I guess you skipped all the testimonials in that article.
It's been easy to find devastating critiques of Numerical Recipes for about as long as there have been search engines, and hell, I remember seeing flameage about it on Usenet back when it was new.
It's also real easy to get bitten by NR when you're green and someone who should know better shoves a copy at you and tells you to go code something. I suppose that's not incompetence on the victim's part, strictly speaking.
I'd tell my favorite NR-correlated-with-incompetence horror story here but it is completely unrelated to the point I'm making.
NR is fine for a lot of things, and it's not bad for a survey text (it's very accessible), but if you actually use the code in it, be sure that it is more important that your results are plausible than that they are correct. That's a tradeoff a lot of people make all the time...
There is a class of geometric construction problems that are impossible with a divider (compass) and straight edge. Basically, if you can do it with a compass and straight edge, you can do it with Euclid's axioms, so this kind of construction is a sort of analog approach to symbolic proofs.
One of these problems is trisecting an angle, that is, dividing an angle into three equal angles. The picture you just posted has nothing to do with this problem.
Another is "squaring a circle", that is, constructing a square that has the same area as a given circle.
People have wasted their lives trying to do these things.
Yeah, CAD programs in general (Solidworks or even better, Vellum) are great for that kind of geometric noodling.
I've wondered from time to time if funky stuff like Dr. Genius (formerly Dr Geo) would prove useful for that kind of problem but I never had the time to spend playing with Dr Geo.
(BTW, the CompSci deptartment at the same school thought that just one of the two-week assignments in this undergrad Nuke class was a semester long graduate level project for a CompSci student. Whatever.).
There are a few things going on here:
First, (some) nuke people have this nuke-navy dicksizing legacy of thinking it's cool to be unreasonable with anyone they have power over. "To Hell and Back" indeed. Your dad sounds like an asshole.
Second, I have a hard time believing anyone's semester long graduate level project was really equivalent to a two-week assignment---maybe the code produced was equivalent, but I'd expect the research and write-up to be much more extensive. These latter items take a lot of time and effort to do right. In other words, I have no trouble imagining taking something your dad would teach in two weeks in a survey course and making it a subject for detailed semester-long project for graduate students.
That said, I've heard horror stories of lax standards in comp sci departments too.
You're talking about two different classes of software: "numerical linear algebra packages" and "computer algebra systems". Maple and Mathematica are the latter, Matlab is the former. I don't know about Magma.
Hardcore numerical programmers use LINPACK/LAPACK with platform-optimized BLAS (this latter is often commercial, or at least proprietary to the platform vendor) directly from Fortran. They usually use modern commercial Fortran 90 or Fortran 95 compilers, too.
On numerical linear algebra stuff where you aren't going to recruit and pay a Fortran programmer with a PhD in applied mathematics, most sane people use Matlab or GNU Octave or one of the many other Matlab clones. A lot of people like Numerical Python, if I had a big new project to do, I'd seriously consider it.
Yes, crazy "researchers" who don't want to learn Fortran and think Matlab is too slow or too expensive will write numerical code in C++. Some of them do fine work, too.
Excel and other spreadsheets are fine for small bits of numerical analysis, too. Don't turn up your nose at 'em, you can email your boss your whole analysis and he doesn't have to learn Matlab to do anything with it. Excel is also slowly replacing Qbasic as the computing lingua franca of the Amateur Radio/hobbyist-electronics community.
The class of people who just doodle out the singular integral equations for the airfoil design they're brainstorming seem to like Mathematica a lot. I wish I were more like that. Maxima is seeing a renaissance now that its licensing and distribution issues are cleared up (it's GPL now). I should check it out. There's also GNU (Emacs) Calc, which I use regularly as an RPN desktop calculator. It is actually much more powerful than that and will do all kinds of HP-calculator-style graphing and computer algebra with a liberal sprinkling of Mathematica-style syntax, but I don't use those features much, because they're wicked slow.
The U.S. has no nuclear (nook-you-ler, if you're a C-grade fratboy from Texas) rocket program.
You misspelled "peanut-farmer from Georgia."
Mr. Carter has a degree in nuclear engineering from the Naval Academy; he had less excuse (perhaps more reason, politics are funny) for consistently and notoriously mispronouncing "nuclear" than Mr. Bush.
try the Dell Precision "m" series laptops. My m40 has a Quadro2 GO; the current model is the m50 with a Quadro4 500 GoGL. I'd expect a new model this fall sometime. They're expensive.
Industry types are always telling us that they need more experimentalists. There is a big shortage of experimentalists right now. If you know how to build and run an experiment, you're golden.
You know, I almost always find myself at least sympathizing with rms, and I even mostly agree with his arguments in this piece, but I often don't understand his priorities at all.
I mean, did the world really need another 5,000 words on why the GNU project should get more credit for the Linux phenomenon, why Linux should be more of a vehicle for Stallman's goals? Did it? rms obviously thought so.
The truth is the reason behiond the success of traditional advertisement is that its very expensive. That guarantees that the customer will remember the few brands that manage to get a goot marketing campaign.
You have the causality backwards. The reason traditional advertising is expensive is because it's effective.
and presumably, from the web site , they've gone to significant trouble to build a camera that produces the sort of images cinematographers expect, can mount the lenses they use in the film industry, can be easily transported to a film location, etc.
I used to work in a lab that used a camera that could shoot a sequence of images at 2 million frames/second on a strip of 35mm film. At the time these cost over a quarter million dollars. They're probably even more expensive now. Neat stuff, I designed the q-switching system to pulse a ruby laser to provide illumination for it. Never got to touch the camera, they sent a technician off for a week of training to run it and basically, no one else went near it.
Lots of people doing high-speed technical and scientific photography have switched to digital systems where smaller frame rates or less resolution will still do the job. There are still plenty of applications for film in high-speed photography though.
Do you have some basis for that assertion? In Sleepycat's case, there is a three-to-one ratio in favor of licensing over support revenue.
Hello Tim!
Remember, though, as stated in the article, much of sleepycat's position in their proprietary licensing market comes from their open-source software strategy.
It does look like dual-license strategies do significantly better than the "write free software and charge for services" model, doesn't it?
I wonder how well sleepycat does compared to other niche "embedded" database vendors like Polyhedra or Solid.
foog
Re:There are lots of profitable open source compan
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, my friend, I think you're reaching. First you said that the annually doubling losses of Cygnus were the result of services bookkeeping practices.
I said that the fact that they posted a loss could have been the result of bookkeeping practices in privately held services companies.
I checked and found out that an ever-increasing ratio of loss to revenue is not on anyone's playbook, professional services or otherwise.
Well, yes, there is that. Furthermore, you could have just pointed out that their losses were rather high.
Then it was that their spiraling losses were to expand their operations. But at the rate they were "expanding", they'd have been in chapter eleven within eighteen months without new funding.
That would seem to follow, wouldn't it? However, Cygnus was in business for about 10 years---I speculate they'd shifted gears to get-big-fast for the dotcom era. There are other ways that investors and potential buyers expect a company to grow that can wreck havoc with a professional services company's margins. I'd bet Cygnus was adding management layers and headcount to show capacity. Further speculation is probably pointless, since we all know what happened, but I imagine they would have had massive layoffs and some serious restructuring in the last year or so if they hadn't sold.
I think a better way to frame your argument is that not only could Cygnus not afford to internally fund (that is, without a paying client) significant R&D on free software projects, but, based on their losses in the years preceding their acquisition by Red Hat, after nearly ten years in business, they couldn't internally fund the expansion necessary to sell the company in 1999.
Finally, you said that they were a success because they managed to get bought out during the Linux bubble. That's like saying VA Linux was a success because Larry Augustin got rich off it. Cygnus is now part of another unprofitable open source software company, Red Hat, which seems like a more accurate measure of their success.
Red Hat is scraping the edge of profitability now---wasn't it big news a while back when they posted a loss that rounded down to zero per share? The optimist in me thinks they'll eventually be a modestly profitable, stable $100 million dollar company. About half of their revenues come from their professional services, by the way. Of course, the optimist in me thinks that Amazon will someday be profitable, too.
Doesn't VA Linux build computers or something?
The fact is that Cygnus was not profitable. Profitability has a specific meaning, and losing more and more money every year doesn't fit it, even if some of the people at Cygnus managed to make personal fortunes from a bubble-era rescue mission.
The fact is that we only have data on Cygnus for fiscal 1996 through fiscal 1998. I have not disputed the fact that they posted losses during that time.
foog
Re:There are lots of profitable open source compan
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
Any idea what would cause this disparity in the rate of increase of loss and revenue? It seems to me it might well indicate an actual rather than a paper loss.
I'd guess they were expanding more and more aggressively to increase revenues and headcount in order to be better positioned to sell the company. Almost all their expense had to be their payroll. Hiring people has a lot of up-front costs.
Note that Cygnus succeeded in executing their exit strategy, and sold to Red Hat in January 2000 for over 12 million shares of Red Hat common stock. Although this acquisition was reported as being valued at $674 million, six months later Red Hat was trading at around $20/share. That's still about $240 million for a professional services company with $22 million in revenues. Today that stock is worth a more realistic but still very high $48 million.
On this basis, I rank Cygnus as a successful "open source" company.
foog
Re:There are lots of profitable open source compan
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
It's a matter of public record that Cygnus was a money-losing business. Take a look at the Red Hat quarterly statement [sec.gov] after the acquisition. The so-called lameness filter insists that it contains too many "junk characters", so I can't give you the table here. Search down for "3. BUSINESS COMBINATION (CONTINUED)". Cygnus lost $1.5M in fiscal 1996, $2.9M in 1997, and $5.8M in 1998. Its losses were nearly doubling every year. It was headed for yet another record loss when it was bought in 1999.
You're talking about a different industry---remember, open-source software companies are best understood as professional services companies.
Most privately held professional services companies roll a loss forward every year in order to minimize their tax burden. Occasionally, if they're positioning themselves to be sold, they will make a token profit. They create a loss or minimal profit on paper by cashing out bonuses, paying bills in advance, deferring billing for their services until the next fiscal year, etc.
It is more relevant that during the period you describe, Cygnus' revenues grew from $12.5M in 1996 to $17.5M in 1997, and to $22.2M in 1998.
As an aside, I suspect that most open-source software companies are being funded with the expectation that they will perform like proprietary software companies---and that the management the VCs install in these companies probably all come from proprietary software backgrounds instead of professional services backgrounds. That's a recipe for failure in the grand dotcom style.
A rule of thumb you might find helpful: When software companies are profitable, they don't remain private. There's no good reason not to take the IPO route and make the big bucks if you're profitable.
Again, your rule of thumb does not necessarily hold in the case of services businesses---most professional services companies are not valued at significantly more than their revenues, so even if Cygnus were highly profitable, it would only have been valued at $20 million or so by a sane market. That's enough to make some of the principals fairly rich and give the rank and file a nice windfall, but hardly "the big bucks"---I'd bet the yearly salary and bonus for a typical member of upper management at Cygnus would have been substantially larger than the yearly interest on say, two million dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you skipped all the testimonials in that article.
It's been easy to find devastating critiques of Numerical Recipes for about as long as there have been search engines, and hell, I remember seeing flameage about it on Usenet back when it was new.
It's also real easy to get bitten by NR when you're green and someone who should know better shoves a copy at you and tells you to go code something. I suppose that's not incompetence on the victim's part, strictly speaking.
I'd tell my favorite NR-correlated-with-incompetence horror story here but it is completely unrelated to the point I'm making.
NR is fine for a lot of things, and it's not bad for a survey text (it's very accessible), but if you actually use the code in it, be sure that it is more important that your results are plausible than that they are correct. That's a tradeoff a lot of people make all the time...
atlas looks seriously cool. thanks.
There is a class of geometric construction problems that are impossible with a divider (compass) and straight edge. Basically, if you can do it with a compass and straight edge, you can do it with Euclid's axioms, so this kind of construction is a sort of analog approach to symbolic proofs.
One of these problems is trisecting an angle, that is, dividing an angle into three equal angles. The picture you just posted has nothing to do with this problem.
Another is "squaring a circle", that is, constructing a square that has the same area as a given circle.
People have wasted their lives trying to do these things.
Here's a link for the curious.
Squaring the Circle
oof. here's the link:
Numerical Recipes -- not so good
using Numerical Recipes, especially in this age of the web, is a sign of incompetence.
t ra n/numrec.html
http://www.colorado.edu/ITS/docs/scientific/for
Yeah, CAD programs in general (Solidworks or even better, Vellum) are great for that kind of geometric noodling.
I've wondered from time to time if funky stuff like Dr. Genius (formerly Dr Geo) would prove useful for that kind of problem but I never had the time to spend playing with Dr Geo.
oh yeah, almost forgot: friends don't let friends use mathcad.
There are a few things going on here:
First, (some) nuke people have this nuke-navy dicksizing legacy of thinking it's cool to be unreasonable with anyone they have power over. "To Hell and Back" indeed. Your dad sounds like an asshole.
Second, I have a hard time believing anyone's semester long graduate level project was really equivalent to a two-week assignment---maybe the code produced was equivalent, but I'd expect the research and write-up to be much more extensive. These latter items take a lot of time and effort to do right. In other words, I have no trouble imagining taking something your dad would teach in two weeks in a survey course and making it a subject for detailed semester-long project for graduate students.
That said, I've heard horror stories of lax standards in comp sci departments too.
You're talking about two different classes of software: "numerical linear algebra packages" and "computer algebra systems". Maple and Mathematica are the latter, Matlab is the former. I don't know about Magma.
Hardcore numerical programmers use LINPACK/LAPACK with platform-optimized BLAS (this latter is often commercial, or at least proprietary to the platform vendor) directly from Fortran. They usually use modern commercial Fortran 90 or Fortran 95 compilers, too.
On numerical linear algebra stuff where you aren't going to recruit and pay a Fortran programmer with a PhD in applied mathematics, most sane people use Matlab or GNU Octave or one of the many other Matlab clones. A lot of people like Numerical Python, if I had a big new project to do, I'd seriously consider it.
Yes, crazy "researchers" who don't want to learn Fortran and think Matlab is too slow or too expensive will write numerical code in C++. Some of them do fine work, too.
Excel and other spreadsheets are fine for small bits of numerical analysis, too. Don't turn up your nose at 'em, you can email your boss your whole analysis and he doesn't have to learn Matlab to do anything with it. Excel is also slowly replacing Qbasic as the computing lingua franca of the Amateur Radio/hobbyist-electronics community.
The class of people who just doodle out the singular integral equations for the airfoil design they're brainstorming seem to like Mathematica a lot. I wish I were more like that. Maxima is seeing a renaissance now that its licensing and distribution issues are cleared up (it's GPL now). I should check it out. There's also GNU (Emacs) Calc, which I use regularly as an RPN desktop calculator. It is actually much more powerful than that and will do all kinds of HP-calculator-style graphing and computer algebra with a liberal sprinkling of Mathematica-style syntax, but I don't use those features much, because they're wicked slow.
The U.S. has no nuclear (nook-you-ler, if you're a C-grade fratboy from Texas) rocket program.
You misspelled "peanut-farmer from Georgia."
Mr. Carter has a degree in nuclear engineering from the Naval Academy; he had less excuse (perhaps more reason, politics are funny) for consistently and notoriously mispronouncing "nuclear" than Mr. Bush.
foog
try the Dell Precision "m" series laptops.
My m40 has a Quadro2 GO; the current model is the m50 with a Quadro4 500 GoGL. I'd expect a new model this fall sometime.
They're expensive.
foog
google on "liquid metal embrittlement" for the real engineering issues involved in using mercury or gallium as a coolant.
foog
I wouldn't wanna have one in my basement.
a lk /sld065.htm
F /guest_benchmark.pdf, but the industrial design is gorgeous.
http://research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/crayt
No, they belong in the living room...
They're not that fast anymore: http://esc.dl.ac.uk/Cdrom-s/Summer_School_2000/PD
foog
The Apple meta-keys were introduced with the Apple IIe, not the II or II+.
foog
Utah beer? For the love of god Max, you live in Oregon. You should know better.
foog
Industry types are always telling us that they need more experimentalists. There is a big shortage of experimentalists right now. If you know how to build and run an experiment, you're golden.
What industry is this?
foog
You know, I almost always find myself at least sympathizing with rms, and I even mostly agree with his arguments in this piece, but I often don't understand his priorities at all.
I mean, did the world really need another 5,000 words on why the GNU project should get more credit for the Linux phenomenon, why Linux should be more of a vehicle for Stallman's goals? Did it? rms obviously thought so.
foog
The truth is the reason behiond the success of traditional advertisement is that its very expensive. That guarantees that the customer will remember the few brands that manage to get a goot marketing campaign.
You have the causality backwards. The reason traditional advertising is expensive is because it's effective.
foog
and presumably, from the web site , they've gone to significant trouble to build a camera that produces the sort of images cinematographers expect, can mount the lenses they use in the film industry, can be easily transported to a film location, etc.
I used to work in a lab that used a camera that could shoot a sequence of images at 2 million frames/second on a strip of 35mm film. At the time these cost over a quarter million dollars. They're probably even more expensive now. Neat stuff, I designed the q-switching system to pulse a ruby laser to provide illumination for it. Never got to touch the camera, they sent a technician off for a week of training to run it and basically, no one else went near it.
Lots of people doing high-speed technical and scientific photography have switched to digital systems where smaller frame rates or less resolution will still do the job. There are still plenty of applications for film in high-speed photography though.
foog
Alicia,
there are over a thousand known titles for the Atari 2600.
http://www.xocolatl.com/carts/
Brent
The U.S. Army's Land Warrior wearable computer project uses voice-over-ip over wireless ethernet for its primary voice radio capability.
Do you have some basis for that assertion? In Sleepycat's case, there is a three-to-one ratio in favor of licensing over support revenue.
Hello Tim!
Remember, though, as stated in the article, much of sleepycat's position in their proprietary licensing market comes from their open-source software strategy.
It does look like dual-license strategies do significantly better than the "write free software and charge for services" model, doesn't it?
I wonder how well sleepycat does compared to other niche "embedded" database vendors like Polyhedra or Solid.
foog
Sorry, my friend, I think you're reaching. First you said that the annually doubling losses of Cygnus were the result of services bookkeeping practices.
I said that the fact that they posted a loss could have been the result of bookkeeping practices in privately held services companies.
I checked and found out that an ever-increasing ratio of loss to revenue is not on anyone's playbook, professional services or otherwise.
Well, yes, there is that. Furthermore, you could have just pointed out that their losses were rather high.
Then it was that their spiraling losses were to expand their operations. But at the rate they were "expanding", they'd have been in chapter eleven within eighteen months without new funding.
That would seem to follow, wouldn't it? However, Cygnus was in business for about 10 years---I speculate they'd shifted gears to get-big-fast for the dotcom era. There are other ways that investors and potential buyers expect a company to grow that can wreck havoc with a professional services company's margins. I'd bet Cygnus was adding management layers and headcount to show capacity. Further speculation is probably pointless, since we all know what happened, but I imagine they would have had massive layoffs and some serious restructuring in the last year or so if they hadn't sold.
I think a better way to frame your argument is that not only could Cygnus not afford to internally fund (that is, without a paying client) significant R&D on free software projects, but, based on their losses in the years preceding their acquisition by Red Hat, after nearly ten years in business, they couldn't internally fund the expansion necessary to sell the company in 1999.
Finally, you said that they were a success because they managed to get bought out during the Linux bubble. That's like saying VA Linux was a success because Larry Augustin got rich off it. Cygnus is now part of another unprofitable open source software company, Red Hat, which seems like a more accurate measure of their success.
Red Hat is scraping the edge of profitability now---wasn't it big news a while back when they posted a loss that rounded down to zero per share? The optimist in me thinks they'll eventually be a modestly profitable, stable $100 million dollar company. About half of their revenues come from their professional services, by the way. Of course, the optimist in me thinks that Amazon will someday be profitable, too.
Doesn't VA Linux build computers or something?
The fact is that Cygnus was not profitable. Profitability has a specific meaning, and losing more and more money every year doesn't fit it, even if some of the people at Cygnus managed to make personal fortunes from a bubble-era rescue mission.
The fact is that we only have data on Cygnus for fiscal 1996 through fiscal 1998. I have not disputed the fact that they posted losses during that time.
foog
Any idea what would cause this disparity in the rate of increase of loss and revenue? It seems to me it might well indicate an actual rather than a paper loss.
I'd guess they were expanding more and more aggressively to increase revenues and headcount in order to be better positioned to sell the company. Almost all their expense had to be their payroll. Hiring people has a lot of up-front costs.
Note that Cygnus succeeded in executing their exit strategy, and sold to Red Hat in January 2000 for over 12 million shares of Red Hat common stock. Although this acquisition was reported as being valued at $674 million, six months later Red Hat was trading at around $20/share. That's still about $240 million for a professional services company with $22 million in revenues. Today that stock is worth a more realistic but still very high $48 million.
On this basis, I rank Cygnus as a successful "open source" company.
foog
You're talking about a different industry---remember, open-source software companies are best understood as professional services companies.
Most privately held professional services companies roll a loss forward every year in order to minimize their tax burden. Occasionally, if they're positioning themselves to be sold, they will make a token profit. They create a loss or minimal profit on paper by cashing out bonuses, paying bills in advance, deferring billing for their services until the next fiscal year, etc.
It is more relevant that during the period you describe, Cygnus' revenues grew from $12.5M in 1996 to $17.5M in 1997, and to $22.2M in 1998.
As an aside, I suspect that most open-source software companies are being funded with the expectation that they will perform like proprietary software companies---and that the management the VCs install in these companies probably all come from proprietary software backgrounds instead of professional services backgrounds. That's a recipe for failure in the grand dotcom style.
Again, your rule of thumb does not necessarily hold in the case of services businesses---most professional services companies are not valued at significantly more than their revenues, so even if Cygnus were highly profitable, it would only have been valued at $20 million or so by a sane market. That's enough to make some of the principals fairly rich and give the rank and file a nice windfall, but hardly "the big bucks"---I'd bet the yearly salary and bonus for a typical member of upper management at Cygnus would have been substantially larger than the yearly interest on say, two million dollars.
foog