Re:Its pronounciation gives us a clue
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 1
> "et setra"
If you pronounce "et cetera" as you learn if in a latin course held in Germany and do a little bit of paleatilsation on the z (of "zetera") to make it acceptable for english native speakers, they would hear indeed "et setera", because enlgish native speakers often have problems with hard "z" or "tz" (translit to cyrillic letters) sound.
Peer Review is a very important thing. Not only it prevents some bad reseaarch from entering Journals, but it actually increases the quality of articles published - because Referees ask meaningful Questions, whcih can help to clarify unclear points.
I for a second really hoped that the apologies for malware related to the big brother functions in Windows Vista and the EULA which allows MS to take control over the computer as normally only trojans do....
I do not believe that this is healthy. All that is known so far is that the different filtering processes of memorizing things in the different memories are important to your psychological balance. In the moment when you will be able to access without any difference the worst times in your life an as well as the best I would predict a whole new class of psychological disorders, becaus this changes the interpretation of yourself completely. One would be optimistic and say that you can get more objective about your own faults, but I doubt that this will be good. Moreover it will change human interaction. I personally find it agressive that when i am calling for support to some company (call-center) the voice in the beginning tell me that the call may be recorded and I have no possibility to decline. The funny thing is that e.g. the bad support experience there would be even impossible to prove, because each person on its own acted somwhow right, nevertheless the point is missed!
Yes, even if i like perl very much to do small text filter/cgi-bin/data aggredgation programs now and then, the "OOP" Features in it give everybody taking OOP seriously instant headaches....
If you write that you have a quantum computer it is bad if you have none.
If you dont claim it it does not matter.
If you stampede as the companies founder in his blog over the "gate model" and implicitly claim that the rest of the community does not get it right because they are trying complicated things to get qubits working, while you use a quick and dirty "simple" approach (which in QC usually can never work), the level of authenticity which the community demands from your Experiments *will be higher* than normal.
One should separate two things: DWave probalby has something interesting, very technological, to demonstrate that, as soon as the problems in superconducting QC are solved, the possibility to implement it is close. This keeps their patents monetary value high enogh to be interesting for investors. From the scientific viewpoint the interpretation which they make public is as I said (see likns to comments below) does not make their quantum computer very authentic.
What they write could be translated to: Vacuum impedance? Sorry we use AQC and ignore it. Two level fluctuators in the Barriers of the commercially available Josephson junctions/Capacitors? We ignore them. Spectroscopic data to prove Quantum effects? This is for groups who try to get Qubits working. For us the whole picture is more important.
As I said (see comments in the links): Before I make my opinion about the system I'd like to see a detailed publication on it, and I am - contrary to some other people in the community - willing to settle my mind only then about it (although this would probably be different if I would have to write proposals which are in direct concurrence with DWave.).
I do want to repeat myself, so I just post links to comments I wrote on the ealier news:
Milk and water: take something which is new, but not be interesting scientifically, mix it with something old and dilute it. Shake it for some time. Smoke: Add nice words and senseless technological complications. Claim that your system (although you are doing basic reseacrh which could not be more of from implmenting that) will solve the problems of the world put in your own hand to choose the problem size you want to do this with (If you write for IEEE on Image Processing wou will also not choose a picture where your algorithm fails). Smoke is necessary if you want to use milk and water and cover up that the things you are mixing with are not very new.
Disclaimer: I come from the field. Before I come to my critics, I have to say that I am impressed with DWave having this System developed in this way and I believe that something will come out, probably good research; and maybe eve a working QC.
Regarding the talk of Dr. Geordie Rose:
* he says, they have something but they do not want to compare it to the other approaches, which this time he at least gives an credit, claiming that the others try it differently. This is done to guide the audience away from topic of coherent entangement. I really miss an simple spectrocsopic measurement of their system or some of the things you can do in AQC.
* And, please. As far as I understand the 128 Control lines are used for DC biasing of the coupling SQUIDS. I'd like to see a calculation of the influence of the 1/f noise of the Spectrum of the Hamiltonian for a realistic algorithm.
* He claims that building a complex system out of things you don't understand and enhancing it is more promising than enhancing the single thing and composing it. He says they qould use a quick and dirty approach to it. He misses to mention that they are the only ones seriously doing so. (a fundamental issue about insulator materials used was found out, exactly because one of the leading groups examined a single qubit very careful)
* He brings it into a subtle connection to a technology long existing (RSFQ, which is not used as far as i can see on DWaves chip and Dwave has not much to do with this technology - only that some people working previously on RSFQ now work there) and presents it as something where their research is useful for. This is done deliberatly to stun the audience who most likely have not heard of it. He says that superconductting computers are fast, but indeed the AQC itself is slow. How slow, depends on the algorithm which you use.
* I would classify DWave as a hardware-company. Why all this glittering software around. For the people who want to use an QC it does not matter if you pack it nicely into an SQL server. Call me conservative and square, but somebody showing animations in a technological demonstration frontend has in 50% of the cases something to cover up.
I understand that all this is necessary to impress possible investors. As a scientist I'd be more impressed about a cond-mat preprint where DWave describes the performance of the system in detail. Actually I can't expect it...
> Language extensions for threading would be great, and I'm sure somebody is working on it. But until that magical threading language > (maybe c++1x) comes along the current ones work just fine.
The sad reality is: unless there is an AI there will be no "magical threading language". That is because designing a multi-threaded program starts with isolating object classes and instances which are *likely* to be used for communication. Isolation and designing an "orthogonal" flow of information is for multi-threaded code much more essential tha for single threaded. If designed correctly on each of the information flows one can use the standard techniques to protect against most of the problems. As the problem goes, the reality is not ideal. A lot of code has extraordinarily badly designed internal communication mechanisms, which gives three possibilities
1) Redesign the code (Um, yes...)
2) Accept design flaws a fix the crashes until they are not annoying any more
3) Accept that while your program may be multi-threaded effectively only 1.0 to 1.5 threads are running at the same time due to your "global locks", and make similar to 2) the probalility of deathlock small enough to be non-annoying
BTW.: I do not condider 2) and 3) to be good programming
I think you are experiencing a common misconception about QC: while it relies, as classical analog computers over large periods on analog operations, the code set is discrete, opposed to the contineus variables in analog comptuting. On the latter it is impossible to correct an error (i imagine it is even diffcult to define something like a hamming distance....). If you would, let's say build an analog computer which operates on a discrete set of voltages you could do the same...
And QC can do some things which classical computers can't do.
Excuse me, that is a "generic paper for gaining Attention" case.
Ingredients:
1) Old Method (heuristic approach, is around since the 1980's and never worked)
2) Well known Countermeasure (Block outgoing ports)
3) Implication that false positives are not so bad as false negatives (cite from the link: "...cancel the quarantine in the event of a false alarm.", without a specification how to do that.
4) A Newspaper reporter who obviously does not know anything about security
A Remark: Implementing this Method enables an escalation of some minor problem (e.g. when an attack targe can be forced to make connections to other hosts) to a DOS.
> I think it's worth a mention that this particular approach will only work on a small subset of the problems to which QCs might > eventually be applied. Other, more popular, research paths like ion traps should lead to more general QCs. In particular, D-wave's > design cannot implement Shor's algorithm for factorization (a fact which seems lost on many of the other posters, parent excluded).
I did not discuss it explicitely since i do not think about QC as a code-breaking machine, but as something general. Nevertheless I did not find in the TAQC proposal how to implement the class of algorithms where a "classical logic function implemented in Qubits" changes the phase of a specific state and is used to find the value minimizing the phase shift in a by a "Shore-like iteration" (respectively in a multiple-way interferometer...).
Im not a theoretist, so I can not state more than that.
> I would have just said "scam" but you expressed it so much more elegantly.
Thanks. Years of writing abstracts in the QC field help for that. If it is scam, we can only evaluate after they demonstrate. I think the community should be so fair depite of some hostilities.
What I wanted to point out is that DWave wants to do something else than the researchers. Actually that is what Geordie Rose also writes in his Blog. Researchers want to so science. DWave wants to build a system. For Researchers it is "publish or perish" with all the good and bad consequences. For DWave it is "show some technology or perish" also eith all the good and bad consequences. All the other people working on QC should be lucky that in gouvernment funded programs it is not a big problem for your future funding if you promised three Qbits and only have one. I guess for Dwave it would be an essential problem to do such a thing. Keep that in mind.
Actually both sides exagerate the results they have from time to time. While scientist will talk about the 3 bit QC when they have only one qubit and never tried anything like that, Dwave may show a system containing systems which most scientists consider "semiclassical" in some sense, and promise (let's see what they show) that the System gains performance from quantum effects. In my opinion, even if they can show that the system shows a small performance gain by Quantum effect they are on a good way even if it is not a quantum computer by the definition of the Community.
As I said: I am sceptical, but I will make my mind only after DWave shows what they have and publishes specific parameters in an peer-reviewed journal, shows the comparison to a classical and semiclassical model of their system (if they use TAQC). So I will neither praise them nor can I say right now that it is scam.
Only after a publication that one could classify it as one of the following: scam, an interesting piece of technology, an showcase of TAQC or an working QC (defined by entanglement). I hope for Dwave that it will be the third option and that they can demonstrate a performance gain. In that case they have reached a goal which some scientists are not interested in reaching.
I think we should all have an unbiased but intense look at what DWave presents. There is big scepticism in the community about adiabatic quantum computation. Specifically it is not sure that it solves the the problem which it is primarily claimed to adress, namely the decoherence. In some sense the Article DWave published on the preprint archive recently about the coupling is interesting. The article about "Thermally assisted adiabatic QC" is also interesting; yet for most of the QC applications it is believed that the computational power comes from entanglement. And entanglent and anything "thermal" in the same energy range seldom are a good combination. Dwave wants to demonstrate on a well choses problem set that their chip works. However there are a lot of thing which they did not discuss.
Some more observations:
1) DWave circumvents the normal scientific way of presenting the thing to the peers first. This is a habit among patent-collecting companies, but it for sure does not contribute in developing a trusting relatenship to the community. On the other hand I could also imagine that DWave is liked so little by a few people that they block papers. However this is nothing we know.
2) Geordie Rose is a little bit to agressive in intentionally devaluating the other approaches. His Blog Entry "Why I hate the Gate Model" is particularly interesting in that aspect. I agree that in his bussiness you sometimes have to kick competitors - sometimes that really helps. However this Entry is IMHO an intentional misunderstanding of what the "Gate model" is about. It is funny that quantum algortihms usually are defined in terms of gates. The task of building a quantum computer is to implement these gates. If you can make an optimization in the end (you can do e.g see Frank Wilhelm et. al), nice for you. Even if you write your Algorithm in terms of gates, nobody is forcing you to do them one by one. However to hate the gate model means to hate your task. But i think Geordies posts main intention was to direct the focus away from implementing an generic QC towards a specific QC. As much as I find his enthousiam about AQC good for the field, one should not redefine the term QC in order to have the most advance QC (Well, that would not be the first time that this happens....).
3) I am missing if they invited anybody from the field to check the experiment. I trust DWave in not faking, but still sombody should have a look at their calculations, ideas and at the final tests. Since they did not publish anythin it would contribute to my interest in this event if they would have some other "referees". Maybe they have.
Nevertheless, i wish DWave good success in the presentation. If the processor does what it is claimed to do, and that reasonable fast (e.g. solving the Ising Model in between 10S and 100S), it a showcase of the things which are yet to come. So even if the term QC should be argued about have this showcase of something non-trivial will help the field. I really hope that political condiderations will be put aside after that and that DWave will be evaluated hard, but unbiased by the community.
The analog circuits designed by Burr-Brown are among the best what you can buy for rasonable Money. Their broad selection of Low-noise/High-performance OpAmps is a real relief for anybody who has built his own sensitive preamplifier. I am in research and I can say that whenever I verified the performance of an Burr-Brown (Ti part of the series) if gave the specs out of the box, while beeing extremly hard to kill. Their datasheets are among the best examples of documentation which I have seen and indeed some of their Example circuits are used without modification in our Lab for 10 Years or more, replacing much more expensive electronics.
1) Social-economic processes impose changing biases to the current paradigms of software development. This leads to a biggest reason of code not being reused and ever-changing development environments.
2) As usual in the bussines world, the driving force is only the first derivative of the cost. Local minima can be quite stable. Morover the local minima are deterimed in a way wich seldom integrates over a long time (e.g. support).
What i mean is: Todays product lifecycle is *assumed to be* shorter than ten years ago. Tell to somebody today that there will be a phase of a few months with no visible results in terms of the final product will yield a different response that ten years ago. Sadly this means that porting code (which, if you do it right, takes most of the times longer than developing "something" with a "state of the art" Development environment) to be usable on a new platform is underrated.
However, old code very often has no semantical problems any more and all these "small bugs", like implementing a special semantic for a certain parameter value or realizing that a certain database lookup will fail under certain circumstances because of some kind strange constellation happening seldom but on a semantical level, are fixed.
Five minutes of my time: Put in a debian-stable network installation CD into the little box which is supposed to be your small workgroup server. Let it boot until it runs the task selection. Select Unix Server, Print Server, Web Server (4Minutes...). press return, go away do some other stuff. Let the server run for years without breakdowns. 4 Years later (!Updates!) without noticable downtime and "upgrading issues" people will have learned that it is a good experience to have a linux server.....
Exactly my opinion! Makes it easier to find for people who look for it and eassier to avoid for people who don't. If an email contains a link to something.xxx it can go directly to spam....
Slashdot Mirror
> "et setra"
If you pronounce "et cetera" as you learn if in a latin course held in Germany and do a little bit of paleatilsation on the z (of "zetera") to make it acceptable for english native speakers, they would hear indeed "et setera", because enlgish native speakers often have problems with hard "z" or "tz" (translit to cyrillic letters) sound.
Peer Review is a very important thing. Not only it prevents some bad reseaarch from entering Journals, but it actually increases the quality of articles published - because Referees ask meaningful Questions, whcih can help to clarify unclear points.
In the winter it is much colder than in the night.
I for a second really hoped that the apologies for malware related to the big brother functions in Windows Vista and the EULA which allows MS to take control over the computer as normally only trojans do....
I do not believe that this is healthy. All that is known so far is that the different filtering processes of memorizing things in the different memories are important to your psychological balance. In the moment when you will be able to access without any difference the worst times in your life an as well as the best I would predict a whole new class of psychological disorders, becaus this changes the interpretation of yourself completely. One would be optimistic and say that you can get more objective about your own faults, but I doubt that this will be good. Moreover it will change human interaction. I personally find it agressive that when i am calling for support to some company (call-center) the voice in the beginning tell me that the call may be recorded and I have no possibility to decline. The funny thing is that e.g. the bad support experience there would be even impossible to prove, because each person on its own acted somwhow right, nevertheless the point is missed!
Yes, even if i like perl very much to do small text filter/cgi-bin/data aggredgation programs now and then, the "OOP" Features in it give everybody taking OOP seriously instant headaches....
please explain, english is not my native language.
I wanted to say:
Be was pretty interesting.
But compared to Nextstep it was not really ahead of it's times.
Be was pretty interesting.
But compared to Nextstep it was really ahead of it's times.
The link to the blog is great. Also look to http://superconducting.blogspot.com/
If you write that you have a quantum computer it is bad if you have none.
If you dont claim it it does not matter.
If you stampede as the companies founder in his blog over the "gate model" and implicitly claim that the rest of the community does not get it right because they are trying complicated things to get qubits working, while you use a quick and dirty "simple" approach (which in QC usually can never work), the level of authenticity which the community demands from your Experiments *will be higher* than normal.
One should separate two things: DWave probalby has something interesting, very technological, to demonstrate that, as soon as the problems in superconducting QC are solved, the possibility to implement it is close. This keeps their patents monetary value high enogh to be interesting for investors. From the scientific viewpoint the interpretation which they make public is as I said (see likns to comments below) does not make their quantum computer very authentic.
What they write could be translated to: Vacuum impedance? Sorry we use AQC and ignore it. Two level fluctuators in the Barriers of the commercially available Josephson junctions/Capacitors? We ignore them. Spectroscopic data to prove Quantum effects? This is for groups who try to get Qubits working. For us the whole picture is more important.
As I said (see comments in the links): Before I make my opinion about the system I'd like to see a detailed publication on it, and I am - contrary to some other people in the community - willing to settle my mind only then about it (although this would probably be different if I would have to write proposals which are in direct concurrence with DWave.).
I do want to repeat myself, so I just post links to comments I wrote on the ealier news:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222540&cid=18
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=221306&cid=17
and lots of smoke is there, too.
Milk and water: take something which is new, but not be interesting scientifically, mix it with something old and dilute it. Shake it for some time. Smoke: Add nice words and senseless technological complications. Claim that your system (although you are doing basic reseacrh which could not be more of from implmenting that) will solve the problems of the world put in your own hand to choose the problem size you want to do this with (If you write for IEEE on Image Processing wou will also not choose a picture where your algorithm fails). Smoke is necessary if you want to use milk and water and cover up that the things you are mixing with are not very new.
Disclaimer: I come from the field. Before I come to my critics, I have to say that I am impressed with DWave having this System developed in this way and I believe that something will come out, probably good research; and maybe eve a working QC.
Regarding the talk of Dr. Geordie Rose:
* he says, they have something but they do not want to compare it to the other approaches, which this time he at least gives an credit, claiming that the others try it differently. This is done to guide the audience away from topic of coherent entangement. I really miss an simple spectrocsopic measurement of their system or some of the things you can do in AQC.
* And, please. As far as I understand the 128 Control lines are used for DC biasing of the coupling SQUIDS. I'd like to see a calculation of the influence of the 1/f noise of the Spectrum of the Hamiltonian for a realistic algorithm.
* He claims that building a complex system out of things you don't understand and enhancing it is more promising than enhancing the single thing and composing it. He says they qould use a quick and dirty approach to it. He misses to mention that they are the only ones seriously doing so. (a fundamental issue about insulator materials used was found out, exactly because one of the leading groups examined a single qubit very careful)
* He brings it into a subtle connection to a technology long existing (RSFQ, which is not used as far as i can see on DWaves chip and Dwave has not much to do with this technology - only that some people working previously on RSFQ now work there) and presents it as something where their research is useful for. This is done deliberatly to stun the audience who most likely have not heard of it. He says that superconductting computers are fast, but indeed the AQC itself is slow. How slow, depends on the algorithm which you use.
* I would classify DWave as a hardware-company. Why all this glittering software around. For the people who want to use an QC it does not matter if you pack it nicely into an SQL server. Call me conservative and square, but somebody showing animations in a technological demonstration frontend has in 50% of the cases something to cover up.
I understand that all this is necessary to impress possible investors. As a scientist I'd be more impressed about a cond-mat preprint where DWave describes the performance of the system in detail. Actually I can't expect it...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/ exped14_overview.html
I'd say yes
> Language extensions for threading would be great, and I'm sure somebody is working on it. But until that magical threading language
> (maybe c++1x) comes along the current ones work just fine.
The sad reality is: unless there is an AI there will be no "magical threading language". That is because designing a multi-threaded program starts with isolating object classes and instances which are *likely* to be used for communication. Isolation and designing an "orthogonal" flow of information is for multi-threaded code much more essential tha for single threaded. If designed correctly on each of the information flows one can use the standard techniques to protect against most of the problems. As the problem goes, the reality is not ideal. A lot of code has extraordinarily badly designed internal communication mechanisms, which gives three possibilities
1) Redesign the code (Um, yes...)
2) Accept design flaws a fix the crashes until they are not annoying any more
3) Accept that while your program may be multi-threaded effectively only 1.0 to 1.5 threads are running at the same time due to your "global locks", and make similar to 2) the probalility of deathlock small enough to be non-annoying
BTW.: I do not condider 2) and 3) to be good programming
I think you are experiencing a common misconception about QC: while it relies, as classical analog computers over large periods on analog operations, the code set is discrete, opposed to the contineus variables in analog comptuting. On the latter it is impossible to correct an error (i imagine it is even diffcult to define something like a hamming distance....). If you would, let's say build an analog computer which operates on a discrete set of voltages you could do the same...
And QC can do some things which classical computers can't do.
Excuse me, that is a "generic paper for gaining Attention" case.
Ingredients:
1) Old Method (heuristic approach, is around since the 1980's and never worked)
2) Well known Countermeasure (Block outgoing ports)
3) Implication that false positives are not so bad as false negatives (cite from the link: "...cancel the quarantine in the event of a false alarm.", without a specification how to do that.
4) A Newspaper reporter who obviously does not know anything about security
A Remark: Implementing this Method enables an escalation of some minor problem (e.g. when an attack targe can be forced to make connections to other hosts) to a DOS.
> ...that the whole thing is doomed to suffer from the same problems as any analog computer.
Actually this applies to all the QC field.
> I think it's worth a mention that this particular approach will only work on a small subset of the problems to which QCs might
> eventually be applied. Other, more popular, research paths like ion traps should lead to more general QCs. In particular, D-wave's
> design cannot implement Shor's algorithm for factorization (a fact which seems lost on many of the other posters, parent excluded).
I did not discuss it explicitely since i do not think about QC as a code-breaking machine, but as something general. Nevertheless I did not find in the TAQC proposal how to implement the class of algorithms where a "classical logic function implemented in Qubits" changes the phase of a specific state and is used to find the value minimizing the phase shift in a by a "Shore-like iteration" (respectively in a multiple-way interferometer...).
Im not a theoretist, so I can not state more than that.
> I would have just said "scam" but you expressed it so much more elegantly.
Thanks. Years of writing abstracts in the QC field help for that. If it is scam, we can only evaluate after they demonstrate. I think the community should be so fair depite of some hostilities.
What I wanted to point out is that DWave wants to do something else than the researchers. Actually that is what Geordie Rose also writes in his Blog. Researchers want to so science. DWave wants to build a system. For Researchers it is "publish or perish" with all the good and bad consequences. For DWave it is "show some technology or perish" also eith all the good and bad consequences. All the other people working on QC should be lucky that in gouvernment funded programs it is not a big problem for your future funding if you promised three Qbits and only have one. I guess for Dwave it would be an essential problem to do such a thing. Keep that in mind.
Actually both sides exagerate the results they have from time to time. While scientist will talk about the 3 bit QC when they have only one qubit and never tried anything like that, Dwave may show a system containing systems which most scientists consider "semiclassical" in some sense, and promise (let's see what they show) that the System gains performance from quantum effects. In my opinion, even if they can show that the system shows a small performance gain by Quantum effect they are on a good way even if it is not a quantum computer by the definition of the Community.
As I said: I am sceptical, but I will make my mind only after DWave shows what they have and publishes specific parameters in an peer-reviewed journal, shows the comparison to a classical and semiclassical model of their system (if they use TAQC). So I will neither praise them nor can I say right now that it is scam.
Only after a publication that one could classify it as one of the following: scam, an interesting piece of technology, an showcase of TAQC or an working QC (defined by entanglement). I hope for Dwave that it will be the third option and that they can demonstrate a performance gain. In that case they have reached a goal which some scientists are not interested in reaching.
A small disclaimer: I work on QC.
I think we should all have an unbiased but intense look at what DWave presents. There is big scepticism in the community about adiabatic quantum computation. Specifically it is not sure that it solves the the problem which it is primarily claimed to adress, namely the decoherence. In some sense the Article DWave published on the preprint archive recently about the coupling is interesting. The article about "Thermally assisted adiabatic QC" is also interesting; yet for most of the QC applications it is believed that the computational power comes from entanglement. And entanglent and anything "thermal" in the same energy range seldom are a good combination. Dwave wants to demonstrate on a well choses problem set that their chip works. However there are a lot of thing which they did not discuss.
Some more observations:
1) DWave circumvents the normal scientific way of presenting the thing to the peers first. This is a habit among patent-collecting companies, but it for sure does not contribute in developing a trusting relatenship to the community. On the other hand I could also imagine that DWave is liked so little by a few people that they block papers. However this is nothing we know.
2) Geordie Rose is a little bit to agressive in intentionally devaluating the other approaches. His Blog Entry "Why I hate the Gate Model" is particularly interesting in that aspect. I agree that in his bussiness you sometimes have to kick competitors - sometimes that really helps. However this Entry is IMHO an intentional misunderstanding of what the "Gate model" is about. It is funny that quantum algortihms usually are defined in terms of gates. The task of building a quantum computer is to implement these gates. If you can make an optimization in the end (you can do e.g see Frank Wilhelm et. al), nice for you. Even if you write your Algorithm in terms of gates, nobody is forcing you to do them one by one. However to hate the gate model means to hate your task. But i think Geordies posts main intention was to direct the focus away from implementing an generic QC towards a specific QC. As much as I find his enthousiam about AQC good for the field, one should not redefine the term QC in order to have the most advance QC (Well, that would not be the first time that this happens....).
3) I am missing if they invited anybody from the field to check the experiment. I trust DWave in not faking, but still sombody should have a look at their calculations, ideas and at the final tests. Since they did not publish anythin it would contribute to my interest in this event if they would have some other "referees". Maybe they have.
Nevertheless, i wish DWave good success in the presentation. If the processor does what it is claimed to do, and that reasonable fast (e.g. solving the Ising Model in between 10S and 100S), it a showcase of the things which are yet to come. So even if the term QC should be argued about have this showcase of something non-trivial will help the field. I really hope that political condiderations will be put aside after that and that DWave will be evaluated hard, but unbiased by the community.
The analog circuits designed by Burr-Brown are among the best what you can buy for rasonable Money. Their broad selection of Low-noise/High-performance OpAmps is a real relief for anybody who has built his own sensitive preamplifier. I am in research and I can say that whenever I verified the performance of an Burr-Brown (Ti part of the series) if gave the specs out of the box, while beeing extremly hard to kill. Their datasheets are among the best examples of documentation which I have seen and indeed some of their Example circuits are used without modification in our Lab for 10 Years or more, replacing much more expensive electronics.
1) Social-economic processes impose changing biases to the current paradigms of software development. This leads to a biggest reason of code not being reused and ever-changing development environments.
2) As usual in the bussines world, the driving force is only the first derivative of the cost. Local minima can be quite stable. Morover the local minima are deterimed in a way wich seldom integrates over a long time (e.g. support).
What i mean is: Todays product lifecycle is *assumed to be* shorter than ten years ago. Tell to somebody today that there will be a phase of a few months with no visible results in terms of the final product will yield a different response that ten years ago. Sadly this means that porting code (which, if you do it right, takes most of the times longer than developing "something" with a "state of the art" Development environment) to be usable on a new platform is underrated.
However, old code very often has no semantical problems any more and all these "small bugs", like implementing a special semantic for a certain parameter value or realizing that a certain database lookup will fail under certain circumstances because of some kind strange constellation happening seldom but on a semantical level, are fixed.
Five minutes of my time: Put in a debian-stable network installation CD into the little box which is supposed to be your small workgroup server. Let it boot until it runs the task selection. Select Unix Server, Print Server, Web Server (4Minutes...). press return, go away do some other stuff. Let the server run for years without breakdowns. 4 Years later (!Updates!) without noticable downtime and "upgrading issues" people will have learned that it is a good experience to have a linux server.....
Five minutes in total: I don't. Honestly.
Up to now we only had 14 year olds which posed in their underpants because they wanted attention.......
Exactly my opinion! Makes it easier to find for people who look for it and eassier to avoid for people who don't. If an email contains a link to something .xxx it can go directly to spam....