It's also Spider-Man canon that Peter Parker intentionally invented an adhesive with properties that it would be super-strong but would break down within about 24 hours. He also made a spraying device with a trigger on his palm. In the movie, Peter Parker presumably mutates so that he can shoot silk from his wrists. Thus, the movie doesn't follow the comic book canon and maybe it has entirely different properties, to be explored later.
OMG, now I'm going to be complaining about the "magic xylophone" next.
I have the book and it's entertaining. I would have preferred more equations and numbers and worked-out examples; the author seemed to be following Stephen Hawking's rule that every equation in a book cuts the readership in half.
This sounds like a reasonable prototyping/porting approach, really. I do much the same thing. For several years, I've been working on a programming language/calculating tool called Frink, and when I'm trying to write new code that may eventually be part of Frink, say, efficiently calculating the Riemann Zeta function, or factoring large numbers, I'll usually first write the prototype function in the Frink language itself, and get it working. It's much less effort, and usually far more legible, to write it in Frink, as opposed to, say, Java or C++. Later, I may port the algorithm to Java for some speed gain.
Frink and Matlab tend to try to preserve normal mathematical notation, which will make your mathematics people happy, and which be easier to read. When I need to refresh my memory about how an algorithm works, it's easier to go back and read the Frink code, not the Java code.
My advice is to try and maintain the algorithms both in Matlab format and C++ format, so that each accurately reflects what the other is doing. Yes, it's more work, but the code in one language will generally be a lot simpler than the other, so it shouldn't take much time. This will make it easier to prototype and test. The Matlab code will generally be more transparent for mathematical algorithms, and you'll be able to see, test, and fix bugs in the Matlab implementation more easily, whether you originally found the bug in the C++ version or the Matlab version. And you can share test suites and validate them against each other.
I don't agree with the people who think that the mathematicians can do all the high-level work in Matlab, and then just hand the work off to lower-level programmers to transliterate into C++. It's very common that an innocuous function in Matlab has huge amounts of very complex code behind it which you'll have to reproduce in C++. This often takes deep mathematical knowledge. For example, you might be using a Matlab function to factor numbers, but do you really know how to factor big numbers fast? Lots of work and user testing has been put into making sure the Matlab functions return the right results. Can you say the same about your C++ code?
There's lots of low-level understanding necessary for this transliteration, and of course the common annoyances where all of your expressions like 1/2 magically become zero when you port to C++!
"In 2002, piracy cost the worldwide software industry $13 billion in lost revenue."
Dispute the BSA's data if you want...
I want. Those figures include every piece of software that somebody copies, plays around with for 5 minutes and discards. If some 13-year-old downloads a copy of AutoCAD, tries to figure it out for 5 minutes, and then gives up and overwrites it with monkey pr0n, they count that a loss of $10,000. Or whatever it costs. This is ridiculous.
It's more likely that somebody who pirates Windows is using it, of course. Once you've installed it, you've made a decision you can't easily rescind. However, claiming that those people would have bought a new version of Windows XP that does nothing visibly new is ridiculous. If Joe Average User knew how little new functionality they'd get from upgrading from, say, Windows 2000 to Windows XP, there's very little chance they'd shell out the 150 bucks. There's nothing that Windows XP would buy me over the (legit) copy of Windows 2000 I have running on this old dog of a laptop.
In fact, "upgrading" to Windows XP Home would intentionally break my ability to connect to many networks! In order to increase their profits, Microsoft goes out of their way to cripple code that's been working for years, and damn the users! Who in their right mind would even consider paying Microsoft to intentionally screw them like that?
As a programmer myself, I fully believe that everyone should pay for the software they use. I just think that if people knew what they were really getting for their money, most would choose not to put another cent into Microsoft's pockets.
Reversible computation is quite real, but it doesn't work in the way you explained. You don't need to actually run the computation backwards. To make a long story short, the only time that a reversible computer needs to expend energy as heat is when it's producing output, or setting/clearing variables to a known state. And then, it only requires energy proportional to the number of bits being output, and the temperature. So if you're testing whether a billion-digit number is prime, the entire calculation can take zero energy, except for the one bit of output.
Unfortunately, to get truly reversible computing, the computation has to be done arbitrarily slowly.
If you don't have it, Feynman Lectures on Computation has one of the clearest discussions of reversible computation. Very highly recommended, and fun. We're 35+ years past the time when Feynman made these lectures, and we're still nowhere close to the limits or the technology that he described. Techniques for varying the power supply on the chip alone would very greatly reduce energy usage.
Wow, that's an interesting view of history. So all of this is a fabrication?
And who implanted my false memories of installing Windows 2.0 just to play Balance of Power? (I always lost in the 4th turn because I refused to concede any territory to the commies.):)
I stopped reading when Marcus claimed to be a "Windows System Administrator since Windows 1.0". Anyone who didn't have the sense to bail out--immediately--from a company that bet its lunch on Windows 1.0 can't be trusted.
"Hmmm... this new Windows 1.0 is not a complete abomination before the Lord. Let us hire a system administrator to manage it. Of course, he shall have to have no independent thought nor sense of shame."
Racter was a bit of a farce, in my opinion. I've heard the claims that it "wrote" all of its texts, but actually all it was was a very simple template-replacement system. I downloaded the version you're talking about a long time ago, and looked through the text files. Every single thing that it produces can be traced to the "template" files shipped with it, which were all written by humans. They're almost complete sentences, with only a few words missing, with placeholders for nouns, verbs, and names.
Once you've looked at its template files, you'll see that it doesn't produce a single original thing. Nothing will surprise you. All of its "wit" and creativity was all written by people, with no more than a random noun-replacement here and a verb-replacement there.
I had an e-mail conversation with someone who knew the author of the software, and he listed the names of many of the human writers, which included rather well-known TV writers and the like. I'll try to dig it up.
Exercise: hack up a similar replacement in Perl in a couple hours.
Actually, the Star Trek creators stated that it was the point of Star Trek to be drama. In the introduction to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, Rich Sternbach and Michael Okuda state,
To would-be
Star Trek writers, we'd like to emphasize that this is NOT required reading. If you're writing a Star Trek story, you will probably be doing yourself and your audience a disservice if you use more than a very tiny amount of this material. Remember, Star Trek is about people; the technology is merely part of their environment. As Gene [Roddenberry] points out in his Introduction, the real mission of the starship Enterprise is to serve as a vehicle for drama.
Interesting. It certainly changes the way that one would think about the series, and the way that scripts would be written. I know a lot of people who hated sci-fi, but would watch the shows for the interpersonal relationships, especially The Next Generation.
I'm not a fanboy (which makes it hard to explain why I own a copy of the Technical Manual, and I never watched Voyager or DS9, but I think that TNG was one of the best pieces of sci-fi and some of the best TV for its interesting ethical puzzles.
Enterprise was okay, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it. The moment I saw the "Red Skull" Nazis, I knew there was a shark with some serious airspace issues.
Efficient recording is more difficult because doing lossy compression is far more computationally-intensive than doing the corresponding decompression. It would likely take significantly more costly computing hardware to do recording and efficient compression. Not to mention the corresponding increase in expense of adding analog-to-digital converters, etc.
I think this was an intentional joke, but I'm not entirely sure.
Of course, the.ie top-level domain is Ireland. Google, of course has domains registered in most countries, so there's a www.google.de and www.google.fr, and so on, with text of the site in that country's language, and the option of searching only that country.
The cool thing about www.google.ie is that if you misspell a word, instead of suggesting corrections, it heckles you in Gaelic.
I don't think you read the article. There are several points that lead me to agree that it's more than just coincidence. For example:
New features were added to Sobig and Send-Safe on approximately the same day.
The version of Sobig compiled on May 30, 2003 added new encryption systems. The version of Send-safe compiled on the same day added new encryption systems.
The versions of Send-Safe and Sobig added additional proxy types on approximately the same day.
The port numbers used by Send-Safe and Sobig changed at approximately the same time.
Spam gangs who are known to be Send-Safe customers used features of the new Sobig virus/proxy before they were even known to the world at large.
The code scans show a very large number of duplicated opcodes between Send-Safe and Sobig. This is the smoking gun, potentially.
What I'd like to see is the decompilation of the matching areas in the code. If they're related to sending mail and/or exploiting proxies, and not library code or boilerplate, then it's very highly probable that the code writers are sharing code, and are either the same person, or working very closely together.
Taken together, this is good evidence that further investigation is indeed warranted.
And here I was all impressed with our petty 2 gigabits/sec that we have for our internet-based television station that just launched today. Umm... can I get one of these installed in my studio? It would let more people see our staggering hotties.:)
Windows Media Player is the bane of my existence. Microsoft makes it impossible to embed in any browser but their own (it's been this way since 6.4.) And we just launched a 24-hour Internet-based television station today. I can play our stream in MPlayer or later versions of RealPlayer, but I'd love to have it embedded in the browser easier and more scriptable. How's Helix doing? Will that be a reasonable choice soon?
You don't necessarily need to re-download your extensions. If you're running the Mozilla installer, it will give you a screen that says something like "the installer will now delete any third-party extensions you have installed to eliminate incompatibilities."
There's a "skip" button there at the bottom. Skip this step, and your extensions remain intact.
There is occasionally a problem with all extensions working correctly (thus the point of this step,) but I've seen that problem rarely lately.
I did a statistical analysis of ratings of movies, as part of a collaborative filtering movie recommendation program I'm building in Frink using the million-recommendation database put out by the GroupLens project.
As part of this, I found the movies with the greatest variance in ratings, and did some weighting to balance out movies that hadn't been rated much. Movies with the highest variance indicated the most disagreement as to whether people loved or hated the movie.
The movie with the biggest variance? (Assuming certain weighting, of course...) The Blair Witch Project. People either loved it or hated it. (I liked it, by the way.)
Those are good stats to have. I know lots of people who have gone blind looking at those graphs and trying to figure what the percentages really are. (At least that's why they say they've gone blind.) Does anyone have links to real numbers and discussions of their methodology?
There are lots of ways even the world's most popular site can produce skewed statistics. It's always interesting to note that Google is far from being valid HTML. This can cause smaller, lighter browsers to choke, as anyone who has ever tried to write an HTML parser knows. The hard part is working around silly bugs in peoples' web pages. If all sites used valid HTML, the browser landscape could be far more diverse.
Where do they get the stats that IE is 93% of the market? That's never what I see. Admittedly, if you have a bad site with broken HTML that only IE will display, IE will make up the majority of your browsers. Everyone else just goes away. It's a Catch-22. But if you have a site that is standards-compliant, and platform-neutral, the numbers are much, much better. Here are my stats from the past month:
MS Internet Explorer 62.1 % Mozilla 10.9 % FireFox 9.3 % Opera 4.5 % Safari 2.9 % Netscape 2.8 % Unknown 2.2 % Galeon 1.6 % Konqueror 1.0 % Firebird (Old FireFox) 0.6 % Others 1.7 %
The one they won't give you unless you cough up $25.95+tax.
In a former consulting gig, the client had bought a component to connect to their LDAP server. I eventually discovered that it was corrupting memory badly, and called support. The head of their support department told me that although they gave free support for 30 days to anyone who downloaded the same software off the internet, we had to buy a support contract because we'd actually paid for the software. She even refused to tell me if there had been a newer release, or if this was a known problem unless we bought a service contract.
Call me petty and vindictive and small, but I'd post the name of the company... if only I remembered it! Nixon was smart to actually write down his enemies list.
Well, even with one compressor, you need 14 electrically-controllable valves, which tend to be as expensive as 14 pumps. And pumps can be run in parallel more reliably than a compressor scheme. Even gravity feed requires valves, which are, again, expensive.
We're going to build one of these (most likely using small, cheap Microchip PIC microcontrollers) as soon as we can find cost-effective, food-quality pumps. Finding good, cheap, non-toxic pumps has been the showstopper. Peristaltic pumps with replaceable hose would be lovely.
Anyone know of a good source for pumps?
What kind of pumps did these guys use? We generally don't want to use windshield washer fluid pumps because they can contain toxins. We want all of the neuron-killing toxins to come out of the bottles themselves.
"It passed the first test--I didn't go blind." --Homer J. Simpson
Wow! After I posted the above message, an automated spider from Microsoft downloaded the referenced documentation for Frink. I'm sure their motives are noble, too.
Does anyone else have automated Microsoft spiders scanning their referenced websites? Or are they just afraid that Frink will 0wn them someday?
Interesting to note:
According to the timestamp above, I posted the message at 4:03 PM. The spider came through at 4:04 PM!
Somebody at Microsoft is using Perl's LWP::Simple module to do the grabbing. At least I have some respect for some of their techies now. But I thought.NET did everything better...
The IP resolves to proton.research.microsoft.com
Anyone heard the Barcelona song "Watching You Watching Us?":)
I've built translation facilities into my programming language, Frink
This section of the documentation also shows how to make your own back-and-forth text-corrupting translations, something like this:
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." -> Spanish -> Ingles
The alcohol is arranged but the meat is weak.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also Spider-Man canon that Peter Parker intentionally invented an adhesive with properties that it would be super-strong but would break down within about 24 hours. He also made a spraying device with a trigger on his palm. In the movie, Peter Parker presumably mutates so that he can shoot silk from his wrists. Thus, the movie doesn't follow the comic book canon and maybe it has entirely different properties, to be explored later.
OMG, now I'm going to be complaining about the "magic xylophone" next.
I have the book and it's entertaining. I would have preferred more equations and numbers and worked-out examples; the author seemed to be following Stephen Hawking's rule that every equation in a book cuts the readership in half.
This sounds like a reasonable prototyping/porting approach, really. I do much the same thing. For several years, I've been working on a programming language/calculating tool called Frink, and when I'm trying to write new code that may eventually be part of Frink, say, efficiently calculating the Riemann Zeta function, or factoring large numbers, I'll usually first write the prototype function in the Frink language itself, and get it working. It's much less effort, and usually far more legible, to write it in Frink, as opposed to, say, Java or C++. Later, I may port the algorithm to Java for some speed gain.
Frink and Matlab tend to try to preserve normal mathematical notation, which will make your mathematics people happy, and which be easier to read. When I need to refresh my memory about how an algorithm works, it's easier to go back and read the Frink code, not the Java code.
My advice is to try and maintain the algorithms both in Matlab format and C++ format, so that each accurately reflects what the other is doing. Yes, it's more work, but the code in one language will generally be a lot simpler than the other, so it shouldn't take much time. This will make it easier to prototype and test. The Matlab code will generally be more transparent for mathematical algorithms, and you'll be able to see, test, and fix bugs in the Matlab implementation more easily, whether you originally found the bug in the C++ version or the Matlab version. And you can share test suites and validate them against each other.
I don't agree with the people who think that the mathematicians can do all the high-level work in Matlab, and then just hand the work off to lower-level programmers to transliterate into C++. It's very common that an innocuous function in Matlab has huge amounts of very complex code behind it which you'll have to reproduce in C++. This often takes deep mathematical knowledge. For example, you might be using a Matlab function to factor numbers, but do you really know how to factor big numbers fast? Lots of work and user testing has been put into making sure the Matlab functions return the right results. Can you say the same about your C++ code?
There's lots of low-level understanding necessary for this transliteration, and of course the common annoyances where all of your expressions like 1/2 magically become zero when you port to C++!
" In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards." --Mark Twain
I want. Those figures include every piece of software that somebody copies, plays around with for 5 minutes and discards. If some 13-year-old downloads a copy of AutoCAD, tries to figure it out for 5 minutes, and then gives up and overwrites it with monkey pr0n, they count that a loss of $10,000. Or whatever it costs. This is ridiculous.
It's more likely that somebody who pirates Windows is using it, of course. Once you've installed it, you've made a decision you can't easily rescind. However, claiming that those people would have bought a new version of Windows XP that does nothing visibly new is ridiculous. If Joe Average User knew how little new functionality they'd get from upgrading from, say, Windows 2000 to Windows XP, there's very little chance they'd shell out the 150 bucks. There's nothing that Windows XP would buy me over the (legit) copy of Windows 2000 I have running on this old dog of a laptop.
In fact, "upgrading" to Windows XP Home would intentionally break my ability to connect to many networks! In order to increase their profits, Microsoft goes out of their way to cripple code that's been working for years, and damn the users! Who in their right mind would even consider paying Microsoft to intentionally screw them like that?
As a programmer myself, I fully believe that everyone should pay for the software they use. I just think that if people knew what they were really getting for their money, most would choose not to put another cent into Microsoft's pockets.
Reversible computation is quite real, but it doesn't work in the way you explained. You don't need to actually run the computation backwards. To make a long story short, the only time that a reversible computer needs to expend energy as heat is when it's producing output, or setting/clearing variables to a known state. And then, it only requires energy proportional to the number of bits being output, and the temperature. So if you're testing whether a billion-digit number is prime, the entire calculation can take zero energy, except for the one bit of output.
Unfortunately, to get truly reversible computing, the computation has to be done arbitrarily slowly.
If you don't have it, Feynman Lectures on Computation has one of the clearest discussions of reversible computation. Very highly recommended, and fun. We're 35+ years past the time when Feynman made these lectures, and we're still nowhere close to the limits or the technology that he described. Techniques for varying the power supply on the chip alone would very greatly reduce energy usage.
And who implanted my false memories of installing Windows 2.0 just to play Balance of Power? (I always lost in the 4th turn because I refused to concede any territory to the commies.) :)
"Hmmm... this new Windows 1.0 is not a complete abomination before the Lord. Let us hire a system administrator to manage it. Of course, he shall have to have no independent thought nor sense of shame."
Once you've looked at its template files, you'll see that it doesn't produce a single original thing. Nothing will surprise you. All of its "wit" and creativity was all written by people, with no more than a random noun-replacement here and a verb-replacement there.
I had an e-mail conversation with someone who knew the author of the software, and he listed the names of many of the human writers, which included rather well-known TV writers and the like. I'll try to dig it up.
Exercise: hack up a similar replacement in Perl in a couple hours.
There's AARON, which paints interesting pictures.
Interesting. It certainly changes the way that one would think about the series, and the way that scripts would be written. I know a lot of people who hated sci-fi, but would watch the shows for the interpersonal relationships, especially The Next Generation.
I'm not a fanboy (which makes it hard to explain why I own a copy of the Technical Manual, and I never watched Voyager or DS9, but I think that TNG was one of the best pieces of sci-fi and some of the best TV for its interesting ethical puzzles.
Enterprise was okay, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it. The moment I saw the "Red Skull" Nazis, I knew there was a shark with some serious airspace issues.
Efficient recording is more difficult because doing lossy compression is far more computationally-intensive than doing the corresponding decompression. It would likely take significantly more costly computing hardware to do recording and efficient compression. Not to mention the corresponding increase in expense of adding analog-to-digital converters, etc.
I think this was an intentional joke, but I'm not entirely sure.
.ie top-level domain is Ireland. Google, of course has domains registered in most countries, so there's a www.google.de and www.google.fr, and so on, with text of the site in that country's language, and the option of searching only that country.
Of course, the
The cool thing about www.google.ie is that if you misspell a word, instead of suggesting corrections, it heckles you in Gaelic.
- New features were added to Sobig and Send-Safe on approximately the same day.
- The version of Sobig compiled on May 30, 2003 added new encryption systems. The version of Send-safe compiled on the same day added new encryption systems.
- The versions of Send-Safe and Sobig added additional proxy types on approximately the same day.
- The port numbers used by Send-Safe and Sobig changed at approximately the same time.
- Spam gangs who are known to be Send-Safe customers used features of the new Sobig virus/proxy before they were even known to the world at large.
- The code scans show a very large number of duplicated opcodes between Send-Safe and Sobig. This is the smoking gun, potentially.
What I'd like to see is the decompilation of the matching areas in the code. If they're related to sending mail and/or exploiting proxies, and not library code or boilerplate, then it's very highly probable that the code writers are sharing code, and are either the same person, or working very closely together.Taken together, this is good evidence that further investigation is indeed warranted.
And here I was all impressed with our petty 2 gigabits/sec that we have for our internet-based television station that just launched today. Umm... can I get one of these installed in my studio? It would let more people see our staggering hotties. :)
Windows Media Player is the bane of my existence. Microsoft makes it impossible to embed in any browser but their own (it's been this way since 6.4.) And we just launched a 24-hour Internet-based television station today. I can play our stream in MPlayer or later versions of RealPlayer, but I'd love to have it embedded in the browser easier and more scriptable. How's Helix doing? Will that be a reasonable choice soon?
There's a "skip" button there at the bottom. Skip this step, and your extensions remain intact.
There is occasionally a problem with all extensions working correctly (thus the point of this step,) but I've seen that problem rarely lately.
As part of this, I found the movies with the greatest variance in ratings, and did some weighting to balance out movies that hadn't been rated much. Movies with the highest variance indicated the most disagreement as to whether people loved or hated the movie.
The movie with the biggest variance? (Assuming certain weighting, of course...) The Blair Witch Project. People either loved it or hated it. (I liked it, by the way.)
The top movies that divide us:
Actually, Mathematica does just that.
There are lots of ways even the world's most popular site can produce skewed statistics. It's always interesting to note that Google is far from being valid HTML. This can cause smaller, lighter browsers to choke, as anyone who has ever tried to write an HTML parser knows. The hard part is working around silly bugs in peoples' web pages. If all sites used valid HTML, the browser landscape could be far more diverse.
In a former consulting gig, the client had bought a component to connect to their LDAP server. I eventually discovered that it was corrupting memory badly, and called support. The head of their support department told me that although they gave free support for 30 days to anyone who downloaded the same software off the internet, we had to buy a support contract because we'd actually paid for the software. She even refused to tell me if there had been a newer release, or if this was a known problem unless we bought a service contract.
Call me petty and vindictive and small, but I'd post the name of the company... if only I remembered it! Nixon was smart to actually write down his enemies list.
We're going to build one of these (most likely using small, cheap Microchip PIC microcontrollers) as soon as we can find cost-effective, food-quality pumps. Finding good, cheap, non-toxic pumps has been the showstopper. Peristaltic pumps with replaceable hose would be lovely.
Anyone know of a good source for pumps?
What kind of pumps did these guys use? We generally don't want to use windshield washer fluid pumps because they can contain toxins. We want all of the neuron-killing toxins to come out of the bottles themselves.
"It passed the first test--I didn't go blind." --Homer J. Simpson
131.107.65.111 - - [03/Jul/2003:16:04:33 -0600] "GET /frinkdocs/ HTTP/1.0" 200 176844 "-" "lwp-trivial/1.36"
Does anyone else have automated Microsoft spiders scanning their referenced websites? Or are they just afraid that Frink will 0wn them someday?
Interesting to note:
Anyone heard the Barcelona song "Watching You Watching Us?" :)
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." -> Spanish -> Ingles
The alcohol is arranged but the meat is weak.