Sorry, I must be a simple soul missing something, but I never thought there was a lot of point to this `formal methods' stuff. A) Didn't Turing (and maybe Goedel even) cut a lot of the guts out of such things? How can you say a thing works right if you can't even prove that it completes? B) How can one be sure the formal specification which one is verifying as correctly implemented, is not merely an alternate codification of the same damn bugs?
I confess, i have not personally delved (dolved? dulved?:p ) far into formal methods because of these prejudices, and so i know next to naught of which i natter. nevertheless... there is is.
must either be a newbie (doesn't know/. talk often goes waay off topic), a gov't/industry operative (they always want to keep discussion `focused'), or illiterate (Katz brought BHD into the topic in his article his own self).
raht on bruddah (eh)! I was going to say, much of the world mistrusts mechanized balloting as being way too easy to fiddle. (No need to mention recent history in america's dongle.)
but - one thing i dislike about our (canadian) balloting is that it's so not condorcet. I would love to see a ranking ballot adopted - but i can't see any way of tallying a reliable result in less than four years without little black boxen... and NO way to make it trustworthy. And personally, technologist or no, i see more `democracy' in a system people may grumble about but can understand and trust over of a `theoretically perfect' system most electors would think is a steaming pile of obfuscation machinated to crank out the outcome preset by the elite.
The National Research Council report `Building a Workforce for the Information Economy' (2000) noted that research has shown that the correlation between grades and future work performance is very weak.
from a read of//heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html I would suggest that the degree really isn't all that valuable (even for managers; Billy G ha no degree) compared to the cost of not being active in the industry for awhile (even a mere year). Personally, I see an inverse correlation between academic performance and professional advancement. Don't get off the track! And save your money, too, 'cause your time in the biz is getting short.
... or whoever invented mail. Each PO or similar collection of boxes is a host, postal/ZIP codes usually correpond to IP addresses each box is a port, postcards are packets, envelopes are encryption, both systems have return addresses, multiple transparent transport media (some are point to point; some are token ring; ethernet has no good analogue...), etc. The Internet is just an abstracted, automated Post Office system.
I guess one bright spot in this would be, if Silwhatsis gets away with it, then M$'s propaganda about the GPL being viral/cancerous goes up in smoke. Thing is, I thought that was one of the rare pieces of M$ propaganda that was correct... don't flame me for that, RMS designed it that way.
What bothers me is, if they do get away with it, doesn't that kinda cut the legal guts out of the GPL, precedent-wise?
Me mum commented the other day that if the media didn't make such a circus out of the things there wouldn't be as many protests. I asked her if she thought The Man would exercise the little restraint He does if there weren't heavy media coverage...
... to get a paper-tape reader/punch without going broke? The what I can find is
about $500 and I can't afford that just now. (I have a few TeX files I want to put on a long-life medium.)
... was along the line of `one machine stops booting, whaddya do?' I took a few seconds to think of `put the drive in a compatible machine, mount and repair it,' which I guess was okay, but they'd been thinking of `boot from the CD,' something I'd never had to resort to so I didn't think of it:p
Other than that question I did pretty well but I guess the other guy did a little better... *shrug*
Oops, I have a couple of non-tech ones.
Of course, Levy's Hackers;
possibly Sterling's Hacker Crackdown.
Software Conflict, Robert Glass.
Oh, and the Jargon File.
Of the books on my shelves, the one absolute must-have is Introduction to Computer Theory by Daniel I. A. Cohen. A rigourous but not dry intro to automata, from what REs can't find to the Halting Problem.
(WOW I got my hardcover new for CA$58.50; I wish I wanted to sell the thing)
The rest would be nice to have but aren't as entertaining on a desert isle, 'cept possibly for Knuth:
I mentioned this on Slashdot at least three times before, months ago. I'd hunt up the instances if I felt so ambitious... or if anyone'd notice, since they obviously didn't before.
The H1-B racket is still going, though... I saw on the Maclaughlin Group (sp?) Friday night something about Bushy considering amnesty-by-another-name for foreigners working without permits, 'cause the economy's come to depend on them? (You guys never really did finish with slave-type labour, didya?)
speaking of making X terminals (the other day), imagine putting that wee board in the foot of a monitor... if there's a kickass video modulator, of course.:p..
take care of your hands. Getting along without them would be tough.
Interesting you should say that...If a thing like
apotemnophilia
(where people become convinced they'll be better off without hands or other bits)
could be contagious even though `all in the head', why not a few cases of RSI?
be particularly careful to turn off things with themostats (refrigerators, a/c, freezer, water heaters, living-space heaters) or other self-regulators so you *know* their "contribution"o your measuree.
... set 'em up as netbooting X terminals around the house and shop. (minimize the moving parts in old Energy* stuff, they shouldn't be heavy power sinks)
please, seriously, where are these "mountains" of unwanted PCs??
... in the truer senses of the word?
Sure, maybe we've had Martian life raining down on us for æons, but we've obviously adapted to that if it's a threat. There's no comparing that with the sudden introduction of what might survive the relatively cushy journey on a probe. And it's not like we're dealing with a huge amount of distributed stuff (eg U, Pu, anthrax) that's going to be hidesouly expensive and nearly impossible to track and contain... especially compared to the expense and difficulty of obtaining it in the first place.
Why the hell not show a little politic caution and assume it's lethal until proven otherwise???
Putting almost any financial services online is something that's always going to bother me... we have income-tax e-filing in Canada already, and ScotiaBank has online service of course... What I don't know is, how well-protected I am from someone operating in my name screwing up my life.
I know not using them is not protection; but at least there's no complication of mixing valid and false digital diddlydoo... none of it's me.
But will I be able to prove that none of it really me, when the time comes?
funny how M$ will claim other browsers improperly implement SSL and certificates, given that they're Netscape inventions. this is a pretty clearcut instance of "nono, all your standards are belong to us, pay no attention to who made them..."
It's interesting he should hold up
Bell, Edison, and Ford as examples.
All three got immensely wealthy, but
themselves invented relatively little.
In fact IIRC Ford invented nothing himself;
it was all prior art.
Many of Edison's patents -- for instance those
for moving pictures -- were for inventions
his employees made.
They actually pretty good analogies to Gates.
They were able to put the right pieces together
at the right time to gain enormous personal
wealth and influence; but public perception credits them with far more genius than they
actually possess(ed) and in the wrong fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I must be a simple soul missing something, but I never thought there was a lot of point to this `formal methods' stuff. A) Didn't Turing (and maybe Goedel even) cut a lot of the guts out of such things? How can you say a thing works right if you can't even prove that it completes? B) How can one be sure the formal specification which one is verifying as correctly implemented, is not merely an alternate codification of the same damn bugs?
:p ) far into formal methods because of these prejudices, and so i know next to naught of which i natter. nevertheless ... there is is.
I confess, i have not personally delved (dolved? dulved?
(watch out for that space in the Guardian URI)
j us tice.cfm
/. chokes if I do. *weeps* WHY is it so f'ing hard to post to /. with konqi?????
this was the article tha came back to my mind:
http://www.nypress.com/15/3/news%26columns/wild
I can't quote the releveant bit because
must either be a newbie (doesn't know /. talk often goes waay off topic), a gov't/industry operative (they always want to keep discussion `focused'), or illiterate (Katz brought BHD into the topic in his article his own self).
*jiggies* wow! /. takes posts from my konqi again! whee! 8)
raht on bruddah (eh)! I was going to say, much of the world mistrusts mechanized balloting as being way too easy to fiddle. (No need to mention recent history in america's dongle.)
but - one thing i dislike about our (canadian) balloting is that it's so not condorcet. I would love to see a ranking ballot adopted - but i can't see any way of tallying a reliable result in less than four years without little black boxen... and NO way to make it trustworthy. And personally, technologist or no, i see more `democracy' in a system people may grumble about but can understand and trust over of a `theoretically perfect' system most electors would think is a steaming pile of obfuscation machinated to crank out the outcome preset by the elite.
PS: scratch my opinion, there.
The National Research Council report `Building a Workforce for the Information Economy' (2000) noted that research has shown that the correlation between grades and future work performance is very weak.
from a read of //heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html I would suggest that the degree really isn't all that valuable (even for managers; Billy G ha no degree) compared to the cost of not being active in the industry for awhile (even a mere year). Personally, I see an inverse correlation between academic performance and professional advancement. Don't get off the track! And save your money, too, 'cause your time in the biz is getting short.
... or whoever invented mail. Each PO or similar collection of boxes is a host, postal/ZIP codes usually correpond to IP addresses each box is a port, postcards are packets, envelopes are encryption, both systems have return addresses, multiple transparent transport media (some are point to point; some are token ring; ethernet has no good analogue...), etc. The Internet is just an abstracted, automated Post Office system.
H'm. It's curiously absent from the Classical Archives. Unless it's on another page...
What bothers me is, if they do get away with it, doesn't that kinda cut the legal guts out of the GPL, precedent-wise?
Me mum commented the other day that if the media didn't make such a circus out of the things there wouldn't be as many protests. I asked her if she thought The Man would exercise the little restraint He does if there weren't heavy media coverage...
I'm still too sentimental to my C64 to sell it :)
... over the past 5/6 years, clearly, because i never spent one cent directly on my NetBSDs, while i did have to buy Winduhs and AmigaOS.
Other than that question I did pretty well but I guess the other guy did a little better... *shrug*
Oops, I have a couple of non-tech ones.
Of course, Levy's Hackers; possibly Sterling's Hacker Crackdown.
Software Conflict, Robert Glass.
Oh, and the Jargon File.
The rest would be nice to have but aren't as entertaining on a desert isle, 'cept possibly for Knuth:
For the practical side of automata, the first half of the `dragon book': Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman.
For a handle on security issues, Practical Unix and Internet Security by Garfinkel and Spafford.
And The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth.
/. won't let me finish!! f*#%!
The H1-B racket is still going, though... I saw on the Maclaughlin Group (sp?) Friday night something about Bushy considering amnesty-by-another-name for foreigners working without permits, 'cause the economy's come to depend on them? (You guys never really did finish with slave-type labour, didya?)
speaking of making X terminals (the other day), imagine putting that wee board in the foot of a monitor... if there's a kickass video modulator, of course. :p..
Interesting you should say that...If a thing like apotemnophilia (where people become convinced they'll be better off without hands or other bits) could be contagious even though `all in the head', why not a few cases of RSI?
be particularly careful to turn off things with themostats (refrigerators, a/c, freezer, water heaters, living-space heaters) or other self-regulators so you *know* their "contribution"o your measuree.
... set 'em up as netbooting X terminals around the house and shop. (minimize the moving parts in old Energy* stuff, they shouldn't be heavy power sinks) please, seriously, where are these "mountains" of unwanted PCs??
... in the truer senses of the word? Sure, maybe we've had Martian life raining down on us for æons, but we've obviously adapted to that if it's a threat. There's no comparing that with the sudden introduction of what might survive the relatively cushy journey on a probe. And it's not like we're dealing with a huge amount of distributed stuff (eg U, Pu, anthrax) that's going to be hidesouly expensive and nearly impossible to track and contain... especially compared to the expense and difficulty of obtaining it in the first place. Why the hell not show a little politic caution and assume it's lethal until proven otherwise???
But will I be able to prove that none of it really me, when the time comes?
funny how M$ will claim other browsers improperly implement SSL and certificates, given that they're Netscape inventions. this is a pretty clearcut instance of "nono, all your standards are belong to us, pay no attention to who made them..."
They actually pretty good analogies to Gates. They were able to put the right pieces together at the right time to gain enormous personal wealth and influence; but public perception credits them with far more genius than they actually possess(ed) and in the wrong fields.