Not that anyone else rtfa, but defects per line of code seems like a bad measurement of how high quality your code is. More lines != more productive.
Then again I've been suspicious of hyped press releases claiming that the government has super efficient ways to write superior code, ever since that mars orbiter crashed due to mistaken units conversion....
Oh, just admit it - you don't care about political freedoms at all, you've just been trying for ages to get a comment modded +5 Insightful that had the phrase "BUSH IS A CUM GUZZLING FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT" in it....
The problem with your question is that "software for mathematics" can mean different things.
If you mean software that will help someone solve mathematical problems, then if you understand how to program then really any programming language will do. An interpreted language with lots of high-level libraries (like Python with NumPy and SciPy) is my personal preference. Also, one nice resource is this online integral doer. Especially good for quick and easy cheating on calculus homework!
If you don't understand how to program, then even Mathematica isn't going to teach you very much, because you won't be able to solve problems unless you've solved a problem exactly like it before. It's nice to think that you can help your kids learn by getting them some software, but it's not really teaching them the fundamentals. Knowing what a graph of z = yx + x + y looks like doesn't really make you any better at math.
Basically, if you already understand math and you just want to solve some problems using the knowledge you already have, then check out Python/NumPy or Octave. If you don't understand math and you want to learn it, software won't really help.
It's not exactly what you're asking for, but I would recommend learning a general-purpose programming language, perhaps an easy one like Python. I found programming to often be an invaluable skill from high school math through graduate math and engineering courses. There's plenty of books that teach programming and I've found that most people who understand programming don't need special "mathematics" software, they can just write their own little program most of the time.
p.s. I just filed my c.s. master's thesis today, woo hoo!
There's gotta be a better way to model what a user's password can be than just all combinations of only letters, or a list of common passwords plus substitutions. I think these are the only ones I've seen. But this doesn't really reflect that "fiqojeio" is a much less likely password than say "foo7bar+".
I think this sort of attack could get much stronger than people expect if there was some sort of Markov-process-ish way of generating plausible passwords. I mean, if Google can guess when you spelled something wrong, these programs should be able to figure out which strings are more likely to be passwords. Or maybe I'm overgeneralizing by how I pick my own passwords....
If they really want to stop bots then they could just have each player solve a
captcha every once in a while. Somewhat annoying, but you could always have non-captcha rooms and captcha rooms so you could decide how much annoyance you would trade away for the security of knowing you're not playing against bots.
If you have to use math to explain something to someone else, it is because you do not truly understand it at its fundamamental level.
I challenge you to explain why it is safe to send my credit card number to Amazon through untrusted servers without using mathematics. Or does nobody understand that at its fundamental level?
It's not very hard at all to figure out a numerical method for finding zeros of a polynomial. Here's a simple way to do it.
1. Let f'(x) be the derivative of f(x). 2. Recursively find all the zeros of f' and put them in a sorted list. 3. Add a really big negative number and a really big positive number to the list. 4. For each two consecutive numbers in the list, call them a and b. If f(a) and f(b) are either both positive or both negative, there's no zero between a and b. Otherwise there is exactly one zero between a and b. 5. If there's a zero between a and b, we can numerically approximate it by repeating: * pick c = (a+b)/2 * check f(c), pick d from {a,b} so that f(c) and f(d) are opposite signs * recurse with a,b = c,d
I waved my hands a little bit but not too much. I'll leave calculation of how big the "really big" numbers have to be and how well we need to approximate the zeros of the derivative as an exercise for the reader.;-)
There won't be any long term solution, even in the future when we can render on the server. The hacks will be a lot cooler, though, when people have to study image analysis in order to build an aimbot.;-)
Wow, the orbiter lasted even longer than the estimated lifetime. Is anyone else noticing the inevitable pattern? NASA launches some sort of mission, gets some positive press, then a few months later more great news! Turns out the mission is lasting even longer than the estimates!
Mission engineers have analysed power data for both Spirit and Opportunity which shows the vehicles are performing much better than they had expected....
But the mission team adds that its original estimates of Mars' environment and the rovers' performance were very conservative.
If I was smart enough to be a NASA engineer I think I'd figure out that people are much happier with your performance when you exceed expectations. It's not like anyone knows what to expect from a Mars orbiter anyways. Nobody looks at the mission statement before launch and says "400 days? Gee, for 3.3 billion I expected more in the range of 550-580 days."
Not anyone I know anyways. Maybe other people have more astrophysicist friends.
The usual progress seems to be new technical innovations start off getting sneakily shafted by the companies that are afraid of change, and then when other companies realize they could profit, they back the innovation. Like TiVo - early on DVR technology looked like it might be squashed by content owners' legal threats, but now that DirecTV and the cable companies have realized DVRs help them make money, there's some big legal guns on the side of the good guys. (As I like to think of it, at least.)
The problem here is that right now I get my internet access from... SBC, same as my phone company. In a better world the ISPs would have a financial incentive to back VoIP against the phone companies' objections, and there could be a huge corporate battle ending up in consumer benefit. Doesn't really work when the ISP and the phone company are one and the same.
I guess Comcast (or your local internet-via-cable company) could start bundling VoIP with their broadband access, competing with the DSL people who already offer those bundles. Makes sense to me, although I still wish the providers of the services were different groups....
can't think any more... brain hurts... color scheme too ugly...
I was roommates with Roger at summer camp way back in the day. His girlfriend would write him encoded letters and he'd figure out how to break the code. Silly me, I thought it was a waste of time....
In fact, his Web site lists many developments that have surfaced since the 2002 publication of his book, including:
Computing that has sped up a thousand fold.
Perhaps we should not believe a journalist who thinks computers are 1000 times faster than they were two years ago.
Re:Are we ready for Immortality?
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 4, Funny
No amount of water conservation will enable us to sustain global populations of 20 billion people.
From the article: "As the system is envisioned, Americans still will be able to mail their passport photographs to the State Department. The department will encode them into the passport chips and add them to a database."
So, you never even get personally face scanned. They put information into the chip that lets a face scanner automatically check if your face looks like the picture on the passport... which is exactly what the humans sitting at the desk do anyways under the current system. What is this adding to our security?
The basic theme is, America is supposed to be the home of everything great. Our vice president invented the internet for christ's sake. So why don't we have the best access for consumers?
"The U.S. now ranks eleventh internationally in residential "broadband" access. Using the FCC's silly 200-kilobit-per-second definition, some now say that 25 percent of American homes have broadband. But by the standards of Asia--where most citizens enjoy access speeds 10 times faster than our fastest links--U.S. residences have no broadband at all. U.S. businesses have far less broadband than South Korean residences. South Korea, for instance, has 40 times the per capita bandwidth of the U.S. Japan is close behind Korea, and countries from China to Italy are removing obstacles to the deployment of vDSL, fiber-to-the-home, and broadband wireless networks."
Gilder thinks our government's mucking things up: "The Telecom Act of 1996... turned into a million-word re-regulation of the industry. Regulatory actions by the FCC and the 51 state utility commissions greatly exacerbated the bad parts of the Act and distorted many of the good parts."
MCI has a new proposal: "A horizontal layers approach would supposedly be a radical shift from the "vertical silos" approach now used, where telephony, cable, and wireless, for example, are regulated based on historical industry definitions, not generic functional categories. The common denominator of Internet Protocol (IP)--supposedly the basis for all future communications networks--is said to necessitate the new layered regulatory approach."
Gilder doesn't think reregulation is going to help, and poses some interesting questions: "Should Google be able to leverage search into Gmail, or to supply content using its proprietary algorithms and its physical network of 100,000 servers? Shouldn't any rival search provider be able to feed off of Google's advanced infrastructure? After all, wouldn't it be impossible to recreate Google's massive web of global intelligence? Doesn't Google's superior infrastructure exhibit "market power"? Might Google actually evolve into a general provider of web-based information management services, rivaling the PC-based Microsoft, or should Google be "quarantined" as a search provider? Or maybe we should structurally separate Google into three companies: an infrastructure provider (its 100,000 networked servers plus algorithmic IP), a content/advertising company, and an information services company (Gmail plus future knowledge management applications). Surely FCC bureaucrats can make these easy distinctions and explain the resulting penalties to weary entrepreneurs who have just spent 10 years of their life building a new service that people really like."
His conclusion: "The real threat to monopolize and paralyze the Internet is not the communications industry and its suppliers, but the premature modularizers and commoditizers, the proponents of the dream of some final government solution for the uncertainties of all life and commerce."
Most bioinformatics software, Windows versions are barely supported. Blast, the SAM toolkit, Clustal_, belvu, BioPerl and BioPython, all of these work perfectly on Mac OS X. Among the more computational bioinformaticists it's very handy to be able to recompile the publicly available software for your needs. Also, it's very common in bioinformatics to have questions you need to answer that don't exactly fit the parameters of the software, so it's important to have an environment where it's easy to write scripts to analyze text files and control the (possibly distributed) running of algorithms. In short, the field of bioinformatics is a perfect fit for Unix-based OSes and a fairly godawful fit for Windows. I don't think this is pure slash-bias; I think most all bioinformatics researchers would agree.
This part slightly OT, but this reminds me how much better bioinformatics tools would be if there were more people who could contribute to the open source tools in the field. Often times a widely used program is released open source, but there are so few people who can code well and also take notice of bioinformatics tools that bugs don't get solved like they could. Somebody please make belvu stop crashing all the damn time, make phylip accept alternate data formats, et cetera... I've already got my advisor's software to debug.
If only my college campus could have wireless access comparable to Estonia's. And I go to Berkeley, you'd think it would look more like the future by now.
This is America, we're supposed to have the best of everything at the mere cost of selling our souls. So how come I don't get free wireless internet? How come we're 10th in percent of the population with broadband access? I blame monopolistic business practices. Wake me up when SBC finally opens their lines to competitors like they were allegedly forced to years ago.
Seems another ex-USAMOer reads slashdot. Were you around for "Advanced Scout"? IBM hadn't figured out that maybe a presentation on basketball wasn't the best thing to motivate a bunch of high school math nerds.
No, I'm not employed by either, happy to be in grad school for the time being where I can lounge around doing what we all love to do: reloading slashdot and getting first posts.
I think there's plenty of room for both groups to be successful. One thing Google and Akamai have in common is their desire to hire extremely skilled people instead of making it up with large numbers of code monkeys.
I assume this is true, at least, because at some point each of these companies have hired a friend of mine.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well jeez, they already link to tons of ways to protest.
I can't think of a company under 10,000 people who can't run off of 1 racks worth of servers.
;-)
Hmm, Google has under 10,000 people. But I don't think 1 rack would cut it.
You're assuming it actually gets released in 2007. ;-)
Not that anyone else rtfa, but defects per line of code seems like a bad measurement of how high quality your code is. More lines != more productive.
Then again I've been suspicious of hyped press releases claiming that the government has super efficient ways to write superior code, ever since that mars orbiter crashed due to mistaken units conversion....
Or to use the technical term, the snails slime to death.
If you mean software that will help someone solve mathematical problems, then if you understand how to program then really any programming language will do. An interpreted language with lots of high-level libraries (like Python with NumPy and SciPy) is my personal preference. Also, one nice resource is this online integral doer. Especially good for quick and easy cheating on calculus homework!
If you don't understand how to program, then even Mathematica isn't going to teach you very much, because you won't be able to solve problems unless you've solved a problem exactly like it before. It's nice to think that you can help your kids learn by getting them some software, but it's not really teaching them the fundamentals. Knowing what a graph of z = yx + x + y looks like doesn't really make you any better at math.
Basically, if you already understand math and you just want to solve some problems using the knowledge you already have, then check out Python/NumPy or Octave. If you don't understand math and you want to learn it, software won't really help.
It's not exactly what you're asking for, but I would recommend learning a general-purpose programming language, perhaps an easy one like Python. I found programming to often be an invaluable skill from high school math through graduate math and engineering courses. There's plenty of books that teach programming and I've found that most people who understand programming don't need special "mathematics" software, they can just write their own little program most of the time.
p.s. I just filed my c.s. master's thesis today, woo hoo!
There's gotta be a better way to model what a user's password can be than just all combinations of only letters, or a list of common passwords plus substitutions. I think these are the only ones I've seen. But this doesn't really reflect that "fiqojeio" is a much less likely password than say "foo7bar+".
I think this sort of attack could get much stronger than people expect if there was some sort of Markov-process-ish way of generating plausible passwords. I mean, if Google can guess when you spelled something wrong, these programs should be able to figure out which strings are more likely to be passwords. Or maybe I'm overgeneralizing by how I pick my own passwords....
If they really want to stop bots then they could just have each player solve a captcha every once in a while. Somewhat annoying, but you could always have non-captcha rooms and captcha rooms so you could decide how much annoyance you would trade away for the security of knowing you're not playing against bots.
I challenge you to explain why it is safe to send my credit card number to Amazon through untrusted servers without using mathematics. Or does nobody understand that at its fundamental level?
It's not very hard at all to figure out a numerical method for finding zeros of a polynomial. Here's a simple way to do it.
;-)
1. Let f'(x) be the derivative of f(x).
2. Recursively find all the zeros of f' and put them in a sorted list.
3. Add a really big negative number and a really big positive number to the list.
4. For each two consecutive numbers in the list, call them a and b. If f(a) and f(b) are either both positive or both negative, there's no zero between a and b. Otherwise there is exactly one zero between a and b.
5. If there's a zero between a and b, we can numerically approximate it by repeating:
* pick c = (a+b)/2
* check f(c), pick d from {a,b} so that f(c) and f(d) are opposite signs
* recurse with a,b = c,d
I waved my hands a little bit but not too much. I'll leave calculation of how big the "really big" numbers have to be and how well we need to approximate the zeros of the derivative as an exercise for the reader.
There won't be any long term solution, even in the future when we can render on the server. The hacks will be a lot cooler, though, when people have to study image analysis in order to build an aimbot. ;-)
Like the Mars rovers for example:
If I was smart enough to be a NASA engineer I think I'd figure out that people are much happier with your performance when you exceed expectations. It's not like anyone knows what to expect from a Mars orbiter anyways. Nobody looks at the mission statement before launch and says "400 days? Gee, for 3.3 billion I expected more in the range of 550-580 days."Not anyone I know anyways. Maybe other people have more astrophysicist friends.
The problem here is that right now I get my internet access from... SBC, same as my phone company. In a better world the ISPs would have a financial incentive to back VoIP against the phone companies' objections, and there could be a huge corporate battle ending up in consumer benefit. Doesn't really work when the ISP and the phone company are one and the same.
I guess Comcast (or your local internet-via-cable company) could start bundling VoIP with their broadband access, competing with the DSL people who already offer those bundles. Makes sense to me, although I still wish the providers of the services were different groups....
can't think any more... brain hurts... color scheme too ugly...
I was roommates with Roger at summer camp way back in the day. His girlfriend would write him encoded letters and he'd figure out how to break the code. Silly me, I thought it was a waste of time....
Linux. In my simplistic mind, the more a console looks like a PC the more possible it is to run Linux.
And maybe this will make it a lot easier to pirate the games! And by "pirate" I mean "make fair-use backups with a DVD burner" of course.
In fact, his Web site lists many developments that have surfaced since the 2002 publication of his book, including: Computing that has sped up a thousand fold.
Perhaps we should not believe a journalist who thinks computers are 1000 times faster than they were two years ago.
Yeah, and 640k should be enough for anybody....
From the article:
"As the system is envisioned, Americans still will be able to mail their passport photographs to the State Department. The department will encode them into the passport chips and add them to a database."
So, you never even get personally face scanned. They put information into the chip that lets a face scanner automatically check if your face looks like the picture on the passport... which is exactly what the humans sitting at the desk do anyways under the current system. What is this adding to our security?
Besides buzzwords.
Too long and dense, here's a summary.
The basic theme is, America is supposed to be the home of everything great. Our vice president invented the internet for christ's sake. So why don't we have the best access for consumers?
"The U.S. now ranks eleventh internationally in residential "broadband" access. Using the FCC's silly 200-kilobit-per-second definition, some now say that 25 percent of American homes have broadband. But by the standards of Asia--where most citizens enjoy access speeds 10 times faster than our fastest links--U.S. residences have no broadband at all. U.S. businesses have far less broadband than South Korean residences. South Korea, for instance, has 40 times the per capita bandwidth of the U.S. Japan is close behind Korea, and countries from China to Italy are removing obstacles to the deployment of vDSL, fiber-to-the-home, and broadband wireless networks."
Gilder thinks our government's mucking things up:
"The Telecom Act of 1996... turned into a million-word re-regulation of the industry. Regulatory actions by the FCC and the 51 state utility commissions greatly exacerbated the bad parts of the Act and distorted many of the good parts."
MCI has a new proposal: "A horizontal layers approach would supposedly be a radical shift from the "vertical silos" approach now used, where telephony, cable, and wireless, for example, are regulated based on historical industry definitions, not generic functional categories. The common denominator of Internet Protocol (IP)--supposedly the basis for all future communications networks--is said to necessitate the new layered regulatory approach."
Gilder doesn't think reregulation is going to help, and poses some interesting questions: "Should Google be able to leverage search into Gmail, or to supply content using its proprietary algorithms and its physical network of 100,000 servers? Shouldn't any rival search provider be able to feed off of Google's advanced infrastructure? After all, wouldn't it be impossible to recreate Google's massive web of global intelligence? Doesn't Google's superior infrastructure exhibit "market power"? Might Google actually evolve into a general provider of web-based information management services, rivaling the PC-based Microsoft, or should Google be "quarantined" as a search provider? Or maybe we should structurally separate Google into three companies: an infrastructure provider (its 100,000 networked servers plus algorithmic IP), a content/advertising company, and an information services company (Gmail plus future knowledge management applications). Surely FCC bureaucrats can make these easy distinctions and explain the resulting penalties to weary entrepreneurs who have just spent 10 years of their life building a new service that people really like."
His conclusion: "The real threat to monopolize and paralyze the Internet is not the communications industry and its suppliers, but the premature modularizers and commoditizers, the proponents of the dream of some final government solution for the uncertainties of all life and commerce."
Most bioinformatics software, Windows versions are barely supported. Blast, the SAM toolkit, Clustal_, belvu, BioPerl and BioPython, all of these work perfectly on Mac OS X. Among the more computational bioinformaticists it's very handy to be able to recompile the publicly available software for your needs. Also, it's very common in bioinformatics to have questions you need to answer that don't exactly fit the parameters of the software, so it's important to have an environment where it's easy to write scripts to analyze text files and control the (possibly distributed) running of algorithms. In short, the field of bioinformatics is a perfect fit for Unix-based OSes and a fairly godawful fit for Windows. I don't think this is pure slash-bias; I think most all bioinformatics researchers would agree.
This part slightly OT, but this reminds me how much better bioinformatics tools would be if there were more people who could contribute to the open source tools in the field. Often times a widely used program is released open source, but there are so few people who can code well and also take notice of bioinformatics tools that bugs don't get solved like they could. Somebody please make belvu stop crashing all the damn time, make phylip accept alternate data formats, et cetera... I've already got my advisor's software to debug.
If only my college campus could have wireless access comparable to Estonia's. And I go to Berkeley, you'd think it would look more like the future by now.
This is America, we're supposed to have the best of everything at the mere cost of selling our souls. So how come I don't get free wireless internet? How come we're 10th in percent of the population with broadband access? I blame monopolistic business practices. Wake me up when SBC finally opens their lines to competitors like they were allegedly forced to years ago.
Seems another ex-USAMOer reads slashdot. Were you around for "Advanced Scout"? IBM hadn't figured out that maybe a presentation on basketball wasn't the best thing to motivate a bunch of high school math nerds.
No, I'm not employed by either, happy to be in grad school for the time being where I can lounge around doing what we all love to do: reloading slashdot and getting first posts.
I think there's plenty of room for both groups to be successful. One thing Google and Akamai have in common is their desire to hire extremely skilled people instead of making it up with large numbers of code monkeys.
;-)
I assume this is true, at least, because at some point each of these companies have hired a friend of mine.