I know this is somewhat tangential to the issue being debated, but... I find it interesting that you define yourself according to your skin color. It is as if you are perceiving this conflict as between whites and browns rather than between employers and employees. Or maybe I am mistaken and you created this slashdot id long ago.. but my first sentence still holds true.
I found your login id interesting because for example, *I* would never think of defining myself as a Light Brown Guy, angry or not. LOL. My skin color has no part in how I define my identity, nor does my ordained nationality.
> Software engineering rarely has anything to do with complex math. (Computer Science occasionally does). If you can do simple algebra, you can probably write 90% of all end user applications out there. >
Not surprising at all when you consider that most software is just an automation of the thinking that we humans do for common daily activities. Such thinking involves processing of higher-level symbols by our brain. These symbols are high-level abstractions into "common-sense" symbols of the sensory inputs fed to our brain continuously.
Contrast this with the lower-level "non-symbolic" processing such as that involved in low-level vision or hearing in the brain.
Its not surprising that our brain cannot easily understand its own lower-level brain activities using its higher-level common-sense kind of thinking. Instead, quantitative thinking or "hard math" is needed to understand how vision or hearing works. Hence software to automate hearing or vision (or the inverse-vision problem which is graphics) is naturally mathematical or at least a mix of mathematics and common-sense symbolic processing.
> The only place I can think of that does involve some hard math, is in 3d engines for games,
Heh, actually 3D graphics is hardly hard math. Most of it is high-school calculus (linear algebra, polynomials, etc) which is simple once you spend enough time studying it. And most of 3D math is fairly easy to visualize.
The truly hard math areas are those are truly abstract in the sense that they are hard to visualize. There is no easy visual analogy for the concepts involved.
For example, try visualizing the formal definition of an abstract topological space or worse, an abstract manifold, hehe.
I am surprised no one has pointed out yet that the Slashdot Effect was anticipated by Niven long before the Internet came into being. Read Niven's 1973 short story Flash Crowd.
I haven't Niven's book, but the media scenes in the movie were apparently intended to purposefully resemble real-life mainstream American media.
Listen to the director Verhoven talking about the state, the media, and Chomsky's influence on him in the director's commentary in the Starship Troopers DVD.
> We need a GNU/Linux volunteer for a dangerous mission behind Redmond lines. Should you decide to accept this mission you will
* Quietly assinate Bill Gates
> The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.
Quantum Physics was not an easy discovery. It was the accumulation of a series of revolutionary theories by Planck first, then Bohr, then Heisenberg, Schrodinger, then Dirac and so on. *This* was big science and it was small-budget.
In what sense do you call this easy work?
Even if you had put hundreds of mediocre scientists to work in an organized big-budget project at the time of Max Planck, to experiment on and explain the ultraviolet catastrophe problem with Wein's law, they still wouldnt have come up with the revolutionary notion that energy is quantized. It required a theoretical genius to figure out this fundamental law of nature.
Even fields like computational biology and genome mapping and decoding still await brilliant or revolutionary discoveries and theories from individual geniuses, particularly in explaining gene interaction and expression.
Big budget science involving hundreds of medicore scientists cannot arrive at such theories easily. Millions on monkeys at typewriters cannot produce a Hamlet.
The same observation applies to the problem where traffic alternates between two routes rather than dividing itself evenly. That is elementary control theory. The problem is that the response has too high a gain factor, in effect the gain factor is infinite so instead of being shared across the routes the system is going into oscillation.
The control theory you refer to is for linear systems with feedback. Routing is a highly nonlinear system and the analysis is much harder. However the basic concept of high gain leading to oscillation is the roughly the same. Multicommodity flow theory researchers have been working on flow allocation and stability for years. Recently this work has caught the attention of the MPLS crowd in IETF.
You are right about IETF inertia though. I have given up on any bold progressive thinking in IETF for now with their attitudes such as "If it basically works, why fix it?"
of the main paper : http://www.cs.cornell.edu/timr/papers/indep_full.p df and others.
1. Their basic idea is to model decentralized routing as a Nash game and then worst-case compare the performance of this game with the best achievable by ANY algorithm, decentralized or not. This sort of comparison is common in the field of competitive analysis .
2. Assuming a hop latency to increase linearly with additional traffic on it, selfish routing causes the average packet latency to increase by no more than 4/3 of that caused by ideal optimal routing. This worst-case figure had been earlier called "the Price of Anarchy" by Papadimitriou, a famous researcher in algorithmic complexity who every CS student loves to hate:P
3. Similar Prices of Anarchy have been derived by them for when the hop latency increases nonlinearly with the additional traffic on it.
4. The worst case is always achievable with a simple network of 2 nodes connected by parallel links. This is the exactly the example used in networking courses and textbooks to illustrate the oscillation problem caused by selfish routing. This paper says that using this simple network as example is justified since the worst case can be always be analysed with it.
5. Instead of optimizing routing to try reach the minimum possible average latency, you can keep the routing selfish but double each link capacity and achieve the same result.
> Not only because of the raw computing power, but due to the parallellalism that is extracted by doing so and the loss of overhead introduced by running too many tasks on one server
without contradicting the laws of physics. Think of the nanobots as held so close together that they behave like the cells of a large insect. The physics of the whole swarm is like that of a single insect flying through the air.
Only the surface of the outermost layer of nanobots will be exposed to the sorrounding air and its viscous drag.
Dyson's argument assumes that the bots are far enough apart so that each bot has its entire surface exposed to the sorrounding medium.
The book is freely available, but not the code.
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Moonbird, thats true.
http://www.nr.com/otherstufftop.html links to some of their public domain code such as wavelet routines, but the rest of the code is licensed. I ought to correct my post as 'freely available code documentation'.
I had used the NRC routines about a decade ago (our univ department had licensed copies of it) and yes, they were not all gems of programming, but I could use them a basic recipes, starting points for brewing own code.
Numerical Recipes in C (NRC) library
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 5, Informative
http://www.library.cornell.edu/nr/bookcpdf.html
is a great example of long-lasting heavily reused library of frely available code. I have used the eigenvalue and matrix decomposition routines directly from NRC so many times I lost count.
> I read most of the summaries and a few of the responses in full. With all due respect, the typical high school newspaper editorial is more insightful than these. Some of these wouldn't make it beyond +3 here on Slashdot.
What makes you think that a score of +3 on slashdot is a true measure of insightfulness?
> It boiled down to the idea that the universe is soo huge that IF we're the only intelligent life in the universe, that there must some type of "god"
This is such an idiotic conclusion, I will be laughing all day. Why would there be a magical 'god' if we are the only intelligent life? Have you ever heard of the idea of scientific explanations?
Dear presumptuous dimwit, the earlier poster wasn't me.
By the way, I am a 35 year old Indian man. I suppose I would be knowing more about the place than you, haha. ROFL.
Have you even set foot in this country, that you feel yourself qualified enough to write satire about it??
How would you feel if I made idiotic sophomoric jokes based on the assumption that the typical american man is a fat-assed hillbilly who drinks beer all afternoon and goes to NASCAR rallies?
Wtf is that about the Kali cult and the British? Are you still living in the 19th century? That's like me saying, "Oh yeah, I know America, ok? You guys have the murderous KKK hanging black people from the trees and burning them, right? Pretty interesting bit of history." Get it?
I don't know whom to pity more.. you or the ignoramuses who moderated your ill-informed piece of dung that tried to pass for a joke.
Satire, my left foot. An intelligent satire is based on truth. I suppose you pea-brain cannot comprehend that in a million years. Believe me, you haven't the faintest clue what wit and satire is.
The fact that you chose it for your example belies ignorance on your part.
Perhaps you are confusing India to be a middle eastern country or similar to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suspect you have much reading and traveling to do to understand India. It is one of the most complex cultures that I have ever come across in this world which I am afraid is beyond the comprehension of your CNN/MTV-fed brainwashed little brain with its micro-second attention span.
> In fact I have found the big thinkers to be more useless than the humble trench soldier.
Speak for yourselves.
There are jobs that need big thinkers and obviously those are not to be found at your firm. Fine. This very friggin internet that you can't live without owes it existence to big thinkers much more than big tinkerers.
To say the least, it needed some careful big thinking to come up with the IP protocol and the end-to-end architecture. Ya think, your army of quick coders could architect the internet given a million years? One might as well hope for a million clattering monkeys to type out Hamlet.
> The discussions center around oral and written skills and personality.
I am surprised you don't discuss the candidate's technical achievements. Makes me wonder what kind of hiring committees have you been in.
I hope you are never on a committee to hire good mathematicians because a good mathematician is most likely to be an introverted type. With clueless committee members like you, extroverted mediocre mathematicians are bound to get hired.
By the way, there is whole psychological category of people out there who are neither shy/introverted nor extroverted but rather a vague mix of both. How do you evaluate these people in a single interview?
Fluidics for computation if I remember right was a hot topic in the 70s and upto mid-80s. Its pathetic how research fields become bandwagons on to which clueless young researchers jump to, just because it was advocated by some 'big shot' at Berkeley or MIT or a technology 'guru' from the Media Labs.
Anyways, the fluidics-for-computation fad died a quick death in the 80s but fluidics still remains important in the instrumentation field to say the least. Like for integrating tons of chemical sensors into an integrated circuit.
A whole bunch of alternative computation technologies are making a comeback or becoming new bandwagons now, though. Check this list of a whole bunch of alternate computing ideas:
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/20 02-April/000706.html
What Junky191 probably meant is TCP/IP as a protocol suite.
The entire suite of IP, UDP and TCP protocols were collectively named as TCP/IP by its designers. So when you say VOIP over TCP/IP, it just means that VOIP uses protocols in the TCP/IP suite as opposed to say X.25 or ATM or IBM SNA.
Slashdot Mirror
invented after the Magna Carta?
I know this is somewhat tangential to the issue being debated, but... I find it interesting that you define yourself according to your skin color. It is as if you are perceiving this conflict as between whites and browns rather than between employers and employees. Or maybe I am mistaken and you created this slashdot id long ago.. but my first sentence still holds true.
I found your login id interesting because for example, *I* would never think of defining myself as a Light Brown Guy, angry or not. LOL. My skin color has no part in how I define my identity, nor does my ordained nationality.
> Software engineering rarely has anything to do with complex math. (Computer Science occasionally does). If you can do simple algebra, you can probably write 90% of all end user applications out there.
>
Not surprising at all when you consider that most software is just an automation of the thinking that we humans do for common daily activities. Such thinking involves processing of higher-level symbols by our brain. These symbols are high-level abstractions into "common-sense" symbols of the sensory inputs fed to our brain continuously.
Contrast this with the lower-level "non-symbolic" processing such as that involved in low-level vision or hearing in the brain. Its not surprising that our brain cannot easily understand its own lower-level brain activities using its higher-level common-sense kind of thinking. Instead, quantitative thinking or "hard math" is needed to understand how vision or hearing works. Hence software to automate hearing or vision (or the inverse-vision problem which is graphics) is naturally mathematical or at least a mix of mathematics and common-sense symbolic processing.
> The only place I can think of that does involve some hard math, is in 3d engines for games,
Heh, actually 3D graphics is hardly hard math. Most of it is high-school calculus (linear algebra, polynomials, etc) which is simple once you spend enough time studying it. And most of 3D math is fairly easy to visualize. The truly hard math areas are those are truly abstract in the sense that they are hard to visualize. There is no easy visual analogy for the concepts involved. For example, try visualizing the formal definition of an abstract topological space or worse, an abstract manifold, hehe.
> ...that there are two things that drive techology forward: Porn and War.
In other words.. sex and violence.
I am surprised no one has pointed out yet that the Slashdot Effect was anticipated by Niven long before the Internet came into being. Read Niven's 1973 short story Flash Crowd.
I haven't Niven's book, but the media scenes in the movie were apparently intended to purposefully resemble real-life mainstream American media.
Listen to the director Verhoven talking about the state, the media, and Chomsky's influence on him in the director's commentary in the Starship Troopers DVD.
> At the end of the summer they are treated to a catered barbecue at Bill Gates's house and have a good shot at a full time job after graduation
flipping burgers at the barbecue
> We need a GNU/Linux volunteer for a dangerous mission behind Redmond lines. Should you decide to accept this mission you will * Quietly assinate Bill Gates
Not needed. Said target is already assinine.
> The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.
Quantum Physics was not an easy discovery. It was the accumulation of a series of revolutionary theories by Planck first, then Bohr, then Heisenberg, Schrodinger, then Dirac and so on. *This* was big science and it was small-budget.
In what sense do you call this easy work? Even if you had put hundreds of mediocre scientists to work in an organized big-budget project at the time of Max Planck, to experiment on and explain the ultraviolet catastrophe problem with Wein's law, they still wouldnt have come up with the revolutionary notion that energy is quantized. It required a theoretical genius to figure out this fundamental law of nature.
Even fields like computational biology and genome mapping and decoding still await brilliant or revolutionary discoveries and theories from individual geniuses, particularly in explaining gene interaction and expression. Big budget science involving hundreds of medicore scientists cannot arrive at such theories easily. Millions on monkeys at typewriters cannot produce a Hamlet.
The same observation applies to the problem where traffic alternates between two routes rather than dividing itself evenly. That is elementary control theory. The problem is that the response has too high a gain factor, in effect the gain factor is infinite so instead of being shared across the routes the system is going into oscillation.
The control theory you refer to is for linear systems with feedback. Routing is a highly nonlinear system and the analysis is much harder. However the basic concept of high gain leading to oscillation is the roughly the same. Multicommodity flow theory researchers have been working on flow allocation and stability for years. Recently this work has caught the attention of the MPLS crowd in IETF.
You are right about IETF inertia though. I have given up on any bold progressive thinking in IETF for now with their attitudes such as "If it basically works, why fix it?"
of the main paper : http://www.cs.cornell.edu/timr/papers/indep_full.p df and others.
:P
1. Their basic idea is to model decentralized routing as a Nash game and then worst-case compare the performance of this game with the best achievable by ANY algorithm, decentralized or not. This sort of comparison is common in the field of competitive analysis .
2. Assuming a hop latency to increase linearly with additional traffic on it, selfish routing causes the average packet latency to increase by no more than 4/3 of that caused by ideal optimal routing. This worst-case figure had been earlier called "the Price of Anarchy" by Papadimitriou, a famous researcher in algorithmic complexity who every CS student loves to hate
3. Similar Prices of Anarchy have been derived by them for when the hop latency increases nonlinearly with the additional traffic on it.
4. The worst case is always achievable with a simple network of 2 nodes connected by parallel links. This is the exactly the example used in networking courses and textbooks to illustrate the oscillation problem caused by selfish routing. This paper says that using this simple network as example is justified since the worst case can be always be analysed with it.
5. Instead of optimizing routing to try reach the minimum possible average latency, you can keep the routing selfish but double each link capacity and achieve the same result.
with Intel going backwards in clock speed and you will soon be surfing punchcard pron on an ENIAC.
> Not only because of the raw computing power, but due to the parallellalism that is extracted by doing so and the loss of overhead introduced by running too many tasks on one server
President Bush reads slashdot?
without contradicting the laws of physics. Think of the nanobots as held so close together that they behave like the cells of a large insect. The physics of the whole swarm is like that of a single insect flying through the air.
Only the surface of the outermost layer of nanobots will be exposed to the sorrounding air and its viscous drag.
Dyson's argument assumes that the bots are far enough apart so that each bot has its entire surface exposed to the sorrounding medium.
Moonbird, thats true.
http://www.nr.com/otherstufftop.html links to some of their public domain code such as wavelet routines, but the rest of the code is licensed. I ought to correct my post as 'freely available code documentation'.
I had used the NRC routines about a decade ago (our univ department had licensed copies of it) and yes, they were not all gems of programming, but I could use them a basic recipes, starting points for brewing own code.
http://www.library.cornell.edu/nr/bookcpdf.html
is a great example of long-lasting heavily reused library of frely available code. I have used the eigenvalue and matrix decomposition routines directly from NRC so many times I lost count.
Transmit the message "Is O.J guilty?" If the answer comes back "Yes", that's a sign of intelligent life.
> I read most of the summaries and a few of the responses in full. With all due respect, the typical high school newspaper editorial is more insightful than these. Some of these wouldn't make it beyond +3 here on Slashdot.
What makes you think that a score of +3 on slashdot is a true measure of insightfulness?
> It boiled down to the idea that the universe is soo huge that IF we're the only intelligent life in the universe, that there must some type of "god"
This is such an idiotic conclusion, I will be laughing all day. Why would there be a magical 'god' if we are the only intelligent life? Have you ever heard of the idea of scientific explanations?
Dear presumptuous dimwit, the earlier poster wasn't me.
By the way, I am a 35 year old Indian man. I suppose I would be knowing more about the place than you, haha. ROFL. Have you even set foot in this country, that you feel yourself qualified enough to write satire about it??
How would you feel if I made idiotic sophomoric jokes based on the assumption that the typical american man is a fat-assed hillbilly who drinks beer all afternoon and goes to NASCAR rallies?
Wtf is that about the Kali cult and the British? Are you still living in the 19th century? That's like me saying, "Oh yeah, I know America, ok? You guys have the murderous KKK hanging black people from the trees and burning them, right? Pretty interesting bit of history." Get it?
I don't know whom to pity more.. you or the ignoramuses who moderated your ill-informed piece of dung that tried to pass for a joke.
Satire, my left foot. An intelligent satire is based on truth. I suppose you pea-brain cannot comprehend that in a million years. Believe me, you haven't the faintest clue what wit and satire is.
Ha-beeb is not a typical indian name.
The fact that you chose it for your example belies ignorance on your part.
Perhaps you are confusing India to be a middle eastern country or similar to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suspect you have much reading and traveling to do to understand India. It is one of the most complex cultures that I have ever come across in this world which I am afraid is beyond the comprehension of your CNN/MTV-fed brainwashed little brain with its micro-second attention span.
> In fact I have found the big thinkers to be more useless than the humble trench soldier.
Speak for yourselves. There are jobs that need big thinkers and obviously those are not to be found at your firm. Fine. This very friggin internet that you can't live without owes it existence to big thinkers much more than big tinkerers.
To say the least, it needed some careful big thinking to come up with the IP protocol and the end-to-end architecture. Ya think, your army of quick coders could architect the internet given a million years? One might as well hope for a million clattering monkeys to type out Hamlet.
> The discussions center around oral and written skills and personality.
I am surprised you don't discuss the candidate's technical achievements. Makes me wonder what kind of hiring committees have you been in.
I hope you are never on a committee to hire good mathematicians because a good mathematician is most likely to be an introverted type. With clueless committee members like you, extroverted mediocre mathematicians are bound to get hired.
By the way, there is whole psychological category of people out there who are neither shy/introverted nor extroverted but rather a vague mix of both. How do you evaluate these people in a single interview?
Fluidics for computation if I remember right was a hot topic in the 70s and upto mid-80s. Its pathetic how research fields become bandwagons on to which clueless young researchers jump to, just because it was advocated by some 'big shot' at Berkeley or MIT or a technology 'guru' from the Media Labs. Anyways, the fluidics-for-computation fad died a quick death in the 80s but fluidics still remains important in the instrumentation field to say the least. Like for integrating tons of chemical sensors into an integrated circuit. A whole bunch of alternative computation technologies are making a comeback or becoming new bandwagons now, though. Check this list of a whole bunch of alternate computing ideas: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/20 02-April/000706.html
What Junky191 probably meant is TCP/IP as a protocol suite.
The entire suite of IP, UDP and TCP protocols were collectively named as TCP/IP by its designers. So when you say VOIP over TCP/IP, it just means that VOIP uses protocols in the TCP/IP suite as opposed to say X.25 or ATM or IBM SNA.