Well, yeah, since it means on average this algorithm performs with around this cost.
Most of the time yes you can safely chose a log N and get better results. But not in all cases.
Yes... but there aren't O(log N) solutions to all problems available to you.
What I was saying is maybe what they're studying is how to solve a known O(N^2) algorithm using parallelism to better learn how to tackle other O(N^2) problems. And that even if there exists an O(log N) solution for that particular problem, they may not be specifically tackling that specific problem, but how to work on the class of problem when you don't have an O(log N) solution available to you.
Even though you know someone has an O(log N) solution to a specific problem, you may be more interested in the generalities of how you solve O(N^2) problems, and the particular problem isn't really the point.
In other words, you're not doing the research to improve on that problem which already has an O(log N) solution, but to learn how to solve O(N^2) problems in general.
For instance, there are the innumerable parallel computing papers that use O(N^2) algorithms to show a speedup on a GPU or supercomputer where there exists a serial O(log N) algorithm that runs faster on a PC. (No joke.)
Except that while there might be some problems which have O(log N) solutions as well as O(N^2) solutions, there are still things which still only have O(N^2) solutions, correct?
So if you can learn how to solve a known O(N^2) problem better (even if there is a known O(log N) solution), what you learn is still applicable to to other O(N^2) problems for which there isn't a known O(log N) solution.
I'm not sure what you're describing is evidence of malfeasance, or that they're working on solving a class of solution, and not necessarily that specific problem.
To me it sounds more like they're probably aware of the O(log N) solution, but that's irrelevant because they're looking at how to use parallelism to address things which are O(N^2), because there's many many of those.
So much of math comes down to solving an equivalent problem you already know how to solve.
Maybe they're figuring out how to address a problem which is O(N^2) by one method, so that once they know how to solve it faster with parallelism, they can learn how to solve other problems which nobody has an O(log N) solution for.
It may not be all about solving that particular problem, but that class of problem. Because mostly it seems like we've never figured out how to do real parallelism except for things which are classed as 'embarassingly parallel' because it already lends itself to breaking it up -- like SETI@Home.
They need to do more than withhold funding, they need to to put the people violating the law in jail, charge them with treason, and otherwise make their lives miserable.
But somehow this is being treated like something they can do and not have any real consequences. Start putting the people in charge in Federal prison, and make them responsible for what their agencies do, and then you might start to see changes.
Right now it sounds like you can lie to Congress and break the law all you want, and nobody does a damned thing about it.
The only way to make them more honest is if Congress actually decided to throw the people who lied to them into jail.
We'll just end up with a committee that isn't allowed to know about the things they should be monitoring, wouldn't be told if they were allowed to know, and can't actually do anything about any abuses they do find beyond politely reminding the NSA that their actions are probably illegal.
Wait, isn't that what we have now?
Something with a little more teeth needs to be in charge of this. Of course, then they themselves would just become the next step in the chain of lying bastards anyway.
Or the company that comes out with an (non-free) upgrade ~every~ year, necessary or not, and immediately stops supporting the previous version. "Yeah, we know about that rare bug. It's fixed in the latest version, which will only cost you $150k, across your user base, to upgrade to."
You think every year is bad, we had a vendor once who went to an 'agile' release cycle and started pumping out releases every 2-4 weeks, and then would say they couldn't support you because you were out of date.
Our production deployment cycle is longer than 2-4 weeks, and we eventually had to tell them that if they expect to be making grown up software for production environments, they'd need to support any given release for no less than six months to a year, or we'd terminate the contract. It took some yelling for them to understand that real production environments can't be updated every time a developer bloody well recompiles.
I updated an app on my Android phone from the Play store recently, and *after* I updated it it started telling me it was only Beta software. Why the hell didn't you tell me is was a steaming turd in the bloody app store? Because I have no interest in a beta version of your damned software.
And then the government can demand the data they don't have the resources to collect on their own.
So, take your pick... is it an Orwellian world in which government sees and controls everything, or is it a Cyberpunk dystopia where the corporations do?
Or are we all eventually going to end up in some "Orwellian 1984" kinda thing
Eventually? We're already well on our way.
Companies are collecting everything they possibly can about you, are under no regulations about doing so or what they do with it, and then are selling it for profit. School boards are tracking everything about students (with no chance to opt out) via private companies who then own that data and can do the same thing. Insurance companies are cross referencing everything about your life and medical information.
Combine that with governments being able to access this data merely because it exists, and I would say anyone born in the new few years stands a good chance of their entire lives being fully documented, and for the rest of us, pretty much most everything going forward is already there.
Throw in facial recognition and whatever else is out there I've missed, and it feels like we're most of the way there.
I once had to fight to keep 'software engineer' off my job title.
I kept explaining that I was not an engineer, that engineering was a specific regulated profession, and that to call me an engineer would be illegal and incorrect.
It took a long time for our Personnel Management Engineers (HR) and the VP (who thought it sounded cool) to understand why it had to be otherwise.
In some cases, companies like it because it sounds cool. But they have no idea that you can't simply call yourself an engineer any more than you can call yourself a lawyer or a doctor -- they actually mean something specific, and aren't just to be thrown around because you like them.
You could stage a broad daylight bank robbery perpetrated by clowns armed with handgrenades and you'd have a below average chance of getting the average American to look up from their phone.
Are you insane? They'd film it with their phone and post it on frigging You Tube.
And, if the store is quiet enough, you can hear the hamster wheel squeaking.
My mother used to work for Tandy years ago, and as a result I spent a lot of time in Radio Shack stores.
Now I can barely stand to go into a store, because they have annoying sales people who insist on telling you about everything you look at, but can neither answer questions nor understand why you are asking them to go away.
To me, Radio Shack became "cheap RC toys and cell phone accessories" a very long time ago. And I'm not sure I think there's anything they can do to turn the tide of being thought of as just a low-end electronics chain which doesn't sell anything you can't get at Wal Mart.
So, your university wants to monetize the usage of the basic infrastructure in order to leverage your synergies by applying an undue burden of usage and accounting on the people to more accurately ensure they spend most of their time accounting for the 2 cents it cost to use the device? So you're going to make me waste an hour of my expensive and limited time to account for a few sheckles?
I had a PM once who wanted us to account for our time in 5 minute increments. Then he was surprised that 1 of every 5 minutes was recording what we did the last 4, despite us having told him that is exactly what would happen.
This sounds about as stupid and counter productive.
It sounds like cost recovery run amok, and usually marks the point at which an organization has been taken over by accountants who then work very hard to ensure the real work can't happen.
Sorry sir, I couldn't do any actual engineering/science/work because I was filling out my time sheets in triplicate, filling in the TPS reports, and updating the spreadsheet to indicate that I've done all of those things.
The 'solution' you think your finding is essentially creating a new kind of problem -- and that's one created from institutional stupidity.
Keep in mind that private currencies undermine government monopolies.
As I said, small potatoes. The magnitude of bitcoin isn't enough to really concern most governments, and certainly not the ones with the resources to do what you suggest.
Could it be a case of criminals in a government being behind this?
Sure. Could it be alien space monkeys trying to destabilize our currencies and use us for slaves to harvest tasty bananas? Sure, I guess
There's about as much evidence for either of those, which means there's zero evidence at all.
I generally tend to fall a little on the tinfoil-hat end of the spectrum -- but in the absence of evidence, I fall back to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
You're well into just claiming it could be a conspiracy, but I just don't see the need. It could be if you want to be paranoid enough. But there's nothing real to suggest it's true, which makes it just pure imagination for the moment.
Why is anyone assuming this is being done by 'criminals'?
Because currently Bitcoin is small potatoes, and the exchanges are so far doing some of the work for them, and because if there's money to be had criminals will go after it.
Is it possible this is some grand conspiracy? Sure it is. Is it more likely that the people running these things have failed at security and actually been ripped off? Sure. Is it also possible that the exchanges are really just scams and these were inside jobs? Sure.
I just don't see the need to assume governments undermining the credibility of these -- it seems to be happening just fine without the need for government help on that front.
Ah, but it's in the terms of service. And those have been upheld by the courts.
Which means people who lost money in this are out of luck, because all they really claim is they'll do their best effort but otherwise make no guarantees about their ability to do anything.
In other words, there's zero basis on which to trust them, it's spelled out in the license, and if you trusted them and lost it's caveat emptor.
You might as well ask the wino on the corner to hold onto your money, because he's about as accountable if your money goes missing.
Translation: We'll try to be secure, and we'll call it secure, but we're really new at this and not entirely sure about this security thingy, but since we're not really a bank we'll tell you that if we prove to be incompetent we take no responsibility for that.
Seriously, how many of us didn't see stuff like this happening?
Hell, it sounds like the most lucrative way to make money of bitcoins is to set up your own exchange, and then have one of your people steal all the money, and then say "oops, teh hax0rs, not our fault, too bad for you".
If you're not a bank, and not regulated like a bank, this is kinda like asking the kid with the lemonade stand to hold onto your life savings.
It's frigging amateur hour. Entrusting someone with no track record with your money when that person has a clause which says "we take no responsibility for this" is just plain stupid in my mind.
So what we have is a bunch of startups who think they know how to be like a bank, but are failing utterly.
Is this is a systematic flaw in Bitcoin itself, or Schadenfreude by companies who have yet to learn they are nowhere near ready for holding onto something like this?
It just seems like this is the kind of thing which sounds great on a whiteboard, but in reality is anything but.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, since it means on average this algorithm performs with around this cost.
Yes ... but there aren't O(log N) solutions to all problems available to you.
What I was saying is maybe what they're studying is how to solve a known O(N^2) algorithm using parallelism to better learn how to tackle other O(N^2) problems. And that even if there exists an O(log N) solution for that particular problem, they may not be specifically tackling that specific problem, but how to work on the class of problem when you don't have an O(log N) solution available to you.
Even though you know someone has an O(log N) solution to a specific problem, you may be more interested in the generalities of how you solve O(N^2) problems, and the particular problem isn't really the point.
In other words, you're not doing the research to improve on that problem which already has an O(log N) solution, but to learn how to solve O(N^2) problems in general.
Except that while there might be some problems which have O(log N) solutions as well as O(N^2) solutions, there are still things which still only have O(N^2) solutions, correct?
So if you can learn how to solve a known O(N^2) problem better (even if there is a known O(log N) solution), what you learn is still applicable to to other O(N^2) problems for which there isn't a known O(log N) solution.
I'm not sure what you're describing is evidence of malfeasance, or that they're working on solving a class of solution, and not necessarily that specific problem.
To me it sounds more like they're probably aware of the O(log N) solution, but that's irrelevant because they're looking at how to use parallelism to address things which are O(N^2), because there's many many of those.
So much of math comes down to solving an equivalent problem you already know how to solve.
Maybe they're figuring out how to address a problem which is O(N^2) by one method, so that once they know how to solve it faster with parallelism, they can learn how to solve other problems which nobody has an O(log N) solution for.
It may not be all about solving that particular problem, but that class of problem. Because mostly it seems like we've never figured out how to do real parallelism except for things which are classed as 'embarassingly parallel' because it already lends itself to breaking it up -- like SETI@Home.
Same is true for government, which mostly only answers to We the Corporations these days.
They need to do more than withhold funding, they need to to put the people violating the law in jail, charge them with treason, and otherwise make their lives miserable.
But somehow this is being treated like something they can do and not have any real consequences. Start putting the people in charge in Federal prison, and make them responsible for what their agencies do, and then you might start to see changes.
Right now it sounds like you can lie to Congress and break the law all you want, and nobody does a damned thing about it.
The only way to make them more honest is if Congress actually decided to throw the people who lied to them into jail.
Wait, isn't that what we have now?
Something with a little more teeth needs to be in charge of this. Of course, then they themselves would just become the next step in the chain of lying bastards anyway.
You think every year is bad, we had a vendor once who went to an 'agile' release cycle and started pumping out releases every 2-4 weeks, and then would say they couldn't support you because you were out of date.
Our production deployment cycle is longer than 2-4 weeks, and we eventually had to tell them that if they expect to be making grown up software for production environments, they'd need to support any given release for no less than six months to a year, or we'd terminate the contract. It took some yelling for them to understand that real production environments can't be updated every time a developer bloody well recompiles.
I updated an app on my Android phone from the Play store recently, and *after* I updated it it started telling me it was only Beta software. Why the hell didn't you tell me is was a steaming turd in the bloody app store? Because I have no interest in a beta version of your damned software.
Ummm ... wow, really?
I wonder how many of those they sell.
And then the government can demand the data they don't have the resources to collect on their own.
So, take your pick ... is it an Orwellian world in which government sees and controls everything, or is it a Cyberpunk dystopia where the corporations do?
Eventually? We're already well on our way.
Companies are collecting everything they possibly can about you, are under no regulations about doing so or what they do with it, and then are selling it for profit. School boards are tracking everything about students (with no chance to opt out) via private companies who then own that data and can do the same thing. Insurance companies are cross referencing everything about your life and medical information.
Combine that with governments being able to access this data merely because it exists, and I would say anyone born in the new few years stands a good chance of their entire lives being fully documented, and for the rest of us, pretty much most everything going forward is already there.
Throw in facial recognition and whatever else is out there I've missed, and it feels like we're most of the way there.
That doesn't sound nearly high enough.
Bluray has been around quite a while (an entire generation of XBox), and is now the primary format of new releases.
I'm betting you need at least one more zero on that number.
I once had to fight to keep 'software engineer' off my job title.
I kept explaining that I was not an engineer, that engineering was a specific regulated profession, and that to call me an engineer would be illegal and incorrect.
It took a long time for our Personnel Management Engineers (HR) and the VP (who thought it sounded cool) to understand why it had to be otherwise.
In some cases, companies like it because it sounds cool. But they have no idea that you can't simply call yourself an engineer any more than you can call yourself a lawyer or a doctor -- they actually mean something specific, and aren't just to be thrown around because you like them.
You may find you're aided by taking off your shoes. it's worked for me for years. ;-)
Very inconvenient at the grocery store though.
Are you insane? They'd film it with their phone and post it on frigging You Tube.
And, if the store is quiet enough, you can hear the hamster wheel squeaking.
My mother used to work for Tandy years ago, and as a result I spent a lot of time in Radio Shack stores.
Now I can barely stand to go into a store, because they have annoying sales people who insist on telling you about everything you look at, but can neither answer questions nor understand why you are asking them to go away.
To me, Radio Shack became "cheap RC toys and cell phone accessories" a very long time ago. And I'm not sure I think there's anything they can do to turn the tide of being thought of as just a low-end electronics chain which doesn't sell anything you can't get at Wal Mart.
So, your university wants to monetize the usage of the basic infrastructure in order to leverage your synergies by applying an undue burden of usage and accounting on the people to more accurately ensure they spend most of their time accounting for the 2 cents it cost to use the device? So you're going to make me waste an hour of my expensive and limited time to account for a few sheckles?
I had a PM once who wanted us to account for our time in 5 minute increments. Then he was surprised that 1 of every 5 minutes was recording what we did the last 4, despite us having told him that is exactly what would happen.
This sounds about as stupid and counter productive.
It sounds like cost recovery run amok, and usually marks the point at which an organization has been taken over by accountants who then work very hard to ensure the real work can't happen.
Sorry sir, I couldn't do any actual engineering/science/work because I was filling out my time sheets in triplicate, filling in the TPS reports, and updating the spreadsheet to indicate that I've done all of those things.
The 'solution' you think your finding is essentially creating a new kind of problem -- and that's one created from institutional stupidity.
My advice? Just don't do it.
As I said, small potatoes. The magnitude of bitcoin isn't enough to really concern most governments, and certainly not the ones with the resources to do what you suggest.
Sure. Could it be alien space monkeys trying to destabilize our currencies and use us for slaves to harvest tasty bananas? Sure, I guess
There's about as much evidence for either of those, which means there's zero evidence at all.
I generally tend to fall a little on the tinfoil-hat end of the spectrum -- but in the absence of evidence, I fall back to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
You're well into just claiming it could be a conspiracy, but I just don't see the need. It could be if you want to be paranoid enough. But there's nothing real to suggest it's true, which makes it just pure imagination for the moment.
Years? It sounds like you'd only need a few months.
Are any of these exchanges 'years' old?
Because currently Bitcoin is small potatoes, and the exchanges are so far doing some of the work for them, and because if there's money to be had criminals will go after it.
Is it possible this is some grand conspiracy? Sure it is. Is it more likely that the people running these things have failed at security and actually been ripped off? Sure. Is it also possible that the exchanges are really just scams and these were inside jobs? Sure.
I just don't see the need to assume governments undermining the credibility of these -- it seems to be happening just fine without the need for government help on that front.
Who is to say they haven't already?
Either they're complicit and these exchanges are a scam, or they're not really qualified to be doing this, and just ripe to be picked off.
Well, we're not trusting laws, regulations, legal accountability, or liability (since the TOS say those things don't apply).
So, really, what's left besides blind trust in their intentions and integrity?
Perhaps I should have said "over" instead of "by" -- but I'm certainly getting some entertainment out of these predictable losses.
For these companies, I'll stick with incompetence, and for the users who entrusted them I'll stick with suckers.
They're apparently a lot smarter than the people doing security for these exchanges.
And possibly smarter than the people who chose to put their bitcoins there.
So who's the dummy in this equation? The guys who walked off with the money would appear to be coming out the winners here.
Ah, but it's in the terms of service. And those have been upheld by the courts.
Which means people who lost money in this are out of luck, because all they really claim is they'll do their best effort but otherwise make no guarantees about their ability to do anything.
In other words, there's zero basis on which to trust them, it's spelled out in the license, and if you trusted them and lost it's caveat emptor.
You might as well ask the wino on the corner to hold onto your money, because he's about as accountable if your money goes missing.
Translation: We'll try to be secure, and we'll call it secure, but we're really new at this and not entirely sure about this security thingy, but since we're not really a bank we'll tell you that if we prove to be incompetent we take no responsibility for that.
Seriously, how many of us didn't see stuff like this happening?
Hell, it sounds like the most lucrative way to make money of bitcoins is to set up your own exchange, and then have one of your people steal all the money, and then say "oops, teh hax0rs, not our fault, too bad for you".
If you're not a bank, and not regulated like a bank, this is kinda like asking the kid with the lemonade stand to hold onto your life savings.
It's frigging amateur hour. Entrusting someone with no track record with your money when that person has a clause which says "we take no responsibility for this" is just plain stupid in my mind.
Then again, I don't own or care about bitcoins.
So what we have is a bunch of startups who think they know how to be like a bank, but are failing utterly.
Is this is a systematic flaw in Bitcoin itself, or Schadenfreude by companies who have yet to learn they are nowhere near ready for holding onto something like this?
It just seems like this is the kind of thing which sounds great on a whiteboard, but in reality is anything but.
It's not a question of me not liking offal (I don't eat meat, so I wouldn't eat it anyway).
Offal is organ meats, which still have nutritional value. But the blood, bone, cartilage, skin, beaks feet and bums ... that's not offal, that's awful.
I'd be less concerned about using gizzards and hearts than the junk they grind into a paste for these things.