aArvind Krishna might be an important person but he is hardly in the position to make such bold predictions (he wrote one paper on cryptology from 1990). But setting this aside, even giants in mathematics got it completely wrong when dealing with scalability or predicting the future in research. Quantum computing might theoretically break through complexity barriers but this has not been demonstrated yet. There could be fundamental problems when trying to scale things up. Theoretically things look always easy. Laplace argued that the future of events can be computed in principle by knowing the positions and momenta of particles. Laplace could refer to Newton's laws which justify this theoretically. But there were not only practical but fundamental objections, even for a small number of particles as errors grow exponenbtially (and then of course just because of quantum mechanics). Similarly, there could be fundamental problems when trying to break the complexity barrier (evenso theoretically, algorithms like Shor's work), maybe because of decoherence problems. If some engineers start to factor integers fast using quantum computing, then one can start worrying, until then it is just fancy advertisement. Come back with such claims if a quantum computer can factor the first integer not factored yet by traditionial computers. There are currently bigger problems to worry about, like CPU's with design flaws.
In general, I have always some issues with MS user interfaces. It is topped only by Oracle based stuff. In general, it is always a matter of priorities. One should not have to get lost in the menues like finding the keypad to dial a number. I had also less issues with Skype before it had been aquired. Zoom is an example of a communication software which has a pretty good UI.
it simply does not matter for most cases. There is the historical reason why double spacing made sense but it rarely matters. It has been pointed out that HTML does not mind whether double spacing is used. Also decent text processing systems like Latex do not show any difference. So, it simply does not matter. If one feels good doing two spaces. Where fanatism in syntax can matter is in programming but also there, the languages don't distinguish between one and two spaces. What matters however is zero or one spacing. I common mistake done in programming languages which allow spaces to be used as multiplication is to mistake xy with x y. This is often hard to catch. I personally always had big reservations with the tab which can often lead to mistakes in data as it is not visible and only the processing of the data with programs can lead to problems. But also here, some tolerance can help as it is easy to "clean out tabs" with one strike. There are obviously some who like tabs. Let them live. Also, if somebody likes the nostalgia with double spacing after punctuation, let them be even if it does not make much sense any more with modern type setting systems.
does a car, bike, train plane put lives at risk? yes. The question is always whether it is worth taking the risk. In space exploration the risks are higher, but it is also more exciting and beneficial.
it would be nice to see how "crazy" he would feel if his own phone was hacked, his personal bank accounts stolen, his medical history made public, his emails analyzed in a foreign county just because a backdoor was mandatory for mobile devices.
The outrage appeared first strange to me. I always assumed that signing up for a free service means that all the data provide are essentially public and can be sold. It is the prize to pay for a free service. I also still assume that a free service can at any time change its rules and policies or disappear or even assume that some censorship might occurs. The network is not mine and I don't pay for it.
Where free services cross a line is when they collect data of users which are not on the network or data which users have chosen not to place onto the network. If some personal data get onto a network because some app just pulled all private contact info of some friend or somer elative, then this is not ok. It is here, that regulations need to be put in place. Also, if I decide to say "yes, it is time to leave a network", I should have the possibility to delete an account without trace if needed. Also that needs to be regulated. The social networks do not do that on their own.
every food processing bears risks. If you cook, it can not be avoided that some unhealthy ingredients are produced. There are pros and cons to every food philosophy. As others have pointed out, the evidence prevails that coffee is beneficial for cancer prevention and has other benefits.
The idea is to store an electronic key on the device that would be separately
encrypted. This looks like a very bad idea as if the system writes that
access key into the memory, this part is accessible physically. Whoever thought about
this assumes that there is a decryption known only to the manufacturer or
FBI which allows to unlock the device. What do you do if for some reason a third
party finds out to unlock or access it remotely?
Suddenly, all phones, including the ones of the morons
who came up with the idea, will be wide open to everybody. This is unrelated to the
technology used. They try to solve a problem, risking a meltdown of a large part of
information infrastructure. Also, how long would it take after the implementation
that nobody would buy phones from US manufacturers any more?
I'm still on trusty (14.04) on one of my machines and I'm glad Ubuntu is well and alive and overcame the Unity disaster. I had never any issues with long term support versions. I just hope that Xorg will stay default. I would not mind Wayland as long as it is not the only version (a linux distribution without Xorg would be not an option any more as I run blackbox, a minimal windows manager which has solved for me the windows manager issue 20 years ago and which had allowed me to just completely ignore unity for the years it existed). The health of Ubuntu is also important for derivative distributions like mint. And even more important is debian which feeds ubuntu. In any case, it is reassuring to see a healthy culture (without monoculture).
Open source projects like Clang is what brings us forward. Especially in the long term.
Open source has enabled and improved many commercial products. The
current case that Microsoft uses it as part of their
development illustrates this very well.
There are crumbling infrastructures, climate change
issues, serious challenges with globalisation and wealth
inequality, health care systems in peril, an opioid crisis, unaffordable higher
education, a fragile financial system, serious deficits,
nations all over the world at the brink of bankruptcy or devastated by
war and these morons have nothing better to propose as a bill which is not only
unnecessary but also technically impossible to realize.
in a time where one can by 500 gig memory cards, it is really time also to have larger harddrives into the macbooks (I have two of those and the lack of harddrive space space is the main complaint for those things). Also nice would be two USB C ports. There are still almost no USB C hubs which allow to attach USB C devices and charge at the same time.
yes, while funny it hits the spot. It had never been easier to program than with these computers. I myself had a Tandy imitation). When the machine was turned on, all you could do is program in basic. backing up a program was tougher (audio tape!). Today, we not only have the the task of finding the programming language but also which version and which tools. Even for well groomed programming languages, textbooks are rather quickly obsolete, often not so much because of language change but because libraries change.
One problem with digital subscription as well as with
news apps is the constantly analysis, tracking, measurements which might occur.
Which article did the customer read, how long, when, from where,
during work time? In the future, news might be delivered individually,
maybe even adapted to the individual user, like in facebook.
What prevents me from signing up often is not so much the pay but the realization
that you essentially read the news while becoming part of big data, there are
mostly machines which analyze you but still, you are categorized and mined, and
your data possibly sold to advertisers. I could imagine that a relatively cheap
subscription version which guarantees: "we don't track you, we don't analyze and sell
your metrics to anybody" could have a larger success. Maybe it is here where
micro payments or crypto currencies could be useful. You pay anonymously and get
the newspaper, nobody looks over your shoulder and you don't get special adds
because of what your interests might have appeared to be. Or worse, that you would
get a version of the news paper which is adapted to you.
An other problem with subscription versions is that they sign you up very cheaply,
then increase the prize constantly. This happened also with print subscriptions.
A simple payment scheme would be relaxing, like "you pay 10 cents and can read the
news for a day" and this prize applies to anybody, as it used to be when the papers
were sold in the stores.
The economics of buying new rather than reparing applies already to many products. There are two strategies: buy good quality and repair if damaged or buy cheap and replace often. Unfortunately the second choice appears to be the better one even for producs which do not innovate that fast. For example: I bike everyday, summer and winter, the bikes start to deteriorate after about two years (which is for me about 6000 miles), pretty much universally so that I have to replace a lot, like breaks, gears, pedals, cables etc. (smaller things can be fixed nicely in bikes still fortunately). Bringing such a bike to a shop can cost close to get a new cheap one. Expensive bikes last longer as the quality of the ingredients is better the chance of having it snatched away. Also with electronics which are carried around, I started to buy frequently new cheaper products more frequently than expensive in larger intervals. Also there, the danger of losing it, or having damaged keyboard, charging plug or battery issues etc makes the first option the better one for me. It is a bit unfortunate that many products also are less and less self repairable.
It is amazing how much Wikipedia has improved over the years.
It has become a valuable starting point. There are various
layers of information and it would be interesting to
know the scales. If the Wikipedia's content is scaled to 1,
the content of books I would estimate to be 1000, the content of articles
and knowledge not processed to books yet, 50000 and then
knowledge available in non-published material, lecture notes,
expert knowledge, maybe 100000. It would be interesting to
see, how others see that. My own experience is that even if
having literally scanned through all books of a topic (in the
dusty stacks of the library), it is still only a small part.
Next comes checking the secondary literature, literature
cited in books, the ternary literature, literature cited in
such citations. Even after checking search engines, databases,
citation indices, preprint archives still, it is possible to miss something.
There is hidden knowledge, maybe never cited, never looked at, maybe
never written down and only known by experts. In all this huge
amount of knowledge, it is good to have an entry point.
It is interesting. I would have thought it was much older
than 1998. There is indeed a big difference between Free software (a term coined in 1985) and open Source software.
The term"free software" was always a hard sell as people would associate it with "gratis" rather than "libre". The term "open source" has it better from from that point of view. Still, it is not the same. While one can not imagine free software without having the code open, it is possible that maybe through patents, open source is not free. The definition given by the Gnu foundation makes this clear: "Open source is a term for developers, while free software is an ethical imperative". It might be necessary keep both terms: Free and open source (FOSS). I for myself always understood "Free software" already as "free and open source software". But the addition "open" makes sense in order not to get the "cheap" association.
the age of the captain problem has some modifications and variations which actually can be answered and also tests word problem understanding: one is:
you are the captain of a boat in which 25 sheep and 10 goats are. How old is the captain?
the captain problem is great the first time you see it. But again, once you have seen it, then it is still a template (and it is a 150n year old template). Solving it does not require any creativity any more. So, the pedagogical benefits are minimal.
Except of course that if such a problem appears in an exam, it pisses off the majority of students.
having worked with the apple stylus for a while now, the most annoying things is the charging. Cables are no option. A standard definitely needs a stylus which is wirelessly charged when near the tablet. One could even imagine a universal solution where the electonics would be the only thing vendor dependent. One could have a pen in a fancy fountain pen shape with an apple cartrige and write on an ipad, then if necessary change the cartridge to write on microsoft tablet etc.
This is a very well researched NYT article. I can imagine this required quite a bit of data mining and analysis and must have been fun to investigate. Especially impressive the time charts illustrating the patterns which give away when followers were bought. I'm glad this is investigated as it would really bother me personally to have my profile been sold like in the case of Jessica in the story.
Just one thing about the appearance of the article on the website: I know it looks cool with all this dynamic build up of the diagrams and pages. At the moment, as a reader I feel lost in a maze of dynamic text buildup and never know whether I have missed something. as scrolling modifies the page constantly. Still, this story is an eye opener.
Slashdot Mirror
aArvind Krishna might be an important person but he is hardly in the position to make such bold predictions (he wrote one paper on cryptology from 1990). But setting this aside, even giants in mathematics got it completely wrong when dealing with scalability or predicting the future in research. Quantum computing might theoretically break through complexity barriers but this has not been demonstrated yet. There could be fundamental problems when trying to scale things up. Theoretically things look always easy. Laplace argued that the future of events can be computed in principle by knowing the positions and momenta of particles. Laplace could refer to Newton's laws which justify this theoretically. But there were not only practical but fundamental objections, even for a small number of particles as errors grow exponenbtially (and then of course just because of quantum mechanics). Similarly, there could be fundamental problems when trying to break the complexity barrier (evenso theoretically, algorithms like Shor's work), maybe because of decoherence problems. If some engineers start to factor integers fast using quantum computing, then one can start worrying, until then it is just fancy advertisement. Come back with such claims if a quantum computer can factor the first integer not factored yet by traditionial computers. There are currently bigger problems to worry about, like CPU's with design flaws.
In general, I have always some issues with MS user interfaces. It is topped only by Oracle based stuff. In general, it is always a matter of priorities. One should not have to get lost in the menues like finding the keypad to dial a number. I had also less issues with Skype before it had been aquired. Zoom is an example of a communication software which has a pretty good UI.
It would have been much easier and cheaper: (Skyfall Rat Scene) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
it simply does not matter for most cases. There is the historical reason why double spacing made sense but it rarely matters. It has been pointed out that HTML does not mind whether double spacing is used. Also decent text processing systems like Latex do not show any difference. So, it simply does not matter. If one feels good doing two spaces. Where fanatism in syntax can matter is in programming but also there, the languages don't distinguish between one and two spaces. What matters however is zero or one spacing. I common mistake done in programming languages which allow spaces to be used as multiplication is to mistake xy with x y. This is often hard to catch. I personally always had big reservations with the tab which can often lead to mistakes in data as it is not visible and only the processing of the data with programs can lead to problems. But also here, some tolerance can help as it is easy to "clean out tabs" with one strike. There are obviously some who like tabs. Let them live. Also, if somebody likes the nostalgia with double spacing after punctuation, let them be even if it does not make much sense any more with modern type setting systems.
does a car, bike, train plane put lives at risk? yes. The question is always whether it is worth taking the risk. In space exploration the risks are higher, but it is also more exciting and beneficial.
decision science with focus on cost-benefit analysis.
it would be nice to see how "crazy" he would feel if his own phone was hacked, his personal bank accounts stolen, his medical history made public, his emails analyzed in a foreign county just because a backdoor was mandatory for mobile devices.
The outrage appeared first strange to me. I always assumed that signing up for a free service means that all the data provide are essentially public and can be sold. It is the prize to pay for a free service. I also still assume that a free service can at any time change its rules and policies or disappear or even assume that some censorship might occurs. The network is not mine and I don't pay for it. Where free services cross a line is when they collect data of users which are not on the network or data which users have chosen not to place onto the network. If some personal data get onto a network because some app just pulled all private contact info of some friend or somer elative, then this is not ok. It is here, that regulations need to be put in place. Also, if I decide to say "yes, it is time to leave a network", I should have the possibility to delete an account without trace if needed. Also that needs to be regulated. The social networks do not do that on their own.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes ....
(John Lithgow's character got that treatment)
maybe they are just overthinking; ike worrying about overthinking and bad mental health.
every food processing bears risks. If you cook, it can not be avoided that some unhealthy ingredients are produced. There are pros and cons to every food philosophy. As others have pointed out, the evidence prevails that coffee is beneficial for cancer prevention and has other benefits.
The idea is to store an electronic key on the device that would be separately encrypted. This looks like a very bad idea as if the system writes that access key into the memory, this part is accessible physically. Whoever thought about this assumes that there is a decryption known only to the manufacturer or FBI which allows to unlock the device. What do you do if for some reason a third party finds out to unlock or access it remotely? Suddenly, all phones, including the ones of the morons who came up with the idea, will be wide open to everybody. This is unrelated to the technology used. They try to solve a problem, risking a meltdown of a large part of information infrastructure. Also, how long would it take after the implementation that nobody would buy phones from US manufacturers any more?
I'm still on trusty (14.04) on one of my machines and I'm glad Ubuntu is well and alive and overcame the Unity disaster. I had never any issues with long term support versions. I just hope that Xorg will stay default. I would not mind Wayland as long as it is not the only version (a linux distribution without Xorg would be not an option any more as I run blackbox, a minimal windows manager which has solved for me the windows manager issue 20 years ago and which had allowed me to just completely ignore unity for the years it existed). The health of Ubuntu is also important for derivative distributions like mint. And even more important is debian which feeds ubuntu. In any case, it is reassuring to see a healthy culture (without monoculture).
Open source projects like Clang is what brings us forward. Especially in the long term. Open source has enabled and improved many commercial products. The current case that Microsoft uses it as part of their development illustrates this very well.
There are crumbling infrastructures, climate change issues, serious challenges with globalisation and wealth inequality, health care systems in peril, an opioid crisis, unaffordable higher education, a fragile financial system, serious deficits, nations all over the world at the brink of bankruptcy or devastated by war and these morons have nothing better to propose as a bill which is not only unnecessary but also technically impossible to realize.
in a time where one can by 500 gig memory cards, it is really time also to have larger harddrives into the macbooks (I have two of those and the lack of harddrive space space is the main complaint for those things). Also nice would be two USB C ports. There are still almost no USB C hubs which allow to attach USB C devices and charge at the same time.
yes, while funny it hits the spot. It had never been easier to program than with these computers. I myself had a Tandy imitation). When the machine was turned on, all you could do is program in basic. backing up a program was tougher (audio tape!). Today, we not only have the the task of finding the programming language but also which version and which tools. Even for well groomed programming languages, textbooks are rather quickly obsolete, often not so much because of language change but because libraries change.
One problem with digital subscription as well as with news apps is the constantly analysis, tracking, measurements which might occur. Which article did the customer read, how long, when, from where, during work time? In the future, news might be delivered individually, maybe even adapted to the individual user, like in facebook. What prevents me from signing up often is not so much the pay but the realization that you essentially read the news while becoming part of big data, there are mostly machines which analyze you but still, you are categorized and mined, and your data possibly sold to advertisers. I could imagine that a relatively cheap subscription version which guarantees: "we don't track you, we don't analyze and sell your metrics to anybody" could have a larger success. Maybe it is here where micro payments or crypto currencies could be useful. You pay anonymously and get the newspaper, nobody looks over your shoulder and you don't get special adds because of what your interests might have appeared to be. Or worse, that you would get a version of the news paper which is adapted to you. An other problem with subscription versions is that they sign you up very cheaply, then increase the prize constantly. This happened also with print subscriptions. A simple payment scheme would be relaxing, like "you pay 10 cents and can read the news for a day" and this prize applies to anybody, as it used to be when the papers were sold in the stores.
The economics of buying new rather than reparing applies already to many products. There are two strategies: buy good quality and repair if damaged or buy cheap and replace often. Unfortunately the second choice appears to be the better one even for producs which do not innovate that fast. For example: I bike everyday, summer and winter, the bikes start to deteriorate after about two years (which is for me about 6000 miles), pretty much universally so that I have to replace a lot, like breaks, gears, pedals, cables etc. (smaller things can be fixed nicely in bikes still fortunately). Bringing such a bike to a shop can cost close to get a new cheap one. Expensive bikes last longer as the quality of the ingredients is better the chance of having it snatched away. Also with electronics which are carried around, I started to buy frequently new cheaper products more frequently than expensive in larger intervals. Also there, the danger of losing it, or having damaged keyboard, charging plug or battery issues etc makes the first option the better one for me. It is a bit unfortunate that many products also are less and less self repairable.
It is amazing how much Wikipedia has improved over the years. It has become a valuable starting point. There are various layers of information and it would be interesting to know the scales. If the Wikipedia's content is scaled to 1, the content of books I would estimate to be 1000, the content of articles and knowledge not processed to books yet, 50000 and then knowledge available in non-published material, lecture notes, expert knowledge, maybe 100000. It would be interesting to see, how others see that. My own experience is that even if having literally scanned through all books of a topic (in the dusty stacks of the library), it is still only a small part. Next comes checking the secondary literature, literature cited in books, the ternary literature, literature cited in such citations. Even after checking search engines, databases, citation indices, preprint archives still, it is possible to miss something. There is hidden knowledge, maybe never cited, never looked at, maybe never written down and only known by experts. In all this huge amount of knowledge, it is good to have an entry point.
It is interesting. I would have thought it was much older than 1998. There is indeed a big difference between Free software (a term coined in 1985) and open Source software. The term"free software" was always a hard sell as people would associate it with "gratis" rather than "libre". The term "open source" has it better from from that point of view. Still, it is not the same. While one can not imagine free software without having the code open, it is possible that maybe through patents, open source is not free. The definition given by the Gnu foundation makes this clear: "Open source is a term for developers, while free software is an ethical imperative". It might be necessary keep both terms: Free and open source (FOSS). I for myself always understood "Free software" already as "free and open source software". But the addition "open" makes sense in order not to get the "cheap" association.
the age of the captain problem has some modifications and variations which actually can be answered and also tests word problem understanding: one is: you are the captain of a boat in which 25 sheep and 10 goats are. How old is the captain? the captain problem is great the first time you see it. But again, once you have seen it, then it is still a template (and it is a 150n year old template). Solving it does not require any creativity any more. So, the pedagogical benefits are minimal. Except of course that if such a problem appears in an exam, it pisses off the majority of students.
having worked with the apple stylus for a while now, the most annoying things is the charging. Cables are no option. A standard definitely needs a stylus which is wirelessly charged when near the tablet. One could even imagine a universal solution where the electonics would be the only thing vendor dependent. One could have a pen in a fancy fountain pen shape with an apple cartrige and write on an ipad, then if necessary change the cartridge to write on microsoft tablet etc.
I have no idea what are you talking about. This is not my article and don't know the authors.
This is a very well researched NYT article. I can imagine this required quite a bit of data mining and analysis and must have been fun to investigate. Especially impressive the time charts illustrating the patterns which give away when followers were bought. I'm glad this is investigated as it would really bother me personally to have my profile been sold like in the case of Jessica in the story. Just one thing about the appearance of the article on the website: I know it looks cool with all this dynamic build up of the diagrams and pages. At the moment, as a reader I feel lost in a maze of dynamic text buildup and never know whether I have missed something. as scrolling modifies the page constantly. Still, this story is an eye opener.