Also, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman *did* invent RSA. I'm not sure what you're implying.
Well, it was apparently thought of earlier, in the late 1960s, by James Ellis and Clifford Cocks (who were British secret agents). However they did not publish (being secret agents). R,S+A thought it up independently 10 years later, and they were the first to publish. See this techweb story for some more details.
Yep, ok. The first part (Eric licensed the rights to CRC) was stated on his website (http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/), which used to advertise the book. The second part is clear because his website has (or always used to have) a request for entries to be contributed on those areas of maths which are not yet covered.
BTW AFAIK CRC always "tolerated" the treasure trove being online, at least in the days when Eric used to randomly block 10 letters of the alphabet (so, e.g. the entries for words beginning with A,G,K,L,N,P,S,T,V,Y would be unaccessable). I guess they've just decided to have a problem with it now that he's (apparently) working for Wolfram.
The print edition is titled the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, which implies that CRC either takes great pride in publishing it or owns significant rights to it.
Eric sold the rights to the Math treasure trove to CRC, although I'm not sure what the terms were.
*However*, the treasure trove was built up over many years and largely user-contributed. So it is not clear that Eric had claim to the rights in the first place. It's much like the CDDB case.
Either get some consistency with your editorial selections, or you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.
Awww, did you get up on the wrong side of your bridge this morning? Seriously, I think one of the good things about slashdot is that it's a bit eccentric; it's not the New York Times or the Economist.
Re:Search engines will answer your question.
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"e-mail" vs "email"
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If that were the case, "a lot" would be spelled "alot" or "allot".
Where do you think words like "helpful" come from?:-)
Re:I agree with Don - let's use email now!
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"e-mail" vs "email"
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let's just get rid of [the hyphen] now and save the world a few billion keystrokes per year.
Yours is a valiant and noble quest; however, I cannot join the crusade yet lest the health of my maths degree suffer:-( [ or should that be:( ? ]
Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..
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"e-mail" vs "email"
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Questions of spelling, grammar, and usage cannot be resolved by appeal to typing speed!
Well, the answers to questions of pronunciation, grammar and usage have always evolved to facilitate *talking* speed in the past. e.g. you don't pronounce the gh in "night" - because it evolved that way. Email is the first really colloquial writing style in common use, so I would expect language to evolve to facilitate it too.
I think strong arguments can be made for abandoning the standard typing position
Speaking as somebody who has tried and abandoned learning Dvorak, the biggest problem with nonstandard keyboard layouts is programs like games which assume the layout is standard, e.g. games whose control keys are W,A,S,D / I,J,K,L for up,left,down,right. That, and operating systems which don't allow change of keyboard layout in user-space (try getting an unhelpful sysadmin to install such an "unusual" driver. And yes, I know that's a problem with the sysadmin and not the OS).
Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..
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"e-mail" vs "email"
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What's the X stand for in X-ray (or even in X ray)?
Nothing. This is a use of "X" to mean "unknown" (as they were not understood when the name was coined).
In case it doesn't stand for anything, I'm not trying to be a sarcastic, nitpicking dick.
Aw, that's the most endearing disclaimer I've heard for ages:-) remind me to buy you a drink sometime.
I am saddened to see linux as the free system of choice
Linux != GNU/Linux. I'm not complaining about your terminology; I'm saying that the reasons for using [GNU/]Linux as opposed to BSD are not really about the kernel, they're more about things like the Debian project, or commercial 24/7 support.
It occurs to me that they may not have actually *heard* of BSD, or they may not wish to confuse their audience by introducing another word they don't know. If you're suggesting that the author has something against Walnut Creek, I'd guess that it was more of an approximation for simplicity's sake.
The needs of The Man outweigh the needs of You
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Send Some Mo' Zilla
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This same problem in Debian wouldn't be posted here in 20 years.
No. Because Debian unstable/frozen gets tested by such a lot of people that a Debian-Crashes-In-Three-Weeks problem would get fixed way before the actual release.
Not saying Debian is perfect, just that that particular problem would be virtually impossible.
The only case where compilation time isn't constant would be a solution to a
problem where you're generating code for each instance of the problem, and the size of the code varies with the problem size. That's pretty unusual though.
I'm guessing that this program took exponentially longer to compile as MAX_INT (or whatever) increased.
Re:Red Hat covets non-free software?
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Qt Going GPL
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Ok, point taken - but would you say Red Hat does aim to attract non-free software? AFAICS they do a lot of evangelising of Open Source - as opposed to the aforementioned example of Caldera.
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
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Qt Going GPL
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It would be silly to change a business model that *worked*.
But it's just as silly to assume that something will work tomorrow, just because it worked yesterday. I think that's a fair description of what Netscape did.
It's staggering how many people think a bunch of random hackers engaged in a forum where consensus is pretty much the only unifying force can design a tight well-designed OS.
Kernel or OS? Kernel development runs under benign dictatorship, not consensus. OTOH something democratic like Debian is a strong counterexample to your claim.
Red Hat covets non-free software?
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Qt Going GPL
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companies like Red Hat [which] want to attract unfree software to Linux.
Is that a fair statement? Red Hat seem to strongly favour free software, though they use non-free software sometimes. If you were talking about Caldera I'd agree, or to a lesser extent SuSE.
Slashdot Mirror
du elsker hvem?
Well, it was apparently thought of earlier, in the late 1960s, by James Ellis and Clifford Cocks (who were British secret agents). However they did not publish (being secret agents). R,S+A thought it up independently 10 years later, and they were the first to publish. See this techweb story for some more details.
Cool. You can get student-written course notes, from the Cambridge maths degree course, with varying free-ish licenses from http://www.cam.ac.uk/Ca mbU niv/Societies/archim/notes.htm.
Yep, ok. The first part (Eric licensed the rights to CRC) was stated on his website (http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/), which used to advertise the book. The second part is clear because his website has (or always used to have) a request for entries to be contributed on those areas of maths which are not yet covered.
BTW AFAIK CRC always "tolerated" the treasure trove being online, at least in the days when Eric used to randomly block 10 letters of the alphabet (so, e.g. the entries for words beginning with A,G,K,L,N,P,S,T,V,Y would be unaccessable). I guess they've just decided to have a problem with it now that he's (apparently) working for Wolfram.
Eric sold the rights to the Math treasure trove to CRC, although I'm not sure what the terms were.
*However*, the treasure trove was built up over many years and largely user-contributed. So it is not clear that Eric had claim to the rights in the first place. It's much like the CDDB case.
Awww, did you get up on the wrong side of your bridge this morning? Seriously, I think one of the good things about slashdot is that it's a bit eccentric; it's not the New York Times or the Economist.
Where do you think words like "helpful" come from?
Yours is a valiant and noble quest; however, I cannot join the crusade yet lest the health of my maths degree suffer
Well, the answers to questions of pronunciation, grammar and usage have always evolved to facilitate *talking* speed in the past. e.g. you don't pronounce the gh in "night" - because it evolved that way. Email is the first really colloquial writing style in common use, so I would expect language to evolve to facilitate it too.
Speaking as somebody who has tried and abandoned learning Dvorak, the biggest problem with nonstandard keyboard layouts is programs like games which assume the layout is standard, e.g. games whose control keys are W,A,S,D / I,J,K,L for up,left,down,right. That, and operating systems which don't allow change of keyboard layout in user-space (try getting an unhelpful sysadmin to install such an "unusual" driver. And yes, I know that's a problem with the sysadmin and not the OS).
Nothing. This is a use of "X" to mean "unknown" (as they were not understood when the name was coined).
Aw, that's the most endearing disclaimer I've heard for ages
Does w3c-valid HTML/Transitional count? If so, I hereby take up the challenge! Here goes:
Not if you bought the spec that Apple said OS X would need two years ago.
I'm pretty sure they removed standard mode from Windows 3.11. I remember unsuccessfully trying to install it on a 286.
Linux != GNU/Linux. I'm not complaining about your terminology; I'm saying that the reasons for using [GNU/]Linux as opposed to BSD are not really about the kernel, they're more about things like the Debian project, or commercial 24/7 support.
It occurs to me that they may not have actually *heard* of BSD, or they may not wish to confuse their audience by introducing another word they don't know. If you're suggesting that the author has something against Walnut Creek, I'd guess that it was more of an approximation for simplicity's sake.
See above.
No. Because Debian unstable/frozen gets tested by such a lot of people that a Debian-Crashes-In-Three-Weeks problem would get fixed way before the actual release.
Not saying Debian is perfect, just that that particular problem would be virtually impossible.
I'm guessing that this program took exponentially longer to compile as MAX_INT (or whatever) increased.
> mov ah, 0
> mov al, 13h
> int 10h
Checkmate.
Ok, point taken - but would you say Red Hat does aim to attract non-free software? AFAICS they do a lot of evangelising of Open Source - as opposed to the aforementioned example of Caldera.
But it's just as silly to assume that something will work tomorrow, just because it worked yesterday. I think that's a fair description of what Netscape did.
Kernel or OS? Kernel development runs under benign dictatorship, not consensus. OTOH something democratic like Debian is a strong counterexample to your claim.
Is that a fair statement? Red Hat seem to strongly favour free software, though they use non-free software sometimes. If you were talking about Caldera I'd agree, or to a lesser extent SuSE.
How hard would it be to port QT/Unix to Cygwin? Anyone who knows lots about this sort of stuff care to answer?