) what Object Oriented Programming was originally supposed to be: synchronous independent process objects that communicate over channels by passing messages. Could be interesting to see how well this works out. It sounds like they are expecting a little much in the way of simplification to naturally occur from handling things this way though. I am dubious as to whether they will actually achieve the lofty accomplishments they claim.
In practice it has a very clean and elegant syntax though. If your editor doesn't do bracket matching you might have a few issues, but then what sort of half assed editor are you using?
Besides you can always try ML or Haskell which are much more pure functional than LISP and have hardly any parentheses (which I actually find occasionally irritating).
A programming method that involves designing an application such that you break each top level logical component/ability down until you a) know that you have to impliment it or b) it is found to have already been done.
That already exists, and the specification is indeed amenable to proof tools (several specification languages use HOL as their proof assistant even!). Check out B-method, HasCASL, SPARK, Extended ML, or even Z and VDM. There are tools like Perfect Developer. There are specification extensions to Java like JML that support extended static checking and proof via other tools.
Uptake has been slow, and the tools associated with this stuff are still maturing (despite the fact that formal specification is a relatively old field - tracing it's way back to Djikstra and Hoare in the late 60's). Doing specification properly tends to require a little more math background, and does take some work. More importantly, for a great many projects, it simply isn't suitable. There is no magic process you can follow that makes everything work, and there is no "final" programming model. There are whatever mix of techniques and models suit the project at hand. Good developers are ones who know lots of models and techniques and adapt them to best fit the problems at hand.
That said, specification is sorely underrated and underused as a programming technique. Too few people are well acquainted with it, and almost all the complaints that often get raised are based on myths and misnomers. It's not right for everything, but there are plenty of places where perhaps it could and should be used. Knowing how to do proper formal specification is simply another weapon in a good developers arsenal, and I wish more people spent the little extra time required to learn something about it.
I wonder how long it will take until we will see some programming models that are more specification oriented, then just being another type of implementation oriented way of programming.
From what I can tell, a long time. Developers seem stringly averse to specification based techniques. Bring the subject up and watch them howl about how impractical it is and how much extra needless work it requires.
Is specification right for every project? No. It is something that deserves a place in the development toolkit though. You wouldn't use OO, or scripting languages for every project either - each is just a different tool suited to different tasks. I agree with you: I wish more developers would take the time to learn how specification oriented programming works and properly understand its benefits and its costs. There is most definitely a place for it, but you'll never know when it would be good to apply if you don't spend the time learning how to do it.
Have a look at some specifiation languages like Z and CASL, and actually learn what they have to offer. Then you can better understand when they might be useful or applicable.
One way publishers get around that is by introducing new editions of text books every year, which differ only by incorporating the errata fixes, and different homework problems.
The math department where I did my undergrad suffered from this. They threatened the publisher with changing texts and eventually negotiated a deal where the publisher would continue to publish an out of print edition (that is, the edition from the previous year) for the university for a fixed period of time (5 years). That deal is coming up for renegotiation - it will be interesting to hear how that works out.
Depending on the text there is a good model available. Publish the book online for free. No, really. The text for my algebraic topology course was chosen for precisely that reason: students wouldn't have to fork over $100 for a text for a 1 semester course.
How does the author get anything out of this? Surprisingly enough a number of students (including myself) purchased a copy of the book by the time the course was over. Sure, it wasn't the whole class, but there were a number of people. Why did I buy the book when I could have it for free? Because a nicely bound hardcopy is a very nice thing to have in the future as a reference to the subject. A PDF on computer, or a printout is just not the same. And having used the text for the course, I realised it was actually a very good text for the subject matter. In general those who didn't buy the book were people who didn't expect to ever see or refer to algebraic topology again.
I suspect, though I admit I have no hard numbers, that the author actally makes more money distributing the free version - it makes it a much more attractive option as a text for a course, and those who go on in the subject are likely to buy the book. Certainly you won't make as much money on, say, a first year calculus textbook this way - too small a percentage of the class is going to go on in calc to bother buying the book. That doesn't mean the author couldn't make a living at it. I don't think anyone has tried yet, so we just don't know.
The math department where I did my undergrad were annoyed by the "edition" treadmill for their textbook of choice (a new editions every year!), forcing students to buy new editions and killing the second hand trade. They actually had a long dispute with the publisher and threatened to change to a different text. The publisher relented and agreed to continue publication of the current edition (which is now out of print everywhere else) for a fixed period (I believe it was 5 years). This was done to save the students money.
That fixed term is about to expire, by the way. It will be interesting if the publisher is willing to renegotiate the same (or a similar) deal. If not I gather the department fully intends to switch texts - they have been evaluating other options.
My advice for people wanting to get into information security is to tune up your mathematics skills. In everything from cryptology (design to implementation) through to secure system programming and even information theory, having a solid grasp of modern mathematics (axiomatic set theory and modern algebra) can make a huge difference.
Perhaps they mean something different by "Infosec" (the fact that the book has the word "skillz" in the title is perhaps a hint), but from my experience a solid background in advanced mathematics is invaluable.
There seems to be a lot of this "Firefox had it first, IE is just copying Firefox" type coments going around. But why not copy good features from other applications?
I think the issue is more that, for long time while firefox was still growing in popularity, there was a great deal of inertia from MS to add/copy those features, and there were a number of high profile comments from MS execs (such as the one from Gates in the GPP) that the features were not significant, not worthwhile, and IE didn't need them.
A year or two on, and these features are now in a new release of IE that's been hustled out the door. It's not the copying of features that is at issue, its the blatant copying of features that had been dismissed as useless and insignificant and unrequired by MS for quite some - and the touting of these features as the new great innovations from MS.
It's not the copying of features, its the obvious dishonesty and sudden turnaround (for what appear to be completely profit driven, rather than user experience driven reasons) that piss people off. Yes companies are entitled to only care about profit. People are entitled to not think very highly of companies if when they do that.
Yes, stuff that can be spun for the purposes of nationalism, religion, politics, or racism have always been problems. Nationalism gets inserted into all kinds of articles about history, archaeology, language, etc. Religious spin is creeping into everything.
For me Wikipedia's strongest area has been the math and science pages, which don't seem to suffer from anywhere near the same kind of issues. Perhaps it's because the math pages I use and contribute to are all obscure so vandals don't go there, but in general a lot of the math pages are actually pretty well written for a quick overview and provides a useful quick reference for terms I'm less familiar with (because they're slightly outside my field).
...will they produce something more interesting than what Hollywood makes?..wouldn't be hard, really.
They are only writing the screenplays, not making the films. Hollywood can butcher a screenplay six ways from Sunday without a moment's thought. I gather the screenplay for "The Island" actually resembled a somewhat thoughtful SF story before Michael Bay and his production team got a hold of it. They can write and brilliant creative and interesting a screenplay as they like, unless it happens to fall into the right hands the first act in the production of the film will be to suck all the creative and interesting elements out of it to make the usual bland lowest common denominator that studio execs can feel safe about.
Will they omit the part of the movie where the highly trained scientist/engineer's job is shipped off to India? Or will they just cut to the chase and produce the movies themselves in Bollywood?
Just do a movie about scientists and engineers working for NSA or similar. When the US starts shipping those jobs to India they will be serious trouble indeed.
if you see what's on tv, you'll find so many shows dedicated to doctors (ER, grey's acadamy, chicago hope) lawyers (law and order: special victims unit, criminal intent, trial by jury) and cops (CSI miami, ny).
you never hear anyone even mention engineers in movies or tv series.
Well there is "Numb3rs" (is that a dumb title or what?!) which does actually do some math. Admittedly it's in a crime drama setting, but there is a reasonable amount of emphasis on the math. As a mathematician myself I would have to say the show is... surprisingly not bad in terms of math content. I've grown use to any math in TV and films to be truly cringe inducing. While what they do in Numb3rs is completely unrealistic and vastly simplified they usually have the core idea right, and they obviously have a mathematician consulting because while the math dialogue (and blackboards) can be a little clunky (as in, a mathematician wouldn't say it quite like that) at times it is actually almost always on point and meaningful.
Is the show actually any good? Well it could be worse, and I try to be positive about it because at least someone is trying...
This service is more akin to froogle than to straight google - it's abotu comparison shopping ove r the various different pay to download services. To their credit they bother to let you comparison shop not just on price, but on format and DRM/license restrictions. This isn't a replacement for finding your favourite illegal download, it is potentially a replacement for just running your search on iTMS for that song you want to buy.
They actually encourage you to try a search on copyrighted materials (i.e. Coldplay), but if you do, it gives you a list of fee-based audio services where you can buy the song(s).
Sure, but they provide a nice overview. The coldplay seach for instance gives you this (after you select a specific track). Now not only is there a free download version via ArtistDirect, it provides a nice pricing guide for comparison shopping (with both buy and download and subscription options priced), as well as actually listing salient features for the different services offering pay download, salient features being: Format (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc.), Platform (Looks like Win or Mac only), "Burn to CD" and "Copy" which presumably is details on the DRM and license restrictions. If I want to buy music online (and apparently many people do) then being able to get and overview like that with pricing, format and DRM options all listed for quick reference counts as a very good thing.
It may not suit your needs, but it does look like an interesting service.
If a company can be sued over it in China, where copyright restrictions are very lax, how successful will Yahoo! be in implementing this here in a country where copyrights are taken much more seriously?
Pretty successful. Have you actually tried it? It doesn't take you to illegal free copies, it provides links to copies to buy.
For instance, searching for a semi-obscure ambient band that I quite like turned up lots of hits. Selecting a track takes you to this page which tells you various places you can buy and download it. It's quite a nice service really - think of it as akin iTMS search that runs over multiple different major music stores and provides options, or Froogle for downloadable music. Excellent if you like hard to find music (that often isn't in CD stores) like myself, or even if you simply want to shop around (though 99c seems to be the rate pretty much everywhere, so comparison shopping is limited). I could definitely see this catching on.
Way to go Yahoo! you actually came up with someting interesting and new for a change.
You got it right when you said "it might as well be a batch script." These are just Monad scripts running on the system, just like batch files, perl scripts, Cygwin bash scripts, Ruby scripts, etc.
Yes but you must remember that F-Secure are a bunch of alarmist gits who will jump at any opportunity to seed panic with regard to threats of viruses, hackers, "cyberterrorists" (if such a thing even exists), and whatever else they can dream up. Read through a decent sampling of their past press releases and you'll get the idea.
Certainly there are potential issues, but I don't think there's really anything to panic about yet.
Infinity plus anything still equals infinity. Infinity minus anything still equals infinity. It can have boundaries and be infinite.
I think hyperbolic space provides a good example of this actually. It is an infinite space that is bounded. It's an odd concept at first, but actually makes a lot of sense once you get your head around it.
Slashdot Mirror
but has anyone taken into consideration that the earth has been warming up steadily for the past several thousand years?...the Earth fluctuates quite frequently (geologic time) in temperature... We very well may be causing this, which would be bad, but what if we are not?
Yes, the earth has been warming. The issue that is being raised here, however, is not the general warming trend, but the rate of warming. The claim (and there is an slowly increasing amount of data to back it up) is that the rate of warming has undergone a very dramatic increase in the last 100 years that is unprecendented in recent history (last 1000 years or so). The sudden rise correlates well with dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 from the industrial revolution onward, and there are studies on the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere that lend creedence to a causal rather than just correlated relationship.
Yes the planet goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, and over time it can indeed fluctuate over huge temperatures. The risk is that we are disturbing the natural fluctuation and pushing the system out of its rough equilibrium. Systems often have tipping (bifurcation) points that can radically alter the behaviour of the system. A pendulum naturally swings back and forth steadily, but give it a hard enough push and it just starts spinning round and round. In essence we are giving the pendulum of warming and cooling a very strong push. Whether the pendulum will simply swing a little higher then settle back, or go over the top and start spinning in just one direction is certainly up for debate. Possibilities for feedback systems and induced dampening given the manner of warming are almost innumerable, and we are still working to understand the most obvious candidates well. There isn't reason to panic yet, but there is most certainly reason for concern.
Jedidiah.
COSA solves the nastiest problem of complex software programs: blind code or unresolved data dependencies. That is, something is modified in one part of the program unbeknownst to another. This makes it almost impossible to modify complex code without introducing dangerous and unforeseen side effects. The second greatest cause of unreliability is non-deterministic timing. COSA solves this problem through synchronicity.
I'm pretty sure a purely functional language like Haskell or ML will solve both those problems for you very elegantly while still remaining much more amenable to explicit analysis, and using the same sort of programming methods currently in use. Neither Haskell nor ML claim to provide 100% reliability (because they don't). They do claim (justifiably) to reduce errors somewhat.
All other programming problems are, as Fred Brooks put it, are accidental and can be easily dealt with using traditional methods.
Yes, traditional methods are doing a fabulous job of eliminating all accidental bugs from software - no wait, they aren't. Not handling side effects or execution order can be "accidents" too - if you do it "right" you won't have a problem.
I don't see any real guarantees of reliability here, and the points you do cite are already well covered by other programming techniques.
Jedidiah.
COSA is revolutionary because it guarantees 100% reliability. No other model comes close.
Can you provide me the link that actually justifies this claim. Reading through the page doesn't offer anything that would seem to justify this other than claims that programs "will be simple" if COSA is used - for which there seem to be absolutely no guarantees.
Compare that to CCS or CSP which actually provides an algebra via which you can logially reason about the system and hence formally mathematically prove things about the system... I don't see how COSA offers anything comparable - unless I've missed something.
Jedidiah.
He has a point actually: If you don't really understand the problem, or can't really explain or define what is needed then "building one to throw away" is actually a worthwhile process (of course you want to use a rapid prototyping language for that). It's just a potential phase of the design process (step 1 - work out what the hell it is you want to be designing anyway). I wouldn't advocate throwing said prototype into production, but as a model to better understand what it is you're actually trying to create, and what requirements should eb specified, it has some value. If you can't clearly articulate the problem, then carefully designing the "solution" isn't really going to get you very far.
If you think I'm advocating slapdash programming then please read the link in my sig.
Jedidiah.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against formal methods (click the link in my sig and read my journal if you don't believe me). I'm just trying to point out that formal methods are not a solution to everything. They're great, and a very powerful tool to have on hand. I'm just trying to argue that they can and should be used where appropriate rather than as a "fix everything" hammer.
Formal method advocates (and I am one!) need to realise that claiming formal methods as the ultimate solution is actually counterproductive. I would suggest you'll find far more converts by simply arguing that formal methods and formal specification is a faulous tool that developers ought to learn for those projects that happen to need or benefit from it. Once people actually learn a bit about it they'll see how many projects could benefit from some level of formal specification that aren't currently using it.
"Formal methods aren't right for everything, but if you're a serious software engineer you owe it to yourself to learn how to use them for when you strike a project that can benefit"
is a much better tack to take IMHO.
Jedidiah.
Why not have the specification be primarily graphical, as in interface builders, flowcharts and object relationship diagrams, then go directly to a low-level representation such as object code, machine language or bytecode with no traditional semi-readable character-based language at all?
Because at its heart programming and computing is just mathematics, and hence requirements for a program or computation are mathematical requirements. While you can do a lot with category theoretic diagrams some things are just more easily expressed in terms of algebraic and logical symbolic expressions. There is a reason most specification langauges ground themselves in terms of foundational mathematics: Z uses axiomatic set theory, CASL uses universal algebra. Diagrams are nice, and category theory is useful, for instance, in defining logic extensions for CASL, but in the end mathematical symbol pushing is still required on some level.
Jedidiah.
From a quick reading it sounds a lot like (in terms of stucture - not the visual development method) what Object Oriented Programming was originally supposed to be: synchronous independent process objects that communicate over channels by passing messages. Could be interesting to see how well this works out. It sounds like they are expecting a little much in the way of simplification to naturally occur from handling things this way though. I am dubious as to whether they will actually achieve the lofty accomplishments they claim.
Jedidiah.
LISP: Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses.
In practice it has a very clean and elegant syntax though. If your editor doesn't do bracket matching you might have a few issues, but then what sort of half assed editor are you using?
Besides you can always try ML or Haskell which are much more pure functional than LISP and have hardly any parentheses (which I actually find occasionally irritating).
Jedidiah.
A programming method that involves designing an application such that you break each top level logical component/ability down until you a) know that you have to impliment it or b) it is found to have already been done.
That already exists, and the specification is indeed amenable to proof tools (several specification languages use HOL as their proof assistant even!). Check out B-method, HasCASL, SPARK, Extended ML, or even Z and VDM. There are tools like Perfect Developer. There are specification extensions to Java like JML that support extended static checking and proof via other tools.
Uptake has been slow, and the tools associated with this stuff are still maturing (despite the fact that formal specification is a relatively old field - tracing it's way back to Djikstra and Hoare in the late 60's). Doing specification properly tends to require a little more math background, and does take some work. More importantly, for a great many projects, it simply isn't suitable. There is no magic process you can follow that makes everything work, and there is no "final" programming model. There are whatever mix of techniques and models suit the project at hand. Good developers are ones who know lots of models and techniques and adapt them to best fit the problems at hand.
That said, specification is sorely underrated and underused as a programming technique. Too few people are well acquainted with it, and almost all the complaints that often get raised are based on myths and misnomers. It's not right for everything, but there are plenty of places where perhaps it could and should be used. Knowing how to do proper formal specification is simply another weapon in a good developers arsenal, and I wish more people spent the little extra time required to learn something about it.
Jedidiah.
I wonder how long it will take until we will see some programming models that are more specification oriented, then just being another type of implementation oriented way of programming.
From what I can tell, a long time. Developers seem stringly averse to specification based techniques. Bring the subject up and watch them howl about how impractical it is and how much extra needless work it requires.
Is specification right for every project? No. It is something that deserves a place in the development toolkit though. You wouldn't use OO, or scripting languages for every project either - each is just a different tool suited to different tasks. I agree with you: I wish more developers would take the time to learn how specification oriented programming works and properly understand its benefits and its costs. There is most definitely a place for it, but you'll never know when it would be good to apply if you don't spend the time learning how to do it.
Have a look at some specifiation languages like Z and CASL, and actually learn what they have to offer. Then you can better understand when they might be useful or applicable.
Jedidiah.
One way publishers get around that is by introducing new editions of text books every year, which differ only by incorporating the errata fixes, and different homework problems.
The math department where I did my undergrad suffered from this. They threatened the publisher with changing texts and eventually negotiated a deal where the publisher would continue to publish an out of print edition (that is, the edition from the previous year) for the university for a fixed period of time (5 years). That deal is coming up for renegotiation - it will be interesting to hear how that works out.
Jedidiah.
This sets the individual cost of a book ('C') at C=(U/X)+R+C.
I'm presuming you have a typo there somewhere (the +C perhaps?) because:
C=(U/X)+R+C
C-C=(U/X)+R
0=(U/X)+R
RX=-U
Doesn't really seem to result in a conclusion that accords well with reality.
Jedidiah.
Depending on the text there is a good model available. Publish the book online for free. No, really. The text for my algebraic topology course was chosen for precisely that reason: students wouldn't have to fork over $100 for a text for a 1 semester course.
How does the author get anything out of this? Surprisingly enough a number of students (including myself) purchased a copy of the book by the time the course was over. Sure, it wasn't the whole class, but there were a number of people. Why did I buy the book when I could have it for free? Because a nicely bound hardcopy is a very nice thing to have in the future as a reference to the subject. A PDF on computer, or a printout is just not the same. And having used the text for the course, I realised it was actually a very good text for the subject matter. In general those who didn't buy the book were people who didn't expect to ever see or refer to algebraic topology again.
I suspect, though I admit I have no hard numbers, that the author actally makes more money distributing the free version - it makes it a much more attractive option as a text for a course, and those who go on in the subject are likely to buy the book. Certainly you won't make as much money on, say, a first year calculus textbook this way - too small a percentage of the class is going to go on in calc to bother buying the book. That doesn't mean the author couldn't make a living at it. I don't think anyone has tried yet, so we just don't know.
Jedidiah.
The math department where I did my undergrad were annoyed by the "edition" treadmill for their textbook of choice (a new editions every year!), forcing students to buy new editions and killing the second hand trade. They actually had a long dispute with the publisher and threatened to change to a different text. The publisher relented and agreed to continue publication of the current edition (which is now out of print everywhere else) for a fixed period (I believe it was 5 years). This was done to save the students money.
That fixed term is about to expire, by the way. It will be interesting if the publisher is willing to renegotiate the same (or a similar) deal. If not I gather the department fully intends to switch texts - they have been evaluating other options.
Jedidiah
My advice for people wanting to get into information security is to tune up your mathematics skills. In everything from cryptology (design to implementation) through to secure system programming and even information theory, having a solid grasp of modern mathematics (axiomatic set theory and modern algebra) can make a huge difference.
Perhaps they mean something different by "Infosec" (the fact that the book has the word "skillz" in the title is perhaps a hint), but from my experience a solid background in advanced mathematics is invaluable.
Jedidiah.
There seems to be a lot of this "Firefox had it first, IE is just copying Firefox" type coments going around. But why not copy good features from other applications?
I think the issue is more that, for long time while firefox was still growing in popularity, there was a great deal of inertia from MS to add/copy those features, and there were a number of high profile comments from MS execs (such as the one from Gates in the GPP) that the features were not significant, not worthwhile, and IE didn't need them.
A year or two on, and these features are now in a new release of IE that's been hustled out the door. It's not the copying of features that is at issue, its the blatant copying of features that had been dismissed as useless and insignificant and unrequired by MS for quite some - and the touting of these features as the new great innovations from MS.
It's not the copying of features, its the obvious dishonesty and sudden turnaround (for what appear to be completely profit driven, rather than user experience driven reasons) that piss people off. Yes companies are entitled to only care about profit. People are entitled to not think very highly of companies if when they do that.
Jedidiah.
Yes, stuff that can be spun for the purposes of nationalism, religion, politics, or racism have always been problems. Nationalism gets inserted into all kinds of articles about history, archaeology, language, etc. Religious spin is creeping into everything.
For me Wikipedia's strongest area has been the math and science pages, which don't seem to suffer from anywhere near the same kind of issues. Perhaps it's because the math pages I use and contribute to are all obscure so vandals don't go there, but in general a lot of the math pages are actually pretty well written for a quick overview and provides a useful quick reference for terms I'm less familiar with (because they're slightly outside my field).
Jedidiah
...will they produce something more interesting than what Hollywood makes? ..wouldn't be hard, really.
They are only writing the screenplays, not making the films. Hollywood can butcher a screenplay six ways from Sunday without a moment's thought. I gather the screenplay for "The Island" actually resembled a somewhat thoughtful SF story before Michael Bay and his production team got a hold of it. They can write and brilliant creative and interesting a screenplay as they like, unless it happens to fall into the right hands the first act in the production of the film will be to suck all the creative and interesting elements out of it to make the usual bland lowest common denominator that studio execs can feel safe about.
Jedidiah.
Will they omit the part of the movie where the highly trained scientist/engineer's job is shipped off to India? Or will they just cut to the chase and produce the movies themselves in Bollywood?
Just do a movie about scientists and engineers working for NSA or similar. When the US starts shipping those jobs to India they will be serious trouble indeed.
Jedidiah.
if you see what's on tv, you'll find so many shows dedicated to doctors (ER, grey's acadamy, chicago hope) lawyers (law and order: special victims unit, criminal intent, trial by jury) and cops (CSI miami, ny).
you never hear anyone even mention engineers in movies or tv series.
Well there is "Numb3rs" (is that a dumb title or what?!) which does actually do some math. Admittedly it's in a crime drama setting, but there is a reasonable amount of emphasis on the math. As a mathematician myself I would have to say the show is... surprisingly not bad in terms of math content. I've grown use to any math in TV and films to be truly cringe inducing. While what they do in Numb3rs is completely unrealistic and vastly simplified they usually have the core idea right, and they obviously have a mathematician consulting because while the math dialogue (and blackboards) can be a little clunky (as in, a mathematician wouldn't say it quite like that) at times it is actually almost always on point and meaningful.
Is the show actually any good? Well it could be worse, and I try to be positive about it because at least someone is trying...
Jedidiah.
This service is more akin to froogle than to straight google - it's abotu comparison shopping ove r the various different pay to download services. To their credit they bother to let you comparison shop not just on price, but on format and DRM/license restrictions. This isn't a replacement for finding your favourite illegal download, it is potentially a replacement for just running your search on iTMS for that song you want to buy.
Jedidiah.
They actually encourage you to try a search on copyrighted materials (i.e. Coldplay), but if you do, it gives you a list of fee-based audio services where you can buy the song(s).
Sure, but they provide a nice overview. The coldplay seach for instance gives you this (after you select a specific track). Now not only is there a free download version via ArtistDirect, it provides a nice pricing guide for comparison shopping (with both buy and download and subscription options priced), as well as actually listing salient features for the different services offering pay download, salient features being: Format (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc.), Platform (Looks like Win or Mac only), "Burn to CD" and "Copy" which presumably is details on the DRM and license restrictions. If I want to buy music online (and apparently many people do) then being able to get and overview like that with pricing, format and DRM options all listed for quick reference counts as a very good thing.
It may not suit your needs, but it does look like an interesting service.
Jedidiah.
If a company can be sued over it in China, where copyright restrictions are very lax, how successful will Yahoo! be in implementing this here in a country where copyrights are taken much more seriously?
Pretty successful. Have you actually tried it? It doesn't take you to illegal free copies, it provides links to copies to buy.
For instance, searching for a semi-obscure ambient band that I quite like turned up lots of hits. Selecting a track takes you to this page which tells you various places you can buy and download it. It's quite a nice service really - think of it as akin iTMS search that runs over multiple different major music stores and provides options, or Froogle for downloadable music. Excellent if you like hard to find music (that often isn't in CD stores) like myself, or even if you simply want to shop around (though 99c seems to be the rate pretty much everywhere, so comparison shopping is limited). I could definitely see this catching on.
Way to go Yahoo! you actually came up with someting interesting and new for a change.
Jedidiah.
You got it right when you said "it might as well be a batch script." These are just Monad scripts running on the system, just like batch files, perl scripts, Cygwin bash scripts, Ruby scripts, etc.
Yes but you must remember that F-Secure are a bunch of alarmist gits who will jump at any opportunity to seed panic with regard to threats of viruses, hackers, "cyberterrorists" (if such a thing even exists), and whatever else they can dream up. Read through a decent sampling of their past press releases and you'll get the idea.
Certainly there are potential issues, but I don't think there's really anything to panic about yet.
Jedidiah.
Infinity plus anything still equals infinity. Infinity minus anything still equals infinity. It can have boundaries and be infinite.
I think hyperbolic space provides a good example of this actually. It is an infinite space that is bounded. It's an odd concept at first, but actually makes a lot of sense once you get your head around it.
Jedidiah.