An xml format for documents is a Very Good Thing with lots of benefits. Or potentially just a whole pile of annoyances.
One of the problems with WYSIWYG markup is that it is visual, everyone likes Word (or whatever) because they can make things Look Right. But this is also its biggest problem, as it removes the structural/semantic information. We've now trained a whole pile of people to believe that what they think looks good must (obviously) look good to anyone. (To see the validity of that, just look at what those attitudes have done to the web. "I like blinkies, so everyone must." Ewww.)
But now the document is non-portable, and in some sense digitally unusable. Hard to index, hard to grab bits of for the next time you need almost that same thing. Indeed, something like the oft vaunted "mail merge" in Scribe, LaTeX, XML are relatively simple (a shell script and sed) but they tend to be hard in WYSIWYG documents.
Why? Because semantic markup is necessarily domain-centric. A business letter doesn't have the same kind of content as an invoice. Even when they're part of the same communication.
Thats a good thing for indexing, cataloging, analyzing and all that.
Its also a good thing for those who need to produce a lot of documents that look a lot alike. Hence document templates (available in any decent word processor).
Even better, using XML allows a nice separation of powers. The person writing the business letter does not need to know what it will look like, and the person defining its look does not need to know its content. Since the writer is not concerned with the look, editing actually gets easier. For example, I often use LaTeX (also HTML and XML increasingly)
and emacs and know them both relatively well (and I use both under both Windows and Unix) and when I need to switch to something WYSIWYGish, I tend to get very cranky. "What do you mean, you cant put every sentence on a line by itself?"
Now everyone with a grain of sense knows all this (so I apologize for repeating it). Or do they?
Microsoft does. XML based documents are going to be the future, they say. Oasis does (but then they're SGML oriented anyway).
But not everyone does. That secretary down the hall doesn't. And he's going to fight like hell having to do things in a true XML oriented way (show him an xml editor and wait for him to threaten to quit). (Why do you think SGML never caught on?) He doesn't care about saving work - he wants to get paid for his 40 hours. And his boss is going to hear him loud and clear since he sits right outside her door. Even though putting him into that XML re-education camp is very likely to save a whole pile of money in the long run, the noise and screams and the short run cost is going to make it very hard to push in any kind of organization.
Which means we might end up with an XML representation of that WYSIWYG text. This would be a real mess. There is a thing called the "Rainbow DTD" (a quick web search turned up no live copies of this). This was an SGML (it predated XML) markup that essentially represented WYSIWYG markup. So there were elements like "". Yech.
As a proof of concept, a while back, I cobbled together a script that would read this and guess as to the users "meaning" (we were dealing with a relatively small target domain)- it worked, but quite badly, to get it to work well would have taken expert system or statistical inference kinds of code. The idea was not supported by my boss, because it would have required iterations and feedback from the original authors to tune the translations. He said, "They like WYSIWYG, lets not bother them." It was clear that it would have worked though, and with tools like XSLT, it would not have been all that hard.
So now I wonder, are the OASIS folks going to do a "rainbow dtd" type thing? Perhaps at a slightly higher level of abstraction? Or will it be a metalanguage for document definition (hey, I thought that was what XML was).
And the MS folks, what does their XML look like?
Cuz, one way or another, with XSLT and a bit of hackery, someone will find a way to translate one to the other. And back.
The only question left is how hard it will be and how much semantic information will carry across.
Along the same lines (more or less) is "Systemantics" by John Gall. Everyone in any kind of organization should read this - especially managers. (Don't worry, they'll have little problem finishing it, it doesn't use too many big words, there are pictures and its only about 100 pages long.)
But it portrays, about as accurately as I've ever seen it, how systems are created to do one thing and end up doing something very different - and usually not something all that valuable.
The following is quoted (excerpted) from the back cover.
Systems are seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster better and more easily... But... you are likely to find you time... now being consumed in the care... of the system itself. New prolems are created by its very presence.
Once set up, it won't go away.
It begins to do strange and wonderful things
Breaks down in ways you never thought possible
It kicks back, gets in the way
Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system
You push on it to make it work
Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all that time.
I meant, how long will it be, given some of the other things on slashdot today about the US Gov't taking things off public web sites, before someone
decides to make all those protected too?
After all, it would be Un American to make the information available without someone profiting on it.
Any touch of cynicism detected is copyright by me. Any attempt to imitate it, quote it or otherwise be cynical will be treated as a serious infringement of my intellectual property rights and my legal bloodhounds will descend on you direct from the Baskervilles where I've been hiding them just for that purpose. I've stored up a nice stash of luminescent paint too.
The American government has determined in all of its infinitesimal wisdom (what can you expect from a government led by a shrubbery ("Ni!")?) that large corporations are better than small ones and that almost any corporation is better than any individual (unless the individual has a whole s--tload of money).
Not entirely a new thing though - check out Tom Paxton's song "I'm changing my name to Chrysler" from which I quote the follwoing lines :
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
and should someone go broke, become unemployed, have to live on social security or whatever as a result of this idiocy, they can always take this hint (also from Mr. Paxton):
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it!
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
For those for whom the name Tom Paxton is not entirely familiar, his music is likely to be (at least in once case) something sitting dormant in your memory, waiting to ambush you - here's the chorus from what is probably his most familiar song :
It went "Zip" when it moved,
And "Pop" when it stopped,
And, "Whirrr" when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will.
Well, it is wandering along toward the toy season, innit?
Given attempts at legal throttling of free speech such as the CDA and the recent Australian efforts (as mentioned on slashdot) and the European Community efforts (slashdot again) and.... the only thing that will NOT be protected speech soon enough will be commercial speech.
A Brave New World indeed, where spam is legal but not much else is. Something for us all to look forward to.
I used to spend a lot of time on bicycles. Not racing or anything, just having fun, commuting, exploring and the like.
Got known for it.
People would say "I want to buy a bike, whats the best one?"
I'd ask them what kind of bike they had now and how often they rode it. The answer was frequently that they did not have a bike and didn't ride. Since none of these people had millions in the bank, my answer was always about the same:
"Go to a thrift store, yard sale, whatever and find a bike that fits..." [insert info about bike fit here ] "...then ride it for a month or two - find out what kind of riding you like, get a feel for how you ride and then come back and we'll talk more."
Why? Without knowing how someone rode or what kind of riding they might like, there is no way to tell them what kind of bike to buy. Further, even sending them to good bike shops to try bikes was a waste of time because they wouldn't be able to tell how the bike felt to them.
Of course, they could just go out to a good bike shop and spend way more than they could afford on a bike they'd never use. But that didn't feel like a good suggestion to me somehow.
Same thing here. "Renderer" and "modeller" seem to be mixed up. I get no feel that the poster knows what he's looking for.
So my advice:
Get Blender, POV (or similar free or very cheap packages) and work with them seriously for a while. Do a couple good sized projects. Figure out what you're good at and what you want to do. Get a feel for how you want the application to react and what you really want it to do.
Then, if you still need advice, you'll be able to ask for it more precisely.
Gelernter's article said exactly one thing to me about Linux and Microsoft.
"We don't want (can't, are too lazy...) to port this to Linux, so it will make things lots easier for us if Linux just rolls up and crawls away."
I wonder if he feels the same way about Macs.
(I also wonder if he would feel the same way if Microsoft created a directly competing product, installed it on the desktop of all their machines, made it "part of the os" and, well, we all know the drill.)
According to a survey recently released by "Survey Sez!", a leading polling, survey and statistical trends analysis company, 97% of US Senators thought that the beliefs and interests of the American Public were completely irrelevent to their jobs and could safely be ignored. The company also sez! (tm) that several senators were unable to respond to their survey. The House of Representatives was also surveyed on the same subject but the results were less clear, with 70% of the representatives believing the same statement; 20% responding "Public? We dont need no steenking public!"; 17% responding "We'll pay attention to the public when the public pay us to." and 78% responding "The Public be Damned!" (totals do not add up to 100% because the checkboxes were filled out with crayon and the congresscritters don't seem to be able to stay in the lines).
At the same time, a survey of top corporate CEO's were asked about legislation on defining corporate legal rights with the following results. 78% responded: "Congress, We don't need no steenking congress"; 99% responded : "We don't elect them, but we sure as hell pay them, they'll do what we want.", 200% responded (this point was made so strongly (bribery of the persons taking the poll) that we needed to give it a few more percents) : "We don't give a flying f--k about congress, laws, people or much of anything else as long as our profits are good and we get paid what we think we are worth."
A group claiming to represent voters and consumers challenged the validity and even importance of the polls, but CEO Simon Sez! of "Survey Sez!" disputed their challenge and said that, as one of those surveyed, he knew that the process had to be valid and important. He further claimed, that given the results, he could only conclude that the only persons in the USA who deserved the right to vote were those who agreed with him (those disagreeing obviously disqualifying themselves by their obvious stupidity).
Simon Sez! sez!(tm) that he'd be introducing a new Constitution for the US to that effect. Congressional review is likely to take place at a special Constitutional Congress held on Sez!'s private island in the Caribbean. Sez! sez!(tm) that he has built a special resort^h^h^h^h^h conference center for that purpose and the discussion period is likely to last as long as the daiquiris do. A large supply of well educated and sexually attractive "pages" is also on hand to help the congresscritters in their deliberations. Ratification is expected quickly after the Constitutional Congress adjourns - as soon thereafter as his checks to the congresscritters clear.
Since kartoo was mentioned here I've started using it and it has rapidly moved to being an important tool.
I don't use it to find specific answers to specific questions (google still does that better), but I do use it as a tool to find related topics that I might not have found otherwise. Sometimes it works very well indeed, sometimes not so well, but when it works its great.
The other day I was just browsing a topic area of minor interest and discovered a tool to do something that I've wanted for a while (built my own, i did, so it will be interesting to compare results). Even though the tool was available back when I was looking for it, it was described in terms that were slightly different than the ones I was searching on so I got not direct hits and the more opened ones often resulted in way too many matches - enough to make effective narrowing tough.
I built something a while back that did something similar - using a graph layout tool, some ad hoc similarity measurements and a few other oddities - but it was a pain and didn't use the kind of interface to the search engines kartoo uses. Lacking effective spidering and a large enough database it was usable, but not always pleasant.
If only it were not flash! And if only there were a "open in other tab" thing so I could more easily keep search context.
Exactly. To which the response is (and was), then only the independently wealthy would be in government.
To which my response is:
"As opposed to those who are trying to become independently wealthy by getting well paid positions in government, with perqs like few others can aspire to, and secondary sources of emolument that makes the phrase 'public service' absurd at best?"
(But then, I think we should appoint congresscritters at random (!) with a one term limit.)
" The problem is that some systems should never be made public. I don't want the command computer source code for the ICBM system running around loose "
Somehow this raises in my mind a compelling visual image of a huge stack of fanfold paper splitting in two to make pseudo-legs and literally "running" around.
But, more seriously, there are very few instances in which this kind of "keep it secret to keep it safe" reasoning makes sense (to me). This doesn't seem like one - while I can imagine possible problems with "bad guys" getting the code, few of them seem sufficiently compelling to require locking the code down tight.
Indeed, the notion of "security through obscurity" (SETHROB) is so seriously flawed that any time it (or something close to it) is suggested, serious questions about the whole business should be raised. Specifically, SETHROB is very often used to hide the fact that the thing being kept obscure contains serious problems - and it is those problems that require the shroud of obscurity.
Worse yet, SETHROB is a convenient thing for those who do not understand the problem to toss in to the solution - and they thereby convince themselves that the problems are all solved. Toss in a way to punish those who try to point out the problems for violating the security involved and suddenly you not only fail to solve the problems, but you make it difficult, if not impossible, to even consider the process of finding workable solutions.
Should all information be public? Thats absurd (although in some relatively theoretical sense it may not be). But using governmental secrecy and obscurity to protect things at the drop of a hat (a common enough reflex in them hollowed halls) is equally absurd and every time someone says its a good thing, we should all ask why - and require a bit of convincing.
On a related topic, does anyone know if there is a place to purchase "peace, love and linux" shirts (the IBM thing that was spray-painted here and there and...)?
Preferably in black with the fun parts in glow-in-the-dark ink?
Their letter states :
"it is essential that the National Strategy affirm federal tradition by explicitly rejecting licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R&D."
Its not clear to me that this eliminates GPL, but it sure as s--t does imply that restrictive patents that allow "commercial adoption" by a single company are Good. By implication, we can also deduce that for a single company to collect (er, um, "extort"?) licensing fees for patents obtained in such ways is a good thing as well.
And when Mr Smith is the (can there be any doubt?) well paid Senator from Washington. I imagine he'll be well supplied with guaranteed perennial assistance (cash, checks, gifts, prepaid investigative trips to (Unnamed Tropical Resort) to investigate claims that the Bikini Industry there is illegally underpricing their product in competition with Legitimate American Corporate Interests (LACI - pronounced "lackey")). With (to continue that sentence) that assistance coming in from Those Who Must Be Obeyed, will there be any real surprise when he initiates the passage of a Law - requiring everyone to use The Only Software System Around We Like Or Trust ("TOSS-A-LOT")?
(Hmm, the "Microsoft" act. "Mandatory Iliminiation of Computing Rights Or Satanic (o?) Foundations of Terrorism". Needs work, but it shoul appeal to the "anti-terrorist" ad campaign, the "Satanic" obsession of the Satanicly obsessed (possessed?), and the Illuminati who are undoubtedly funding it all. By the time he gets to be senator I'm sure they'll work it out.)
I did the peace corps thing after college. And I'd recommend it highly. If you have the chance, jump at it. You'll see and do things you'd probably never encounter otherwise and you'll learn a lot. Some employers will discount it as will some grad schools - but others will look on it as a big plus.
The applicable part of the sourceforge terms of use seems to be:
the submitting user grants SourceForge.net the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable approved license.
( Perpetual?? Does this bind someone to a timeframe that even Disney would drool over? At least it doesn't say "throughout the universe".)
First, I think (NBAL,YU (Not Being A Lawyer, You Understand)) that most open source licenses give users approximately the rights listed there in general - and since they are saying that their rights are still subject to the terms of an "applicable approved license" so I'm not sure (AIAAL (Again I Aint A Lawyer)) that they're claiming that much. And I suspect that a part of that license (reproduce...publish...display...) is really there to cover them in the case that someone puts something on sourceforge and then wants to take it back and then sue sourceforge for having shown it around. (BAISIANNBALA (you figure it out this time)).
I'm still staring at the MS license (interesting that its not clear right up at the top of the gotdotnet site pages that MS is actually gotdotnet) and the "explanations" offered to see if I can figure out what it might actually be saying (BAISIANNBALA). It does look though like you're giving MS a whole lot more power over your work than you're giving sourceforge.
Many of the responders to this claim loudly and insistently that they've been programming for years and have never used any math. This is one of those perennial topics - I've seen it on the usenet and on web sites more times than I'd like to admit.
But by "math" the reference is almost always to calculus.
But math is not just calculus.
Math includes (and this is a MINIMAL list :
algebra Every program using symbols to represent things that might vary is using algebra. Algebra isnt just manipulating big expressions to find values of x and y - it is really about using names to refer to values. (For example x=y+1 is fundamentally an algebraic expression.
boolean logic Using logical expressions and understanding what they do is just the predicate calculus. Using logic languages (prolog primarily) is, well, logic.
Linear Algebra Try to program more than minimal graphics without linear algebra.
The structure of numbers computing square roots and the like. This kind of computing also typically involves calculus and its relatives
Calculus
many parts of computational mathematics, including things like square roots, sin/cos and the like. Also, finding tangents and normals to surfaces which is a big part of reflection models in graphics. The logic involved is also used in the analysis of algorithms.
logical reasoning Every time someone writes a loop or a recursive function, they are essentially using mathematical induction (albeit informally). Propagation of pre/post conditions (not just in procedure calls, but on the statement to statement level is also logical reasoning (and informal proofs).
Fourier analysis Fourier analysis is essential in image manipulation (including compression), graphics in general, Most algorithms involving sound processing also rely on fourier analysis
Graph Theory Where doesn't graph theory show up? Dependency graphs, path algorithms of all sorts. Trees are graphs. Garbage collection involves graph theory. Programs are (on several levels) graphs. The internet as a network is a graph. Websites are graphs (and it can be interesting and revealing to look at them as such).
Number Theory Cryptography!
And there's more - check out Glassner's "Digital Image Synthesis", or Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming", - find places where mathematics is not mentioned. Let alone such things as wavelets, the Mandelbrot set, grammars, text (or UI) layout, automata (and on, and on, and on...). I can show you a very hard mathematical problem (which I'm still working on) based on an algorithm you all know, but that is often coded incorrectly.
If you're not doing any of these things, you may be programming, but you're probably not programming well.
Juris Hartmanis said (half jokingly) in his Turing Award lecture that "Computer Science is the engineering of mathematics" I think its about as good a definition as any I have ever heard.
At the unversity(sic) I used to teach at, the bulk of the network connections were paid for by an involuntary levy on the students - this was reviewed each year, but the folks who ran the network had what amounted to the right to take their cut first and it was never challenged.
There was no set policy on music downloading and the like, instead the network administrator just turned off student network connections when he thought they got too high - this did not apply to faculty or staff. It did make at least one student very cranky when he tried to download a linux distribution.
If this is not illegal, it sure should be. In the meantime someone should drop the executives from those companies on their pointy, sleazy little heads a few times. And I (personally) think the coders should be treated similarly.
In a larger sense though, this points up some difficulties with the current way that shrink wrap, click through licensing, EULA's, "terms of use" and the like work.
Users agree to things that they may not understand (if it is couched in sufficiently baroque legalese), or to things that they may never even see. And the fact that sleazoids like these folks can hide behind an EULA is truly despicable and points up the fact that as long as companies are making enough money, they can pretty much do what they want.
I've seen such licences and the like exceed 1000 lines in length and recently saw one in both English and French - the French was essentially a translation of the English (at least for the first few lines). It seems quite possible that it was different and that the differences would commit a user to something fun.
Recently I have found a good one. Go to the abc tv web site and locate the "terms of use" link. (in most browsers is it even visible when you load the page?), then click through to the terms of use page . Interesting reading.
Firstly, not that most people will not even see the link to the terms of use page as it is probably below the bottom of browser windows. It is for me with Mozilla in full screen mode (yech).
Formatted for a 70 character line, this is about 500 lines long and just by visiting the first site, you are agreeing (legally? I think UCITA says yes) to all the terms.
To begin with, you're agreeing to a nicely sweeping claim:
... you signify your agreement to these terms of use. If you do not agree to these terms of use, please do not use the WDIG Site. We reserve the right, at our discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of these terms at any time. Please check these terms periodically for changes. Your continued use of this WDIG Site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.
In particular the seriously unethical ( like Kazaa et al) might bind you to whatever changes in their licenses they might want to make forever. Even if you don't know about them.
For a good chortle, search for "universe".
Most license agreements have something like this in them. IANAL so I can't even claim to understand the full ramifications of this, so how might a 13 year old who visits the site? Is a 13 year old legally capable of participating in a contract?
"You hereby indemnify, defend, and hold us and our affiliates and our officers, directors, owners, agents, information providers, affiliates, licensors, and licensees (collectively, the "Indemnified Parties") harmless from and against any and all liabilities and costs (including reasonable attorneys' fees') incurred by the Indemnified Parties in connection with any claim arising out of any breach by you of this Agreement or claims arising from your account. You shall use your best efforts to cooperate with us in the defense of any claim. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you."
If Kazaa and the like have similar claims in their EULAs, it might mean that even if you are peeved and try to take action against them, you are still responsible for paying for their defense in the legal doodly-doo that ensues. I've seen at least one EULA that seems to say that the user is responsible for any legal action taken against the company. If that is the case, and if M$ had such a clause in their EULA, then they could conceivably make monetary claims against any users of their software in order to pay for the antitrust suit.
For amusement value, as well as insight into the way the US congresscritters are selling their souls to the devil of profit, reading EULA's and the like is highly recommended.
I would prefer multiple monitors at 1600x1200 (indeed, I'd quite like a 4Kx4K monitor - sized appropriately - even if it had to be monochrome).
I've used multiple monitors for lots of things - at one point I was actively using four - one was monitoring web/systems/network activity, one was running tail -f on the web error log, one was for docs, database table definitions and so on, and the final one was for development. Virtual desktops and the like did not work anywhere near as well (though I once had this huge set of virtual desktops so it could hold an XEmacs that was something like 2000 columns wide - so it could hold the results of this MASSIVE join).
Most judges issue warrants when the law enforcement/DAs and the like ensure them that things are all hunky dory. Naturally enough that gives them a certain legal clout in court - "this was a legal warrant, the judge signed off on it" - and the warrant can be as broad and inclusive as the constabulary and their friends wish. Not quite what the constitution IMPLIES is the goal. Since the goal is not stated, the courts are free to do whatever they like.
With secret courts, its even more fun, the government could potentially appoint judges in secret, with no review to screen out the loonies, those who have been bought off, or those permanently biased one way or another. (Even review of the candidates may not help substantially if the folks appointing them only appoint judges with the "correct" viewpoints). And it is far from impossible to belive that someone might appoint ANYONE - I think of Reverend Jim from "Taxi". Or Homer Simpson.
These judges can make decisions in secret, including warrants (picture the local cop going in and saying "hey, I need warrants for all the people who've been passing out leaflets in favor of electing "person x" - the cop has nothing to lose, neither does the judge - its all secret).
Then the trial can be secret so the accused has no right to the kind of scrutiny that is assumed to help ensure fair trials. Probably with no juries. Pprobably with no evidence presented (can you guarantee that evidence WAS presented - nope, its all secret).
Keep it up and the government has the right to put anyone in jail at any time for doing pretty much anything. (This isn't all bad, the prison industry would benefit immensely.)
Just to keep this all real, the unversity (not a spelling error - Eastern Oregon Unversity for those who might want to avoid the place) I used to work for wanted to pass a rule that would allow a female (the gender was very specific) to accuse any male (again specific in gender) of sexual harassment. The male could be tried and expelled by a committee which only heard the female side of the story. He did not need to be informed of the person pressing the charges, or even the precise charges (as that could enable him to determine who was pressing charges) and the hearings and committee decisions were private. I don't think the rule passed, but I'm sure it will be tried again and again until it is.
Randomness is a very complex subject with lots of odd facets. The article cited at the top of this topic may be a good way to generate more or less "true" random sequences (17 is, of course, the Only Random Number).
Random sequences based on quantum (or similar effects) are useful primarily in cryptography where "true" randomness is important. Probably in video gambling devices as well (is there any good way to tell how they generate randomness).
Random sequences based on deterministic generators are useful for lots of other things: simulation, pysol (including freecell), and a number of algorithms. These are not useless by any means and while they need to satisfy some fairly stringent statistical properties, they can be generated by well defined algorithms starting with seeds which may be reused.
Randomness, its uses, implications, theory and even philosophy is a massive subject - probably more than a single lifetime's worth.
In fact, its hard to even describe what randomness actually is and how you can tell is something is random.
For starters try Knuth Chapter 3, go on to Greg Chaitin's work, and cryptography. Then continue with the appropriate bits and pieces of quantum physics and then go back and fill in all the holes. (Don't neglect using cryptographic algorithms to generate random numbers - as well as their uses the other way around, the digits of Pi, the Riemann Zeta function and, well, a lot else) You'll have lots of fun and push your brain quite a bit.
There's a major difference between a sequence of pseudo-random numbers (as you describe) and a sequence true random numbers (leaving aside completely any proper definition of what is random).
Simply enough, it is what they are used for - in many computer applications (simulation, pysol, and the like) pseudo-random numbers are great - given the same seed they're reproducable, they have the right statistical properties - but they may be very predictable, - in cryptography building a perfect one time pad requires true randomness - and a pseudo random number sequence is not even close to working.
Random numbers are actually a very tough subject, with odd and wonderful oddnesses and wonderfulnesses. Start with Knuth (Chapter 3) (a reasonable introduction to pseudo-random numbers and go on from there (there's easily a lifetime or three of stuff on the topic).
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." John Von Neumann
Slashdot Mirror
(And, yes, I know where and why it doesnt work, but it had to be done at least this far.)
version="1.0">
/> /> <xsl:apply-templates /> )
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(node()) = 0">
<xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
( <xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The transformation in the other direction is left as the traditional exercise for the interested reader.
One of the problems with WYSIWYG markup is that it is visual, everyone likes Word (or whatever) because they can make things Look Right. But this is also its biggest problem, as it removes the structural/semantic information. We've now trained a whole pile of people to believe that what they think looks good must (obviously) look good to anyone. (To see the validity of that, just look at what those attitudes have done to the web. "I like blinkies, so everyone must." Ewww.)
But now the document is non-portable, and in some sense digitally unusable. Hard to index, hard to grab bits of for the next time you need almost that same thing. Indeed, something like the oft vaunted "mail merge" in Scribe, LaTeX, XML are relatively simple (a shell script and sed) but they tend to be hard in WYSIWYG documents.
Why? Because semantic markup is necessarily domain-centric. A business letter doesn't have the same kind of content as an invoice. Even when they're part of the same communication.
Thats a good thing for indexing, cataloging, analyzing and all that.
Its also a good thing for those who need to produce a lot of documents that look a lot alike. Hence document templates (available in any decent word processor).
Even better, using XML allows a nice separation of powers. The person writing the business letter does not need to know what it will look like, and the person defining its look does not need to know its content. Since the writer is not concerned with the look, editing actually gets easier. For example, I often use LaTeX (also HTML and XML increasingly) and emacs and know them both relatively well (and I use both under both Windows and Unix) and when I need to switch to something WYSIWYGish, I tend to get very cranky. "What do you mean, you cant put every sentence on a line by itself?"
Now everyone with a grain of sense knows all this (so I apologize for repeating it). Or do they?
Microsoft does. XML based documents are going to be the future, they say. Oasis does (but then they're SGML oriented anyway).
But not everyone does. That secretary down the hall doesn't. And he's going to fight like hell having to do things in a true XML oriented way (show him an xml editor and wait for him to threaten to quit). (Why do you think SGML never caught on?) He doesn't care about saving work - he wants to get paid for his 40 hours. And his boss is going to hear him loud and clear since he sits right outside her door. Even though putting him into that XML re-education camp is very likely to save a whole pile of money in the long run, the noise and screams and the short run cost is going to make it very hard to push in any kind of organization.
Which means we might end up with an XML representation of that WYSIWYG text. This would be a real mess. There is a thing called the "Rainbow DTD" (a quick web search turned up no live copies of this). This was an SGML (it predated XML) markup that essentially represented WYSIWYG markup. So there were elements like "". Yech.
As a proof of concept, a while back, I cobbled together a script that would read this and guess as to the users "meaning" (we were dealing with a relatively small target domain)- it worked, but quite badly, to get it to work well would have taken expert system or statistical inference kinds of code. The idea was not supported by my boss, because it would have required iterations and feedback from the original authors to tune the translations. He said, "They like WYSIWYG, lets not bother them." It was clear that it would have worked though, and with tools like XSLT, it would not have been all that hard.
So now I wonder, are the OASIS folks going to do a "rainbow dtd" type thing? Perhaps at a slightly higher level of abstraction? Or will it be a metalanguage for document definition (hey, I thought that was what XML was). And the MS folks, what does their XML look like?
Cuz, one way or another, with XSLT and a bit of hackery, someone will find a way to translate one to the other. And back. The only question left is how hard it will be and how much semantic information will carry across.
But it portrays, about as accurately as I've ever seen it, how systems are created to do one thing and end up doing something very different - and usually not something all that valuable.
The following is quoted (excerpted) from the back cover.
I meant, how long will it be, given some of the other things on slashdot today about the US Gov't taking things off public web sites, before someone decides to make all those protected too?
After all, it would be Un American to make the information available without someone profiting on it.
Any touch of cynicism detected is copyright by me. Any attempt to imitate it, quote it or otherwise be cynical will be treated as a serious infringement of my intellectual property rights and my legal bloodhounds will descend on you direct from the Baskervilles where I've been hiding them just for that purpose. I've stored up a nice stash of luminescent paint too.
"You can be dogfood." (obobscurereference)
The American government has determined in all of its infinitesimal wisdom (what can you expect from a government led by a shrubbery ("Ni!")?) that large corporations are better than small ones and that almost any corporation is better than any individual (unless the individual has a whole s--tload of money).
Not entirely a new thing though - check out Tom Paxton's song "I'm changing my name to Chrysler" from which I quote the follwoing lines :
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
and should someone go broke, become unemployed, have to live on social security or whatever as a result of this idiocy, they can always take this hint (also from Mr. Paxton):
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it!
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
For those for whom the name Tom Paxton is not entirely familiar, his music is likely to be (at least in once case) something sitting dormant in your memory, waiting to ambush you - here's the chorus from what is probably his most familiar song :
It went "Zip" when it moved,
And "Pop" when it stopped,
And, "Whirrr" when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will.
Well, it is wandering along toward the toy season, innit?
Given attempts at legal throttling of free speech such as the CDA and the recent Australian efforts (as mentioned on slashdot) and the European Community efforts (slashdot again) and
A Brave New World indeed, where spam is legal but not much else is. Something for us all to look forward to.
I used to spend a lot of time on bicycles. Not racing or anything, just having fun, commuting, exploring and the like.
:
..." [insert info about bike fit here ] "...then ride it for a month or two - find out what kind of riding you like, get a feel for how you ride and then come back and we'll talk more."
Got known for it.
People would say "I want to buy a bike, whats the best one?"
I'd ask them what kind of bike they had now and how often they rode it. The answer was frequently that they did not have a bike and didn't ride. Since none of these people had millions in the bank, my answer was always about the same
"Go to a thrift store, yard sale, whatever and find a bike that fits
Why? Without knowing how someone rode or what kind of riding they might like, there is no way to tell them what kind of bike to buy. Further, even sending them to good bike shops to try bikes was a waste of time because they wouldn't be able to tell how the bike felt to them.
Of course, they could just go out to a good bike shop and spend way more than they could afford on a bike they'd never use. But that didn't feel like a good suggestion to me somehow.
Same thing here. "Renderer" and "modeller" seem to be mixed up. I get no feel that the poster knows what he's looking for.
So my advice:
Get Blender, POV (or similar free or very cheap packages) and work with them seriously for a while. Do a couple good sized projects. Figure out what you're good at and what you want to do. Get a feel for how you want the application to react and what you really want it to do.
Then, if you still need advice, you'll be able to ask for it more precisely.
And the answers will mean more.
Gelernter's article said exactly one thing to me about Linux and Microsoft.
...) to port this to Linux, so it will make things lots easier for us if Linux just rolls up and crawls away."
"We don't want (can't, are too lazy
I wonder if he feels the same way about Macs.
(I also wonder if he would feel the same way if Microsoft created a directly competing product, installed it on the desktop of all their machines, made it "part of the os" and, well, we all know the drill.)
According to a survey recently released by "Survey Sez!", a leading polling, survey and statistical trends analysis company, 97% of US Senators thought that the beliefs and interests of the American Public were completely irrelevent to their jobs and could safely be ignored. The company also sez! (tm) that several senators were unable to respond to their survey. The House of Representatives was also surveyed on the same subject but the results were less clear, with 70% of the representatives believing the same statement; 20% responding "Public? We dont need no steenking public!"; 17% responding "We'll pay attention to the public when the public pay us to." and 78% responding "The Public be Damned!" (totals do not add up to 100% because the checkboxes were filled out with crayon and the congresscritters don't seem to be able to stay in the lines).
At the same time, a survey of top corporate CEO's were asked about legislation on defining corporate legal rights with the following results. 78% responded: "Congress, We don't need no steenking congress"; 99% responded : "We don't elect them, but we sure as hell pay them, they'll do what we want.", 200% responded (this point was made so strongly (bribery of the persons taking the poll) that we needed to give it a few more percents) : "We don't give a flying f--k about congress, laws, people or much of anything else as long as our profits are good and we get paid what we think we are worth."
A group claiming to represent voters and consumers challenged the validity and even importance of the polls, but CEO Simon Sez! of "Survey Sez!" disputed their challenge and said that, as one of those surveyed, he knew that the process had to be valid and important. He further claimed, that given the results, he could only conclude that the only persons in the USA who deserved the right to vote were those who agreed with him (those disagreeing obviously disqualifying themselves by their obvious stupidity).
Simon Sez! sez!(tm) that he'd be introducing a new Constitution for the US to that effect. Congressional review is likely to take place at a special Constitutional Congress held on Sez!'s private island in the Caribbean. Sez! sez!(tm) that he has built a special resort^h^h^h^h^h conference center for that purpose and the discussion period is likely to last as long as the daiquiris do. A large supply of well educated and sexually attractive "pages" is also on hand to help the congresscritters in their deliberations. Ratification is expected quickly after the Constitutional Congress adjourns - as soon thereafter as his checks to the congresscritters clear.
Since kartoo was mentioned here I've started using it and it has rapidly moved to being an important tool.
I don't use it to find specific answers to specific questions (google still does that better), but I do use it as a tool to find related topics that I might not have found otherwise. Sometimes it works very well indeed, sometimes not so well, but when it works its great.
The other day I was just browsing a topic area of minor interest and discovered a tool to do something that I've wanted for a while (built my own, i did, so it will be interesting to compare results). Even though the tool was available back when I was looking for it, it was described in terms that were slightly different than the ones I was searching on so I got not direct hits and the more opened ones often resulted in way too many matches - enough to make effective narrowing tough.
I built something a while back that did something similar - using a graph layout tool, some ad hoc similarity measurements and a few other oddities - but it was a pain and didn't use the kind of interface to the search engines kartoo uses. Lacking effective spidering and a large enough database it was usable, but not always pleasant.
If only it were not flash! And if only there were a "open in other tab" thing so I could more easily keep search context.
Exactly. To which the response is (and was), then only the independently wealthy would be in government.
:
To which my response is
"As opposed to those who are trying to become independently wealthy by getting well paid positions in government, with perqs like few others can aspire to, and secondary sources of emolument that makes the phrase 'public service' absurd at best?"
(But then, I think we should appoint congresscritters at random (!) with a one term limit.)
" The problem is that some systems should never be made public. I don't want the command computer source code for the ICBM system running around loose "
Somehow this raises in my mind a compelling visual image of a huge stack of fanfold paper splitting in two to make pseudo-legs and literally "running" around.
But, more seriously, there are very few instances in which this kind of "keep it secret to keep it safe" reasoning makes sense (to me). This doesn't seem like one - while I can imagine possible problems with "bad guys" getting the code, few of them seem sufficiently compelling to require locking the code down tight.
Indeed, the notion of "security through obscurity" (SETHROB) is so seriously flawed that any time it (or something close to it) is suggested, serious questions about the whole business should be raised. Specifically, SETHROB is very often used to hide the fact that the thing being kept obscure contains serious problems - and it is those problems that require the shroud of obscurity.
Worse yet, SETHROB is a convenient thing for those who do not understand the problem to toss in to the solution - and they thereby convince themselves that the problems are all solved. Toss in a way to punish those who try to point out the problems for violating the security involved and suddenly you not only fail to solve the problems, but you make it difficult, if not impossible, to even consider the process of finding workable solutions.
Should all information be public? Thats absurd (although in some relatively theoretical sense it may not be). But using governmental secrecy and obscurity to protect things at the drop of a hat (a common enough reflex in them hollowed halls) is equally absurd and every time someone says its a good thing, we should all ask why - and require a bit of convincing.
On a related topic, does anyone know if there is a place to purchase "peace, love and linux" shirts (the IBM thing that was spray-painted here and there and
Preferably in black with the fun parts in glow-in-the-dark ink?
"it is essential that the National Strategy affirm federal tradition by explicitly rejecting licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R&D."
Its not clear to me that this eliminates GPL, but it sure as s--t does imply that restrictive patents that allow "commercial adoption" by a single company are Good. By implication, we can also deduce that for a single company to collect (er, um, "extort"?) licensing fees for patents obtained in such ways is a good thing as well.
And when Mr Smith is the (can there be any doubt?) well paid Senator from Washington. I imagine he'll be well supplied with guaranteed perennial assistance (cash, checks, gifts, prepaid investigative trips to (Unnamed Tropical Resort) to investigate claims that the Bikini Industry there is illegally underpricing their product in competition with Legitimate American Corporate Interests (LACI - pronounced "lackey")). With (to continue that sentence) that assistance coming in from Those Who Must Be Obeyed, will there be any real surprise when he initiates the passage of a Law - requiring everyone to use The Only Software System Around We Like Or Trust ("TOSS-A-LOT")?
(Hmm, the "Microsoft" act. "Mandatory Iliminiation of Computing Rights Or Satanic (o?) Foundations of Terrorism". Needs work, but it shoul appeal to the "anti-terrorist" ad campaign, the "Satanic" obsession of the Satanicly obsessed (possessed?), and the Illuminati who are undoubtedly funding it all. By the time he gets to be senator I'm sure they'll work it out.)
I did the peace corps thing after college. And I'd recommend it highly. If you have the chance, jump at it. You'll see and do things you'd probably never encounter otherwise and you'll learn a lot. Some employers will discount it as will some grad schools - but others will look on it as a big plus.
the submitting user grants SourceForge.net the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable approved license.
( Perpetual?? Does this bind someone to a timeframe that even Disney would drool over? At least it doesn't say "throughout the universe".)
First, I think (NBAL,YU (Not Being A Lawyer, You Understand)) that most open source licenses give users approximately the rights listed there in general - and since they are saying that their rights are still subject to the terms of an "applicable approved license" so I'm not sure (AIAAL (Again I Aint A Lawyer)) that they're claiming that much. And I suspect that a part of that license (reproduce...publish...display...) is really there to cover them in the case that someone puts something on sourceforge and then wants to take it back and then sue sourceforge for having shown it around. (BAISIANNBALA (you figure it out this time)).
I'm still staring at the MS license (interesting that its not clear right up at the top of the gotdotnet site pages that MS is actually gotdotnet) and the "explanations" offered to see if I can figure out what it might actually be saying (BAISIANNBALA). It does look though like you're giving MS a whole lot more power over your work than you're giving sourceforge.
But by "math" the reference is almost always to calculus.
But math is not just calculus.
Math includes (and this is a MINIMAL list :
- algebra Every program using symbols to represent things that might vary is using algebra. Algebra isnt just manipulating big expressions to find values of x and y - it is really about using names to refer to values. (For example x=y+1 is fundamentally an algebraic expression.
And there's more - check out Glassner's "Digital Image Synthesis", or Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming", - find places where mathematics is not mentioned. Let alone such things as wavelets, the Mandelbrot set, grammars, text (or UI) layout, automata (and on, and on, and on...). I can show you a very hard mathematical problem (which I'm still working on) based on an algorithm you all know, but that is often coded incorrectly.boolean logic Using logical expressions and understanding what they do is just the predicate calculus. Using logic languages (prolog primarily) is, well, logic.
Linear Algebra Try to program more than minimal graphics without linear algebra.
The structure of numbers computing square roots and the like. This kind of computing also typically involves calculus and its relatives
Calculus many parts of computational mathematics, including things like square roots, sin/cos and the like. Also, finding tangents and normals to surfaces which is a big part of reflection models in graphics. The logic involved is also used in the analysis of algorithms.
logical reasoning Every time someone writes a loop or a recursive function, they are essentially using mathematical induction (albeit informally). Propagation of pre/post conditions (not just in procedure calls, but on the statement to statement level is also logical reasoning (and informal proofs).
Fourier analysis Fourier analysis is essential in image manipulation (including compression), graphics in general, Most algorithms involving sound processing also rely on fourier analysis
Graph Theory Where doesn't graph theory show up? Dependency graphs, path algorithms of all sorts. Trees are graphs. Garbage collection involves graph theory. Programs are (on several levels) graphs. The internet as a network is a graph. Websites are graphs (and it can be interesting and revealing to look at them as such).
Number Theory Cryptography!
If you're not doing any of these things, you may be programming, but you're probably not programming well.
Juris Hartmanis said (half jokingly) in his Turing Award lecture that "Computer Science is the engineering of mathematics" I think its about as good a definition as any I have ever heard.
Fags - Faggots Architect Great Software
There was no set policy on music downloading and the like, instead the network administrator just turned off student network connections when he thought they got too high - this did not apply to faculty or staff. It did make at least one student very cranky when he tried to download a linux distribution.
If everyone did this at FBI offices could the overload on their computer systems not be considered a distributed denial-of-service attack?
In a larger sense though, this points up some difficulties with the current way that shrink wrap, click through licensing, EULA's, "terms of use" and the like work.
Users agree to things that they may not understand (if it is couched in sufficiently baroque legalese), or to things that they may never even see. And the fact that sleazoids like these folks can hide behind an EULA is truly despicable and points up the fact that as long as companies are making enough money, they can pretty much do what they want.
I've seen such licences and the like exceed 1000 lines in length and recently saw one in both English and French - the French was essentially a translation of the English (at least for the first few lines). It seems quite possible that it was different and that the differences would commit a user to something fun.
Recently I have found a good one. Go to the abc tv web site and locate the "terms of use" link. (in most browsers is it even visible when you load the page?), then click through to the terms of use page . Interesting reading.
Firstly, not that most people will not even see the link to the terms of use page as it is probably below the bottom of browser windows. It is for me with Mozilla in full screen mode (yech).
Formatted for a 70 character line, this is about 500 lines long and just by visiting the first site, you are agreeing (legally? I think UCITA says yes) to all the terms.
To begin with, you're agreeing to a nicely sweeping claim:
In particular the seriously unethical ( like Kazaa et al) might bind you to whatever changes in their licenses they might want to make forever. Even if you don't know about them.For a good chortle, search for "universe".
Most license agreements have something like this in them. IANAL so I can't even claim to understand the full ramifications of this, so how might a 13 year old who visits the site? Is a 13 year old legally capable of participating in a contract?
If Kazaa and the like have similar claims in their EULAs, it might mean that even if you are peeved and try to take action against them, you are still responsible for paying for their defense in the legal doodly-doo that ensues. I've seen at least one EULA that seems to say that the user is responsible for any legal action taken against the company. If that is the case, and if M$ had such a clause in their EULA, then they could conceivably make monetary claims against any users of their software in order to pay for the antitrust suit.
For amusement value, as well as insight into the way the US congresscritters are selling their souls to the devil of profit, reading EULA's and the like is highly recommended.
I would prefer multiple monitors at 1600x1200 (indeed, I'd quite like a 4Kx4K monitor - sized appropriately - even if it had to be monochrome).
I've used multiple monitors for lots of things - at one point I was actively using four - one was monitoring web/systems/network activity, one was running tail -f on the web error log, one was for docs, database table definitions and so on, and the final one was for development. Virtual desktops and the like did not work anywhere near as well (though I once had this huge set of virtual desktops so it could hold an XEmacs that was something like 2000 columns wide - so it could hold the results of this MASSIVE join).
Most judges issue warrants when the law enforcement/DAs and the like ensure them that things are all hunky dory. Naturally enough that gives them a certain legal clout in court - "this was a legal warrant, the judge signed off on it" - and the warrant can be as broad and inclusive as the constabulary and their friends wish. Not quite what the constitution IMPLIES is the goal. Since the goal is not stated, the courts are free to do whatever they like.
With secret courts, its even more fun, the government could potentially appoint judges in secret, with no review to screen out the loonies, those who have been bought off, or those permanently biased one way or another. (Even review of the candidates may not help substantially if the folks appointing them only appoint judges with the "correct" viewpoints). And it is far from impossible to belive that someone might appoint ANYONE - I think of Reverend Jim from "Taxi". Or Homer Simpson.
These judges can make decisions in secret, including warrants (picture the local cop going in and saying "hey, I need warrants for all the people who've been passing out leaflets in favor of electing "person x" - the cop has nothing to lose, neither does the judge - its all secret).
Then the trial can be secret so the accused has no right to the kind of scrutiny that is assumed to help ensure fair trials. Probably with no juries. Pprobably with no evidence presented (can you guarantee that evidence WAS presented - nope, its all secret).
Keep it up and the government has the right to put anyone in jail at any time for doing pretty much anything. (This isn't all bad, the prison industry would benefit immensely.)
Just to keep this all real, the unversity (not a spelling error - Eastern Oregon Unversity for those who might want to avoid the place) I used to work for wanted to pass a rule that would allow a female (the gender was very specific) to accuse any male (again specific in gender) of sexual harassment. The male could be tried and expelled by a committee which only heard the female side of the story. He did not need to be informed of the person pressing the charges, or even the precise charges (as that could enable him to determine who was pressing charges) and the hearings and committee decisions were private. I don't think the rule passed, but I'm sure it will be tried again and again until it is.
Randomness is a very complex subject with lots of odd facets. The article cited at the top of this topic may be a good way to generate more or less "true" random sequences (17 is, of course, the Only Random Number).
Random sequences based on quantum (or similar effects) are useful primarily in cryptography where "true" randomness is important. Probably in video gambling devices as well (is there any good way to tell how they generate randomness).
Random sequences based on deterministic generators are useful for lots of other things: simulation, pysol (including freecell), and a number of algorithms. These are not useless by any means and while they need to satisfy some fairly stringent statistical properties, they can be generated by well defined algorithms starting with seeds which may be reused.
Randomness, its uses, implications, theory and even philosophy is a massive subject - probably more than a single lifetime's worth.
In fact, its hard to even describe what randomness actually is and how you can tell is something is random.
For starters try Knuth Chapter 3, go on to Greg Chaitin's work, and cryptography. Then continue with the appropriate bits and pieces of quantum physics and then go back and fill in all the holes. (Don't neglect using cryptographic algorithms to generate random numbers - as well as their uses the other way around, the digits of Pi, the Riemann Zeta function and, well, a lot else) You'll have lots of fun and push your brain quite a bit.
There's a major difference between a sequence of pseudo-random numbers (as you describe) and a sequence true random numbers (leaving aside completely any proper definition of what is random).
Simply enough, it is what they are used for - in many computer applications (simulation, pysol, and the like) pseudo-random numbers are great - given the same seed they're reproducable, they have the right statistical properties - but they may be very predictable, - in cryptography building a perfect one time pad requires true randomness - and a pseudo random number sequence is not even close to working.
Random numbers are actually a very tough subject, with odd and wonderful oddnesses and wonderfulnesses. Start with Knuth (Chapter 3) (a reasonable introduction to pseudo-random numbers and go on from there (there's easily a lifetime or three of stuff on the topic).
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." John Von Neumann