That logo is a reason to defect to OpenBSD. I admire their artist - Ty Semanka? - who could also do nice Hawaii shirts, thus expressing the same relaxed art that was so nice about the old McKusick daemon renderings (a lot of little guys with fork running around light balls, symbolizing processes) or the friendly Hosokawa daemon in sneakers. This is so corporate apple style without heart and artificial coolness.:-(
First, a little about SHA and SHA-1. SHA (0) was developed as a national standard hash function. Curiously, a last minute change was proposed by the NSA which resulted in SHA-1. The change was puzzling the cryptographers in academia. After some time, an attack was discovered on some classes of cryptographic hashes which SHA-1 turned out to be curiously immune to.
I wonder if this posting is a case of advanced trolling.
When coming up with the DES (Data Encryption Standard), some government agency insisted on a modification of the S-Boxes (the part that scrambles the bits) that later turned out to make DES more strong against the at that time (publically) unknown differential cryptanalysis technique, making it very reasonable that this agency knew about that attack technique.
This is described in Simon Singh's "code book".
Thus I wonder if there are two similiar stories, or if you intentionally or not, messed up the storiy.
I want to contribute to Wikipedia, but what language should I choose English as the global language or one of my native tongues (Dutch, German)?
It would be no hard decision if there were some synchronization efforts that try to move good information between different language versions.
Are there such efforts?
Alas the partitioning of information into different articles alone is not obvious and probably matter to taste and whatever, one article might cover 5 interesting paragraphs, while in a different language one spreads that information differently.
I need to have a look if I am right with that conjecture.
I was already amazed by the various very good Apple ][ emulators.
The bad news is, that while the hardware can be emulated at some point you need the old software as well, be it the ROM chips with the Apple ][ Monitor routines, the Apple ][ Basic (Hello Bill!:-) and of course some Apple DOS or ProDOS copy to have a nice system.
What about the hundreds of old games?
You can't ask the companies, most of them are out of business.
And that was a rather simple hardware.
If you would emulate a todays system, you need to emulate the graphics chips, the network card, Direct X, and god knows what else.
A legal nightmare to get permission to use under emulation.
Anyone knows how long it takes until one can use old software? Does it take 70 years or so like the Mickey Mouse character protection?
Unfortunately, you can't understand the books since it in some ancient, long dead language.:)
They deciphered the hyroglyphs from Egypt, which is pretty amazing.
So it might be possible to have English stuff understood for a couple of thousand years.
I also read that there are archives from Chinese administrations two or three thousand years old.
Perhaps boring stuff who paid how much income tax in 500 B.C.
That really made me wonder if valuable stuff might get lost (Beatles recordings) and such government protected trivia might survive for a long, long time.
By the way, there is a book by Physics Professor and Hard SF writer Gregory Benford,
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia which seems to view the pyramids as a kind of (timely) long distance message.
I need to get a copy of that.
Prof. Knuth was unhappy with the degrading typographical quality of the printings of his
The arts of Computer Programming series.
So he took 10 years of his research time to develop the TeX computer type setting system. (A stunt hard to pull off, if you are not a professor or rich:-).
Now look at how he published the TeX System.
There is a set of 5 books containting
TeX user manual
TeX commented source code
Metafont user manual
Metafont commented source code
The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts
What is that good for?
If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language.
Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!
Of course you need to write a.dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.
If you now find some.tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!
Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!
Last year, for the first time, they let you run your code on your own hardware, and simply submit the results.
The winner ran his simple C++ algorithm on a farm of dual processor machines, and managed to brute force his way into first place.
The problem of last year's contest was implementing the simulation of a formula one racing car.
Then you had to determine a set of control commands (steer left, right, accelerate, break) to stear it through a racing track from start to finish, which depending on the geometry of track could be quite tricky.
It is a bit sad that brute forcing gave the best results. I still believe using theory of optimal control would have been the way to go, on the other hand for the hairy track I don't know if that would work out.
I was very surprised that the organizers chose that kind of problem. Using the functional programming languages forbid destructive updates, thus once a variable got a value bound to it, that sticks. On the other hand most of the mathematical algorithms I know make rather much use of destructive updates.
Don't know yet, if I am still to stupid to see the way how to do numerics with a functional language or if these are not as well suited for such problems like C++ or FORTRAN.
By not allowing destructive updates you keep all intermediate results of a computation. So you can't brute force as much, as with C++.
This is rather strange, so I believe the organizers had some clever tricks in mind that not relied on brute forcing (like that theory of optimal control) and we participants were just too stupid to know.:-)
Regards,
Marc
PS I submitted that item days before twice and got rejected, does anyone understand the editorial policy of Slashdot?
If I were going to be controversial I would say that it all just goes to show that humans are better than computers and imperative languages are better than functional ones;)
Oh yes. Too bad there is no Visual Fortran, it would have crushed the competition.:)
The "idea" that we organizers thought would be the winning one was computer assisted manual driving, and that the task would become writing a GUI for that purpose.
I was aiming for manual assisted computer driving.
Something like providing the control points and let the computer draw the Bezier spline.
To brute force the general problem I wouldn't dare in the first place.
I wasted most of the time reading and writing stuff between the various formats and to get my
simulator implementation running exactly like the official one. Which was probably 1-2 days too much. Coming up with such an optimizing GUI would have taken another 2-3 days for me.So the winners
did a good job.
Yes, it is. It allows you to both program close to the hardware and on an abstract level. The focus is on efficiency.
But sometimes you want other goals first. In case of concurrent and fault tolerant programming I would rather use Erlang. For GUIs you can hack it together quicker if you rely on Java and its excellent development tools.
It is rather amusing to see the functional programming zealots beaten in their own competiition.
I don't mind. What I mind is that organizer did not officially publish the results. I sent several emails. No reaction.:(
Perhaps the problem posers got tared and feathered after the conference for posing a problem that was more suited to imperative programming.:-)
Now maybe the FP "movement" will go back to relative obscurity where it belongs, and let the real programmers do their jobs.
I hope you mean the F1rst P0st crowd, otherwise I have to consider you being an ignorant idiot.
That is one thing I never understood about Japan. Books over there were quite cheap compared to here.
Manga are cheap in Europe as well (France, Germany).
First they tried to sell 200p Manga books in European 48p portions for European prices (~10 $).
It was not a success.
That was btw. the formula Viz sold Ranma (16$ a book?).
Then someone (I believe in France) dared to use the Japanese formula. Which means 200p cheap paper Ranma (actually it was Dragon Ball, but forget it for a moment) for $5 a book. Guess what happened. It was a huge success.
So it is important to sell thick manga book of various genres for cheap money in large volumes to make big money. Works like I said Germany and France as well, not only in Japan.
and yet all of their pulp/paper can't come from that tiny island. Don't they import from the States?
Or are they raizing China's trees for cheap pulp?
I guess they have to deforest Asia for that.
Japan has not much area for growing stuff.
They don't frequently switch writers and/or artists. Popular stories are not necessarily stretched and reinvented in order to increase sales.
The Gundam series (a space epic more involved and arguably better than Star Trek:) is a nice counter example.
If I see aside the fact that Knights (Mechs) or World War II naval battles seem reused, they tell the same core story over and over again.
Young boy finds Gundam mechanical armour suit, is able to fly it better than any other for some reason and is involved in a large campain.
Not that I do not utterly enjoy it. For example I love Gundam Wing, Turn A Gundam and lately
Gundam Seed.
Perhaps I should end with the remark that the Japanese are famous for getting some outlandish concept, and turn it into something very Japanese.
So much for recycling.
Three days were not much for that task. I wasted most of the time writing tools and getting a proper implementation of the specs.
Ideal would have been a team of 1 toolmaker, 1 tester, 1 strategy/optimizing guy, 1 coordinator. And of course more libs in the background ready for various optimization task, plus something to hack together visual editors very quickly.
I wish I had known better ways to interface to the GIMP, it turned out to be a useful editor for me, but i only managed file based communications.
What you describe is an adapative scheme, something that kicks in automatically, that uses the fast version where possible, otherwise the slow but more accurate. Thus yielding the fastest but still accurate result.
That autocontrol is more than I would ask for.
I would already like to brace my code with some
use_reliable_calculation { // old code
}
declaration, or flip some compiler switch, and with minimal changes to the code have the same stuff calculated slow but safe.
After that I would like to compare results, off course.:)
You are right, that for many cases the exact calculation (which is computaionally more expensive) should be used only when needed.
But how is that achieved, if?
I guess one would go and hunt for some arbitrary precision library for integers or some intervals lib for exact error bounds.
Think for a moment that compilers came just with integer data types and you had a to get a floating point arithmetics library every time you want to use floating point arithmetics!
(I can only remember old Apple ][ integer basic, where something like that might have been really happened:-)
Wouldn't you say that is too uncomfortable?
So why not make arbitrary precision integer calculations and interval arithmetics part of the compilers? (A compiler switch?)
My guess is that people would start to use these features more, if they were easy to add to existing software.
To some extend functional languages already offer certain integer operations with arbitrary precision. But I believe one could do much better.
Let us hope that future languages will have such extended support right built in.
But that is black art, maybe engineering, but definitely not science.
This works because most problems in applied science and engineere are rather good behaving.
If some numerical analyst comes up with a counter example, one can often deem that as a pathological case, without having too much a bad conscience.
I would really like to know, if there are real world engineering examples, where simulations produced dangerous products, because the simulation was inadequate because of numerical errors. Perhaps in aerodynamics, who knows how they perform their flight simulations.
Slashdot Mirror
"Stories on rearranged routing yielded great overstatement today. For UPS customers keep invaluable. No government necessitated said law!"
That logo is a reason to defect to OpenBSD. :-(
I admire their artist - Ty Semanka? - who could also do nice Hawaii shirts, thus expressing the same relaxed art that was so nice about the old McKusick daemon renderings (a lot of little guys with fork running around light balls, symbolizing processes) or the friendly Hosokawa daemon in sneakers.
This is so corporate apple style without heart and artificial coolness.
Regards,
Marc
Yes, quite embarrassing if he grows up, doing e.g. functional programming. :-)
Sorry,
Marc
I wonder if this posting is a case of advanced trolling.
When coming up with the DES (Data Encryption Standard), some government agency insisted on a modification of the S-Boxes (the part that scrambles the bits) that later turned out to make DES more strong against the at that time (publically) unknown differential cryptanalysis technique, making it very reasonable that this agency knew about that attack technique.
This is described in Simon Singh's "code book".
Thus I wonder if there are two similiar stories, or if you intentionally or not, messed up the storiy.
Regards,
Marc
I want to contribute to Wikipedia, but what language should I choose English as the global language or one of my native tongues (Dutch, German)?
It would be no hard decision if there were some synchronization efforts that try to move good information between different language versions.
Are there such efforts?
Alas the partitioning of information into different articles alone is not obvious and probably matter to taste and whatever, one article might cover 5 interesting paragraphs, while in a different language one spreads that information differently.
I need to have a look if I am right with that conjecture.
Regards,
Marc
Sure and in 2072 the interest in Apple ][ emulation is probably as big as today in the emulation of Charles Babbage's analytical engine. :)
Thank your for those information!
Regards,
Marc
The bad news is, that while the hardware can be emulated at some point you need the old software as well, be it the ROM chips with the Apple ][ Monitor routines, the Apple ][ Basic (Hello Bill! :-) and of course some Apple DOS or ProDOS copy to have a nice system.
What about the hundreds of old games?
You can't ask the companies, most of them are out of business.
And that was a rather simple hardware.
If you would emulate a todays system, you need to emulate the graphics chips, the network card, Direct X, and god knows what else. A legal nightmare to get permission to use under emulation.
Anyone knows how long it takes until one can use old software? Does it take 70 years or so like the Mickey Mouse character protection?
Regards,
Marc
They deciphered the hyroglyphs from Egypt, which is pretty amazing. So it might be possible to have English stuff understood for a couple of thousand years.
I also read that there are archives from Chinese administrations two or three thousand years old. Perhaps boring stuff who paid how much income tax in 500 B.C. That really made me wonder if valuable stuff might get lost (Beatles recordings) and such government protected trivia might survive for a long, long time.
By the way, there is a book by Physics Professor and Hard SF writer Gregory Benford, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia which seems to view the pyramids as a kind of (timely) long distance message. I need to get a copy of that.
Regards,
Marc
- TeX user manual
- TeX commented source code
- Metafont user manual
- Metafont commented source code
- The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts
What is that good for?If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language. Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!
Of course you need to write a .dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.
If you now find some .tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!
Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!
Regards,
Marc
Erlang (not strongly typed) won the Lightning division once, if I remember right.
The problem of last year's contest was implementing the simulation of a formula one racing car.
Then you had to determine a set of control commands (steer left, right, accelerate, break) to stear it through a racing track from start to finish, which depending on the geometry of track could be quite tricky.
It is a bit sad that brute forcing gave the best results. I still believe using theory of optimal control would have been the way to go, on the other hand for the hairy track I don't know if that would work out.
I was very surprised that the organizers chose that kind of problem. Using the functional programming languages forbid destructive updates, thus once a variable got a value bound to it, that sticks. On the other hand most of the mathematical algorithms I know make rather much use of destructive updates.
Don't know yet, if I am still to stupid to see the way how to do numerics with a functional language or if these are not as well suited for such problems like C++ or FORTRAN.
By not allowing destructive updates you keep all intermediate results of a computation. So you can't brute force as much, as with C++.
This is rather strange, so I believe the organizers had some clever tricks in mind that not relied on brute forcing (like that theory of optimal control) and we participants were just too stupid to know. :-)
Regards,
Marc
PS I submitted that item days before twice and got rejected, does anyone understand the editorial policy of Slashdot?
Regards,
Marc
Oh yes. Too bad there is no Visual Fortran, it would have crushed the competition. :)
See ya next year!
I was aiming for manual assisted computer driving. Something like providing the control points and let the computer draw the Bezier spline.
To brute force the general problem I wouldn't dare in the first place.
I wasted most of the time reading and writing stuff between the various formats and to get my simulator implementation running exactly like the official one. Which was probably 1-2 days too much. Coming up with such an optimizing GUI would have taken another 2-3 days for me.So the winners did a good job.
Regards,
Marc
Yes, it is. It allows you to both program close to the hardware and on an abstract level. The focus is on efficiency.
But sometimes you want other goals first. In case of concurrent and fault tolerant programming I would rather use Erlang. For GUIs you can hack it together quicker if you rely on Java and its excellent development tools.
It is rather amusing to see the functional programming zealots beaten in their own competiition.
I don't mind. What I mind is that organizer did not officially publish the results. I sent several emails. No reaction. :(
Perhaps the problem posers got tared and feathered after the conference for posing a problem that was more suited to imperative programming. :-)
Now maybe the FP "movement" will go back to relative obscurity where it belongs, and let the real programmers do their jobs.
I hope you mean the F1rst P0st crowd, otherwise I have to consider you being an ignorant idiot.
Regards,
Marc
Read this message from a recent thread about the subject on news group comp.lang.functional.
Manga are cheap in Europe as well (France, Germany).
First they tried to sell 200p Manga books in European 48p portions for European prices (~10 $). It was not a success. That was btw. the formula Viz sold Ranma (16$ a book?).
Then someone (I believe in France) dared to use the Japanese formula. Which means 200p cheap paper Ranma (actually it was Dragon Ball, but forget it for a moment) for $5 a book. Guess what happened. It was a huge success.
So it is important to sell thick manga book of various genres for cheap money in large volumes to make big money. Works like I said Germany and France as well, not only in Japan.
and yet all of their pulp/paper can't come from that tiny island. Don't they import from the States? Or are they raizing China's trees for cheap pulp?
I guess they have to deforest Asia for that. Japan has not much area for growing stuff.
Regards,
Marc
The Gundam series (a space epic more involved and arguably better than Star Trek :) is a nice counter example.
If I see aside the fact that Knights (Mechs) or World War II naval battles seem reused, they tell the same core story over and over again.
Young boy finds Gundam mechanical armour suit, is able to fly it better than any other for some reason and is involved in a large campain.
Not that I do not utterly enjoy it. For example I love Gundam Wing, Turn A Gundam and lately Gundam Seed.
Perhaps I should end with the remark that the Japanese are famous for getting some outlandish concept, and turn it into something very Japanese. So much for recycling.
Sayonara,
Marc
No way at present, the Plan 9 license is not free enough to justify that.
See the recent discussion on the Plan 9 mailing list, which you (as a rather subtle troll) obviously have noticed.
But probably the lessons learned by the Plan 9 researchers who wrote those compilers and wrote some papers on the task, will not be ignored.
I will rather write my own sexy compiler.
Regards
Marc
Now it is over.
Three days were not much for that task. I wasted most of the time writing tools and getting a proper implementation of the specs.
Ideal would have been a team of 1 toolmaker, 1 tester, 1 strategy/optimizing guy, 1 coordinator. And of course more libs in the background ready for various optimization task, plus something to hack together visual editors very quickly.
I wish I had known better ways to interface to the GIMP, it turned out to be a useful editor for me, but i only managed file based communications.
Regards,
Marc
I opened #erlang_icfp at irc.freenode.net
See you.
I would already like to brace my code with some
use_reliable_calculation {
// old code
}
declaration, or flip some compiler switch, and with minimal changes to the code have the same stuff calculated slow but safe.
After that I would like to compare results, off course. :)
Regards, Marc
But how is that achieved, if?
I guess one would go and hunt for some arbitrary precision library for integers or some intervals lib for exact error bounds.
Think for a moment that compilers came just with integer data types and you had a to get a floating point arithmetics library every time you want to use floating point arithmetics! (I can only remember old Apple ][ integer basic, where something like that might have been really happened :-)
Wouldn't you say that is too uncomfortable?
So why not make arbitrary precision integer calculations and interval arithmetics part of the compilers? (A compiler switch?)
My guess is that people would start to use these features more, if they were easy to add to existing software.
To some extend functional languages already offer certain integer operations with arbitrary precision. But I believe one could do much better.
Let us hope that future languages will have such extended support right built in.
Regards,
Marc
This works because most problems in applied science and engineere are rather good behaving.
If some numerical analyst comes up with a counter example, one can often deem that as a pathological case, without having too much a bad conscience.
I would really like to know, if there are real world engineering examples, where simulations produced dangerous products, because the simulation was inadequate because of numerical errors. Perhaps in aerodynamics, who knows how they perform their flight simulations.
Regards,
Marc