Pardon the shouting, but I mean it. Testing as is mostly done in the coding shops is the detection of what bugs got introduced in the code. Quality code production doesn't mean finding the flaws, but keeping them from occurring in the first place. There is only one way to accomplish this, and that is to make testing a design criterion. There is no substitute for specifying design invariants and coding to assure them. This is where specification languages like Z come in handy, and why the Eiffel wankers are so in love with their language.
All locating failures does is locate failures; it does not ensure success. The only way to ensure success of a system of any complexity is to define what correct operation is and ensure it. There are brainiacs from the planet Smartron-Five that are good enough at their formal logic to actually prove whether a piece of code is correct or not. That's great if you can do it, otherwise, you're stuck with ASSERTs or JUnit or somesuch. But you can't do any of that meaningfully without a rigorous understanding of what it truly means when you say "it works".
My review of Wolfram's book
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 1
Submitted to Amazon on Friday:
***** = A massive acheivement Reviewer: James Mitchell from San Francisco, CA United States
Stephen Wolfram's 'A new kind of science' is a massive achievement, true to the grandest traditions of self-publishing. In this stunningly beautifully laid out tome, Wolfram displays the fruits of long, intense dedication to the most sublime hubris, progressing from what are genuinely intriguing results of arduous empirical research to sweeping delusions of competance. Who would have thought that you could replicate the behavior of fluid movement on a computer by explicitly modelling it? Stunning, indeed. Doubly stunning is that a work of such gargantuan inanity could contain such a concise and lucid explanation of chaotic processes. That a mind that can so clearly explain the phenomenon of super-critical dependence on initial conditions can also produce so much excess self-congratulation for producing such a vapid vehicle for presenting this work will provide excellent working material for budding young doctoral candidates in psychology.
In its best movement, Wolfram's book spends a great deal of time demonstrating how his computational artifacts are unable to work out the results of constraints, in the process demonstrating the total futility of over a decade's worth of research. Amazingly, Wolfram presents the inapplicability of his work as a mark of its virtue -- that you can produce totally unpredictable and incomprehensible behavior without regard to the actual process one is researching. Given an intellect of such Colossal stature as Wolfram's, this massive tome is in and of itself the most solid, bulletproof example of the value of peer-review. That such a Herculean effort by such a gifted mind could produce a work of such stunning irrelevence should dissuade even the most ardent researcher from removing himself or herself from the academic community.
In addition to being the absolute paragon of case-studies for the value of peer-review, the book is also physically beautiful; it's rich yellow and black artwork will spice up even the most pedestrian of bookcases.
Zed lets you fully specify your program regardless of how it's implemented. It is specifically designed to let you work out the conceptual nuts & bolts and make sure they're consistent before you implement.
First of all, do nothing is a stupid suggestion. People elect legislators to legislate -- that's what they do, and how they're evaluated in elections. DO SOMETHING is the first principle.
Secondly, given that one should do something, what to do? What the media corporations really care about is not the fact of piracy, but the harm (real or perceived -- I'll bow out of that debate) done to their bottom-lines as a result of piracy. It can also be taken as a fact that while everyone is not a pirate, enough people are pirating music that it is not practical to find a way to stop them. So don't try to do so. Instead find a way to repair the harm.
I propose doing just what was done for other media -- create a "shut up and go away" tariff on the media. That'll reduce the hand distribution. Combine this with greater enforcement for the medium-less transmissions as already covered under existing law, or pass a law creating an office for such enforcement.
I only copy.ogg's of cd's I own for the purpose of "space-shifting"(they're much easier to carry) and am not a pirate. Likewise, many other people aren't either. But we're at a level where "society" is pirating, so let "society" pay until a dramatically lowered target piracy rate is reached. And if people don't like it, then let peer pressure work towards meeting that target.
For those of us who ride motorcycles in wet and cold weather, these things'd be great. When it's raining and 40 degrees out and I've got a synthetic 90mph head-wind, I get to work frozen to the bone and can't warm up for hours(even w/ coffee). I want one!
Solaris's CDE has great feel to it; gnome is great in concept, but without enforcing repaint discipline it's annoying to watch all the little objects bubble-up to the current state of the gui. CDE doesn't do that.
I'm a serious c++ programmer, and I'm interested both in using c++ in a functional manner as well as learning a true functional language. I looked at lisp, and then at scheme, and lately I've been looking at Haskell. Unlike the Java/C/C++/C#/ObjC/Pascal/68K wars I've been seeing, I've never seen any good flamewars between the various camps in the functional community. Everyone's so busy liking everyone else, how does an outside like myself choose which language to learn? Which is "best"?
So does someone have a super-duper steganography-detection algorithm, or what?
Maybe they assume in color-discretized images that images having RGBs one-off of their surrounding pixels are steganographic? I gotta write a filter to induce 1-off color changes then, just to keep 'em busy. =)
Consensus is derived by compromise. Can you imagine where the middle would be today without zealous idiots on either end of it? We'd have fascist lefties ruling or we'd have a christian theocracy that'd make the Taliban or Saudis look gentle by comparison.
Put a bunch of radical screeming-ninnies in the mix so they'll make the middle move. Initially, society will react against them like "whoa, who're those crazy fools?!", but eventually many folks will see sense underlying some of their arguments and we'll be better for it.
Re:Death to Islam. Kill all Muslims. Nuke the Wogs
on
Slashdot in Politics?
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You, sir, need to get a life. And a few muslim friends to bitch-slap your ass into the 21st century. The only thing sadder than pissant little trolls like yourself out trying to get some negative feedback(since you're incapable of garnering *positive* feedback) is that some people actually buy into your racist BS. Pity we're not allowed to kill racists; it'd make a great late-night TV show.
He's got a router, and a table saw,
And you won't believe what Mr. Stitches saw,
There's poison under the sink of course,
There's also enough formaldehyde to choke a horse...
There's still defensibility in the "one copy in use" idea; why not make this on the web? Make a server that will display a work to one user at a time, per the number of that work that the library posesses/licensed. You'd get the fast turn-around of not having to wait for someone to physically return the book while still protecting the publisher. (Maybe this's the way to do music sharing too?)
Why does Microsoft keep creating new operating systems instead of improving one of them? With so many Microsoft platforms out there, the level of "this API is not implemented" errors makes you guys a royal pain to develop for. With your operating system revenue-streams being protected by your having cornered the office-suite market, it seems like this could be avoided(also good for folks like me who run Linux partly because I can't afford to buy a new license every time you write a new OS).
I have to chide many of my fellow/. lurkers for being socialists of convenience when it comes to the MP3 thing; yet I know many people that use MP3's to decide what CD's they want to purchase (I don't have to because I'm a shameless leach from my friends;). Having a band and feeding yourself (hopefully well), your kids, &c. nowadays requires a fair amount of interaction with Agents, producers, the label, etc, who all also want to get fed from the produce of the popularity of your work. Do you think there's room in an MP3-ish setup for something like the PayLars site (wish it worked!) model wherein a band that wants to be both artists and support themselves can be true to their fans, their wallets, and their principles without having the record companies coming in for their share too, or are venue-deals/etc just too tightly linked?
What they're talking about is realizing that they've taken the wrong branch in a set of code (INTERPRETED MICROCODE!), (probably) generating some kind of exception, and replaying the code back for the correct branch(es).
If my pet theory is right that TM's processor will be a virtual machine, they might have just gotten a big patent edge with the whole branch-prediction side of pipelined/fetchahead execution of microcode tokens.
I don't really know crap about processor design outside of Tannenbaum's example CPU in one of my school textbooks, but it's a theory.;o)
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon the shouting, but I mean it. Testing as is mostly done in the coding shops is the detection of what bugs got introduced in the code. Quality code production doesn't mean finding the flaws, but keeping them from occurring in the first place. There is only one way to accomplish this, and that is to make testing a design criterion. There is no substitute for specifying design invariants and coding to assure them. This is where specification languages like Z come in handy, and why the Eiffel wankers are so in love with their language.
All locating failures does is locate failures; it does not ensure success. The only way to ensure success of a system of any complexity is to define what correct operation is and ensure it. There are brainiacs from the planet Smartron-Five that are good enough at their formal logic to actually prove whether a piece of code is correct or not. That's great if you can do it, otherwise, you're stuck with ASSERTs or JUnit or somesuch. But you can't do any of that meaningfully without a rigorous understanding of what it truly means when you say "it works".
Submitted to Amazon on Friday:
***** = A massive acheivement
Reviewer: James Mitchell from San Francisco, CA United States
Stephen Wolfram's 'A new kind of science' is a massive achievement, true to the grandest traditions of self-publishing. In this stunningly beautifully laid out tome, Wolfram displays the fruits of long, intense dedication to the most sublime hubris, progressing from what are genuinely intriguing results of arduous empirical research to sweeping delusions of competance. Who would have thought that you could replicate the behavior of fluid movement on a computer by explicitly modelling it? Stunning, indeed. Doubly stunning is that a work of such gargantuan inanity could contain such a concise and lucid explanation of chaotic processes. That a mind that can so clearly explain the phenomenon of super-critical dependence on initial conditions can also produce so much excess self-congratulation for producing such a vapid vehicle for presenting this work will provide excellent working material for budding young doctoral candidates in psychology.
In its best movement, Wolfram's book spends a great deal of time demonstrating how his computational artifacts are unable to work out the results of constraints, in the process demonstrating the total futility of over a decade's worth of research. Amazingly, Wolfram presents the inapplicability of his work as a mark of its virtue -- that you can produce totally unpredictable and incomprehensible behavior without regard to the actual process one is researching. Given an intellect of such Colossal stature as Wolfram's, this massive tome is in and of itself the most solid, bulletproof example of the value of peer-review. That such a Herculean effort by such a gifted mind could produce a work of such stunning irrelevence should dissuade even the most ardent researcher from removing himself or herself from the academic community.
In addition to being the absolute paragon of case-studies for the value of peer-review, the book is also physically beautiful; it's rich yellow and black artwork will spice up even the most pedestrian of bookcases.
Here's a good indexing page. It's not terribly informative on its own, but it has lotsa links.
http://www.afm.sbu.ac.uk/z/
// James
Zed lets you fully specify your program regardless of how it's implemented. It is specifically designed to let you work out the conceptual nuts & bolts and make sure they're consistent before you implement.
The most grievous bugs are logic errors(imho).
// James
First of all, do nothing is a stupid suggestion. People elect legislators to legislate -- that's what they do, and how they're evaluated in elections. DO SOMETHING is the first principle.
.ogg's of cd's I own for the purpose of "space-shifting"(they're much easier to carry) and am not a pirate. Likewise, many other people aren't either. But we're at a level where "society" is pirating, so let "society" pay until a dramatically lowered target piracy rate is reached. And if people don't like it, then let peer pressure work towards meeting that target.
Secondly, given that one should do something, what to do? What the media corporations really care about is not the fact of piracy, but the harm (real or perceived -- I'll bow out of that debate) done to their bottom-lines as a result of piracy. It can also be taken as a fact that while everyone is not a pirate, enough people are pirating music that it is not practical to find a way to stop them. So don't try to do so. Instead find a way to repair the harm.
I propose doing just what was done for other media -- create a "shut up and go away" tariff on the media. That'll reduce the hand distribution. Combine this with greater enforcement for the medium-less transmissions as already covered under existing law, or pass a law creating an office for such enforcement.
I only copy
For those of us who ride motorcycles in wet and cold weather, these things'd be great. When it's raining and 40 degrees out and I've got a synthetic 90mph head-wind, I get to work frozen to the bone and can't warm up for hours(even w/ coffee). I want one!
crypto crypto crypto crypto
Hi, my name is AFJWEFNPVTNGPIWERTGNPINGGX>YICT, what's yours?
Solaris's CDE has great feel to it; gnome is great in concept, but without enforcing repaint discipline it's annoying to watch all the little objects bubble-up to the current state of the gui. CDE doesn't do that.
Hi there,
I'm a serious c++ programmer, and I'm interested both in using c++ in a functional manner as well as learning a true functional language. I looked at lisp, and then at scheme, and lately I've been looking at Haskell. Unlike the Java/C/C++/C#/ObjC/Pascal/68K wars I've been seeing, I've never seen any good flamewars between the various camps in the functional community. Everyone's so busy liking everyone else, how does an outside like myself choose which language to learn? Which is "best"?
(no text)
So does someone have a super-duper steganography-detection algorithm, or what?
Maybe they assume in color-discretized images that images having RGBs one-off of their surrounding pixels are steganographic? I gotta write a filter to induce 1-off color changes then, just to keep 'em busy. =)
Or are these people just freakin morons?
Consensus is derived by compromise. Can you imagine where the middle would be today without zealous idiots on either end of it? We'd have fascist lefties ruling or we'd have a christian theocracy that'd make the Taliban or Saudis look gentle by comparison.
Put a bunch of radical screeming-ninnies in the mix so they'll make the middle move. Initially, society will react against them like "whoa, who're those crazy fools?!", but eventually many folks will see sense underlying some of their arguments and we'll be better for it.
You, sir, need to get a life. And a few muslim friends to bitch-slap your ass into the 21st century. The only thing sadder than pissant little trolls like yourself out trying to get some negative feedback(since you're incapable of garnering *positive* feedback) is that some people actually buy into your racist BS. Pity we're not allowed to kill racists; it'd make a great late-night TV show.
In the interim, grow up.
router -> row-ter: row as in fight.
He's got a router, and a table saw,
And you won't believe what Mr. Stitches saw,
There's poison under the sink of course,
There's also enough formaldehyde to choke a horse...
then you could do a beowulf in a breadbox!
whee!
// james
There's still defensibility in the "one copy in use" idea; why not make this on the web? Make a server that will display a work to one user at a time, per the number of that work that the library posesses/licensed. You'd get the fast turn-around of not having to wait for someone to physically return the book while still protecting the publisher. (Maybe this's the way to do music sharing too?)
Good morning boys & girls, can you say CLASS ACTION?
These guys are harming the whole community.
Why does Microsoft keep creating new operating systems instead of improving one of them? With so many Microsoft platforms out there, the level of "this API is not implemented" errors makes you guys a royal pain to develop for. With your operating system revenue-streams being protected by your having cornered the office-suite market, it seems like this could be avoided(also good for folks like me who run Linux partly because I can't afford to buy a new license every time you write a new OS).
I wonder if this would increase the amount of functional code being written. The lisp guys finally win after all?
I have to chide many of my fellow /. lurkers for being socialists of convenience when it comes to the MP3 thing; yet I know many people that use MP3's to decide what CD's they want to purchase (I don't have to because I'm a shameless leach from my friends ;). Having a band and feeding yourself (hopefully well), your kids, &c. nowadays requires a fair amount of interaction with Agents, producers, the label, etc, who all also want to get fed from the produce of the popularity of your work. Do you think there's room in an MP3-ish setup for something like the PayLars site (wish it worked!) model wherein a band that wants to be both artists and support themselves can be true to their fans, their wallets, and their principles without having the record companies coming in for their share too, or are venue-deals/etc just too tightly linked?
What they're talking about is realizing that they've taken the wrong branch in a set of code (INTERPRETED MICROCODE!), (probably) generating some kind of exception, and replaying the code back for the correct branch(es).
;o)
If my pet theory is right that TM's processor will be a virtual machine, they might have just gotten a big patent edge with the whole branch-prediction side of pipelined/fetchahead execution of microcode tokens.
I don't really know crap about processor design outside of Tannenbaum's example CPU in one of my school textbooks, but it's a theory.