I'm closer, but not quite: Half of my spam is for Viagra, or herbal sex-enhancing drugs (for both genders). No pictures, just lots of capital letters and exclamation points.
BTW, why do they usually put V----- in the email instead of the word? Do some mail servers filter email like browser censorware filters web pages?
Yeah, but it is thick enough in LEO to cause a satellite to deorbit in a couple years, as opposed to geosynchronous orbits, which are stable for much, much longer.
...and we should assume that copyright lasts essentially forever, since they'll patch the law everytime Disney's cash cow is about to become public domain.
I wish my high school had a decent computer programming class at all when I was there. The year I took it was the last year that it was taught in Pascal (the AP was just about to switch over) and it was horrible. I consider myself fairly "hardcore" when it comes to computers (i.e. I find most things about computers interesting, even though most other people consider it quite boring), but if I hadn't already learned how to program elsewhere, I think I would have learned to hate programming.
The teacher was totally incompetent. She was a math teacher who had taken the equivalent course at the community college (failed it the first time) and the next course. Somewhere in there, the idea of compiling multiple source files into a single executable had totally passed her by, among other things.
But, yes, I agree that people really need to take a course in programming early to find out if they want to go into CS.
I have to agree with you on that one. I learned how to use computers on CP/M and DOS. Both of those command lines I think were designed to make you hate CLI's. You would think that the designers would have made them better in the pre-Windows days since everyone had to use the command line all the time.
bash, csh, etc. are all incredibly more powerful and much nicer (tab completion!!) than DOS. Wildcard expansion is better, and you can write real programs for the interpret, and not these klunky batch files that need the Norton utilities to be useful.
It makes me wonder how many people are entering the "computer industry" because of the lure of supposed fortune.
Amen to that. If I tell anyone that I'm studying computer science, the immediate response is "I hear you can make a lot of money doing that." It makes me batty, especially because the people I see excelling in the degree mostly do computer sceince because they like it, not because they know they'll get paid a lot. (Pay is a nice benefit, however.)
To anyone who might be reading this: Please, please, please don't go into computer science unless you like it. You'll make yourself miserable and there's a good chance you won't be very good at it.
Aside from other comments people have made about HTML being a markup language, not a structural language (like SGML), the other problem is an evolutionary one. HTML started out with a similar purpose to LaTeX: descript documents in a platform-independent manner. HTML was simpler because the designers weren't trying to achieve excellent print quality (which requires more constructs), but they just wanted a way to put documents with text, pictures, and hyperlinks online.
Eight years of insane growth has pushed HTML into what can only be called an "interface language." Websites aren't documents anymore. They are forms, banners, toolbars, indexes, and all sorts of non-HTML stuff taped together to create an "information interface." That doesn't map well to the LaTeX as it is. LaTeX is overkill for somethings (pagination, text flow layout) and is completely missing other things (forms).
Again, I'm confused by people's perceptions of the "Slashdot opinion." Most of the posts I read (or at least recall reading) comment on how "sweet" Mac OS X looks. I can't remember ever reading a post complaining that it was a waste of CPU power.
MS: Microsoft calling. According to a disgruntled employee, you have an invalid license for your copies of Windows.
User: But I paid for it! (Mentally thinking: "Damn, I gave those silly holograms to my kids.")
MS: Not our problem. Disgruntled employees never lie. Cough up the licenses, or just pay us again, and we'll leave you alone until we come back next year.
...and you still haven't told us how you know that Excel's spreadsheet execution engine is written in assembly language. (Other than we all have to be idiots not to believe you.)
People don't use assembly language for everything for a reason: it offers a low level of abstraction. This means the programmer has to keep more in his or her head. People--even skilled, uber-programmers--are not perfect, and the more you make them keep in their head, the more likely they are to screw up. The increased cost of screwing up more has to be worth less than the gain of speeding up your app with assembly language in parts.
Cell computation in Excel is non-trivial, and implementing it in assembly would be tough. That doesn't mean Microsoft didn't do it, but it does mean that it isn't obvious that they did do it either.
One of these days I'm going to be bored enough to do a statistical study of posts in a Slashdot article to determine:
How many espouse view conforming to the "Slashdot stereotype."
How many complain about views conforming to the "Slashdot stereotype."
I want to do this because I read some posts (like the parent; nothing personal, you just happened to remind me of this question of mine) that complain about some view of the traditional Slashdot user and I wonder what posts they are talking about. Sure, you see some "linux r00ls" posts, but if you exclude the blatant trolls, I don't remember reading that many. To be fair, I realize that I may have a mental filter when I scan the posts that makes the stupid ones (like what the parent post complains about) recede into the background and the posts that complain about them stick out.
Hopefully that makes sense. I can't tell if our perceptions of Slashdot are colored by preconceived notions of the types of posts we expect to find.
If someone gets bored enough to do this for a psychology/sociology assignment, let me know.:)
That makes sense. The cardinality of the set of integer points on a grid is the same as integer points on a line. Therefore you can map the grid positions to tape positions indefinitely. Good point.
Since you can simulate Life on a computer, Life cannot compute anything that a computer cannot. Conversely, since you can simulate a Turing machine with Life, a Turing machine is no more powerful than Life. Therefore they are computationally equivalent.
Life, however, I wouldn't necessarily say is simpler than a Turing machine. A Turing machine has more state change rules and states, but only a 1D tape. Life has fixed states and state change rules, but a 2D grid. They seem to just be different ways to do the same thing.
For a hillarious song on this topic by my favorite Canadian humor group (okay, so it's the only one I know), Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, go check out The War of 1812. While you're at it, listen to their other pieces, including the Internet Help Desk and the Toronto song. I laughed myself silly when I first heard their stuff.
...except Transmeta actually has a new and innovating product. It may not be as good as the hype, but they came up with neat techniques to lower power consumption. Transmeta didn't subject us to the hype machine until they had a real product that we could compare to the claims. Ultimately, their product is technology-driven.
On the other hand, this Omniputer is marketing-driven. It's hard to be truly innovative when your product is created for the express purpose of meeting a deadline given in a 35 year-old science fiction story. At best it will be an eMachine with a red light taped to it.
If they were just naming a computer HAL for the whole 2001 marketing effect, I could understand. However, this guy is actually claiming that the computer will have some of the attributes of HAL: Artificial intelligence, the ability to repair itself, etc. Now he just sounds wacko.
He also sounds financially irresponsible. One million pounds in debt in his other company?? Moving to Sri Lanka to avoid persecution for his "advanced cryptography scheme." Uh huh. Sure.
Clarke better find a less shady character if he wants to get a computer to market by next year. Contact Dell and have them market a computer with a futuristic case and a glowing red light on the front. Then at least we would quit pretending that this is advanced technology and call it like it is: a novelty item.
I asked a similar question while I was working on the software team at our university's satellite design lab. The electronics guru explained that, among other things (many of which have been mentioned), one of the reasons we can't slap a Celeron into orbit (or even a Crusoe if you want real power savings) is that the manufacturing process uses such small gates that it doesn't take much stray radiation to start flipping bits in your CPU registers. DRAM is already suceptible to this and needs error-correcting bits to be reliable.
The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.
Actually, I think evolutionary algorithms are quite interesting. In the form you usually see, they are very good at optimizing lots of variables in a complex solution space. No good for problems where you can't define an overall structure for the solution.
However, the link you provide made for an interesting read. Genetic Programming (as they describe it) seems to be the most likely candidate for the kind of outcome you describe. It appears to permit program evolution to change algorithmic structure, rather than just algorithmic constants (which Genetic Algorithms change). I'm not totally convinced that even the insane improvements in computing power will enable Genetic Programming to produce anything beyond laboratory curiosities.
Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see one of these programs be developed to drive a car, or some such "AI"-type problem.
The basic problem I have with the nanotech pundits is that they seem to assume that once you have the parts, it is trivial to make the whole. I think the Computing Revolution has demonstrated the falsity of that statement fairly well.
Processors provide the "parts" of computation by physically performing the actual instructions used. These computers basically allow numerical operations, memory access, and branching. That doesn't seem like much, but it's "Turing complete," which means that (if you buy the Turing hypothesis) everything which is computable can be computed with such instructions. We have all the parts of computation we need, and they're getting faster all the time.
But the software still lags. We have "computationally intense" software, but that's not the same as complex software. 3D games always push the envelope of computer capability because just when you think you've got enough computing power, id throws more triangles and more textures at the problem. That's a quantitative change, but not a qualitative change.
When we look at all of the other software produced, it seems that if the software is marginally complex (think of your favorite program here), it's buggy as hell. Reducing the bugs in the software requires more effort; an exponential amount of effort as the complexity increases.
That's why we've seen the speed of computer hardware shoot through the roof, and the complexity of computer software plod along, unable to keep up. Producing complex software is an NP-complete problem. (/me ducks the flames of the math people in the audience.)
If you'll permit me to play pundit for a second: I think we'll reach these so-called "milestones" that the AI people and the nanotech people keep giving us and realize that while we can manufacture a computer with the MIPS/FLOPS/whatever of a mouse/dog/human brain, we don't have the slightest idea how to string all of that power together to actually perform the operations of the mouse/dog/human brain.
Your computer will get 10,000 fps with 6e10 textured polygons in Quake XXXVI, but it still won't be able to learn a new language.
I've found that pretty much every drive can read CD-R media, but I haven't been so successful with CD-RW. So far the only drives I've gotten to work are other CD burners. I suspect new CD-ROM drives can read CD-RW media, but I don't have any around to test.
One of the reasons for CISC in the first place (other than the non-existence of compilers that knew how to use registers effectively) was memory bandwidth. CISC was motivated by the extremely slow nature of memory several decades ago. Once DRAM became both cheap and fast, the CPU was the major bottleneck and RISC became more popular.
Now we've gone full circle and memory is the bottleneck again. CISC could provide a performance advantage again.
Koblitz and Elliptic Curves
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 2
The added emphasis on Elliptic Curves in Koblitz is to be expected since that is one of his big areas. I got a chance to hear him speak at my University (Arizona State), and it was pretty interesting.
I especially enjoyed hearing his story about RSA bashing (in a "polite way") on Elliptic Curve crypto. He showed us a quote by Rivest where he said that finding a mathematician who could give you a reasonable analysis of EC crypto was about as hard as finding someone to give you an interpretation of Chaldean poetry. In response, the organizers of an EC workshop that Koblitz attended had shirts made with elliptic curves on them and the statement "I Love Chaldean Poetry" silkscreened on the front.
Koblitz wore the shirt to the talk, and we all had a good chuckle.:)
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, why do they usually put V----- in the email instead of the word? Do some mail servers filter email like browser censorware filters web pages?
Yeah, but it is thick enough in LEO to cause a satellite to deorbit in a couple years, as opposed to geosynchronous orbits, which are stable for much, much longer.
I thought Microsoft was the one who killed NT on the Alpha, and Compaq dropped support accordingly.
...and we should assume that copyright lasts essentially forever, since they'll patch the law everytime Disney's cash cow is about to become public domain.
The teacher was totally incompetent. She was a math teacher who had taken the equivalent course at the community college (failed it the first time) and the next course. Somewhere in there, the idea of compiling multiple source files into a single executable had totally passed her by, among other things.
But, yes, I agree that people really need to take a course in programming early to find out if they want to go into CS.
bash, csh, etc. are all incredibly more powerful and much nicer (tab completion!!) than DOS. Wildcard expansion is better, and you can write real programs for the interpret, and not these klunky batch files that need the Norton utilities to be useful.
Amen to that. If I tell anyone that I'm studying computer science, the immediate response is "I hear you can make a lot of money doing that." It makes me batty, especially because the people I see excelling in the degree mostly do computer sceince because they like it, not because they know they'll get paid a lot. (Pay is a nice benefit, however.)
To anyone who might be reading this: Please, please, please don't go into computer science unless you like it. You'll make yourself miserable and there's a good chance you won't be very good at it.
Eight years of insane growth has pushed HTML into what can only be called an "interface language." Websites aren't documents anymore. They are forms, banners, toolbars, indexes, and all sorts of non-HTML stuff taped together to create an "information interface." That doesn't map well to the LaTeX as it is. LaTeX is overkill for somethings (pagination, text flow layout) and is completely missing other things (forms).
I like LaTeX, but it won't work for websites.
Again, I'm confused by people's perceptions of the "Slashdot opinion." Most of the posts I read (or at least recall reading) comment on how "sweet" Mac OS X looks. I can't remember ever reading a post complaining that it was a waste of CPU power.
People don't use assembly language for everything for a reason: it offers a low level of abstraction. This means the programmer has to keep more in his or her head. People--even skilled, uber-programmers--are not perfect, and the more you make them keep in their head, the more likely they are to screw up. The increased cost of screwing up more has to be worth less than the gain of speeding up your app with assembly language in parts.
Cell computation in Excel is non-trivial, and implementing it in assembly would be tough. That doesn't mean Microsoft didn't do it, but it does mean that it isn't obvious that they did do it either.
Nice diatribe though.
I want to do this because I read some posts (like the parent; nothing personal, you just happened to remind me of this question of mine) that complain about some view of the traditional Slashdot user and I wonder what posts they are talking about. Sure, you see some "linux r00ls" posts, but if you exclude the blatant trolls, I don't remember reading that many. To be fair, I realize that I may have a mental filter when I scan the posts that makes the stupid ones (like what the parent post complains about) recede into the background and the posts that complain about them stick out.
Hopefully that makes sense. I can't tell if our perceptions of Slashdot are colored by preconceived notions of the types of posts we expect to find.
If someone gets bored enough to do this for a psychology/sociology assignment, let me know. :)
How so? The random number generator would have to be a hardware device using some sort of trick to be nondeterministic. Do you know how this worked?
That makes sense. The cardinality of the set of integer points on a grid is the same as integer points on a line. Therefore you can map the grid positions to tape positions indefinitely. Good point.
Life, however, I wouldn't necessarily say is simpler than a Turing machine. A Turing machine has more state change rules and states, but only a 1D tape. Life has fixed states and state change rules, but a 2D grid. They seem to just be different ways to do the same thing.
For a hillarious song on this topic by my favorite Canadian humor group (okay, so it's the only one I know), Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, go check out The War of 1812. While you're at it, listen to their other pieces, including the Internet Help Desk and the Toronto song. I laughed myself silly when I first heard their stuff.
Say what? Do you have a source for this one?
On the other hand, this Omniputer is marketing-driven. It's hard to be truly innovative when your product is created for the express purpose of meeting a deadline given in a 35 year-old science fiction story. At best it will be an eMachine with a red light taped to it.
He also sounds financially irresponsible. One million pounds in debt in his other company?? Moving to Sri Lanka to avoid persecution for his "advanced cryptography scheme." Uh huh. Sure.
Clarke better find a less shady character if he wants to get a computer to market by next year. Contact Dell and have them market a computer with a futuristic case and a glowing red light on the front. Then at least we would quit pretending that this is advanced technology and call it like it is: a novelty item.
The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.
However, the link you provide made for an interesting read. Genetic Programming (as they describe it) seems to be the most likely candidate for the kind of outcome you describe. It appears to permit program evolution to change algorithmic structure, rather than just algorithmic constants (which Genetic Algorithms change). I'm not totally convinced that even the insane improvements in computing power will enable Genetic Programming to produce anything beyond laboratory curiosities.
Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see one of these programs be developed to drive a car, or some such "AI"-type problem.
Processors provide the "parts" of computation by physically performing the actual instructions used. These computers basically allow numerical operations, memory access, and branching. That doesn't seem like much, but it's "Turing complete," which means that (if you buy the Turing hypothesis) everything which is computable can be computed with such instructions. We have all the parts of computation we need, and they're getting faster all the time.
But the software still lags. We have "computationally intense" software, but that's not the same as complex software. 3D games always push the envelope of computer capability because just when you think you've got enough computing power, id throws more triangles and more textures at the problem. That's a quantitative change, but not a qualitative change.
When we look at all of the other software produced, it seems that if the software is marginally complex (think of your favorite program here), it's buggy as hell. Reducing the bugs in the software requires more effort; an exponential amount of effort as the complexity increases.
That's why we've seen the speed of computer hardware shoot through the roof, and the complexity of computer software plod along, unable to keep up. Producing complex software is an NP-complete problem. (/me ducks the flames of the math people in the audience.)
If you'll permit me to play pundit for a second: I think we'll reach these so-called "milestones" that the AI people and the nanotech people keep giving us and realize that while we can manufacture a computer with the MIPS/FLOPS/whatever of a mouse/dog/human brain, we don't have the slightest idea how to string all of that power together to actually perform the operations of the mouse/dog/human brain.
Your computer will get 10,000 fps with 6e10 textured polygons in Quake XXXVI, but it still won't be able to learn a new language.
Now we've gone full circle and memory is the bottleneck again. CISC could provide a performance advantage again.
I especially enjoyed hearing his story about RSA bashing (in a "polite way") on Elliptic Curve crypto. He showed us a quote by Rivest where he said that finding a mathematician who could give you a reasonable analysis of EC crypto was about as hard as finding someone to give you an interpretation of Chaldean poetry. In response, the organizers of an EC workshop that Koblitz attended had shirts made with elliptic curves on them and the statement "I Love Chaldean Poetry" silkscreened on the front.
Koblitz wore the shirt to the talk, and we all had a good chuckle. :)