I'm sure there are people who will make good use of this. But I am reminded of a piece of software that TSR produced in the 80s called the Dungeon Master's Familiar or some such thing. The idea is that you could load the payer's, henchmen, NPC's and monster's statistics into the computer, which would then perform all of the combat dice rolling and computations. How I longed for the program! How I fantasized about how thrilling my games would be when I was freed from the tedium of dice rolling, hit point tallying and round management! How disappointed I was when I actually got the game, lugged my computer to card table where we played and discovered that that the computer actually caused more administrative problems then it solved and worse, became the center of the game, utterly shattering the story-telling element.
By contrast the best D&D that I played in, I admit to being a fairly mediocre DM, was in a group that played very fast loose with the rules, w/o miniatures, w/o maps. Just you, the DM and your imagination.
I remember debugging a Perl script that I was supporting. To paraphrase Truman Capote, I spent one day removing a backslash and the entire next day putting it back in. I never did fix the problem.
I must say I detest Rumsfeld and his complete and intentional lack of conventional ethics. However, this statement, while highly abstract, makes sense.
I have a lunch box there is a tuna fish sandwich and something spongy in a brown paper wrapper. I like tuna fish, that is a 'known' and i don't have to worry about it.
I don't know what's in the brown paper wrapper but I know better then to eat it. That's a 'known unknown' and since I'm not going to eat it, I don't have to worry about that either.
What I didn't have any idea about, however, was that my lunch box was trapped with a spring loaded poison needle, that's an 'unknown unknown'. Because I didn't have any idea my lunch box could be trapped, I'm dead.
The letter x has at least 3 things that make it seXy.
1) It is a relatively rare letter, especially at the beginning of words. This gives it a specialness.
2) Its primary use is to transliterate Greek words into English. Since Greek words and morphemes are borowed heavily in science and technology (and to a lesser extent religious) terminology, 'X' has been conspicuously associated with words and ideas in these fields.
3) It is the most famous of variable names and therefore is associated with mathamatics and abstract reasoning.
This is an idiotic commentary. Recording media for future playback is
no more 'timeshifting', then using a glass to hold water so you don't have
to go down to the river to get a drink is 'matter morphing', or
walking somewhere is 'space warping'. So, lots of people want to want
to record or purchase media or so they aren't subjected to advertising
or forced scheduling? Does that really warrant a brand new word or
change in your outlook on the world. So, some people are tired of
listening to music during their commute and want to listen to an audio
book, have they just added 2 hours a day to their life?
I had hoped that 'new paradigming' was an art that had died with
the other vaporings of the dot-com boom. But I see some still cling
to it tenaciasly.
I do have one good thing to say about Pierce Anthony. I was reading
him one day and suddenly a little thought balloon formed over my head which
read: "This is crap." I threw the book down in disgust and learned a
valuable lesson: it's not a moral failing to give up on a bad book.
Quite the opposite, it a sin to reward a horrible writer by plowing
threw dreck just to finish it.
I have worked on a couple of projects where the 'higher ups' (COO,
CEO) were obsessed with the value of the intellectual property that
their code represented. Woe be to the developer that tried to explain
to them that their code was crap, written by team of programmers
obviously just learning learning VB and trying to write it like a
dumbed down version of Java. Most of programming was developing
solutions to straight forward programming problems, which they still
implemented in nearly the worst possible way.
Yet, I have no doubt that if someone came up to them and warned them
about the dangers of IP theft and showed them this solution, they
would bite.
If they really wanted to do maximum damage to their competition they
should have just released the source code and hoped their competitors
tried to used that as guidance.
There are probably some rare instances when a specialized software
technique is developed and you want to keep its implementation
specifics secret. I have yet to run into a single instance of this
after many years in the industry.
Re:I'm Still Doubtful About Life On Mars
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why am I doubtful that life is there now? Because life is agressively pervasive.
There are a couple faults in your analysis about the possibility of life on Mars.
The first is your statement about life being aggressively pervasive.
This is only true in one sample that that we know about, Earth. We
have no idea whether there are other types of life that are either not
aggressively pervasive or pervasive but not not easily detected.
Second, there are areas, even on Earth, where life is existent but not
aggressively pervasive. Ocean floor thermal ducts and the interior of
Antarctica being notable examples. So, from even our limited sample,
one could draw the conclusion that the aggressiveness and pervasiveness
of life is proportional to the hospitableness of the environment. From that one would expect any life that exists on Mars to be very difficult
to find.
As a disclaimer, I add that the following points are a couple of reasons to discount my below observation.
- I work in the technology field and half of me, for rather selfish (and short sighted) reasons, would like to limit the supply in my current field.
- Irrespective of nay sayers, it is always most important to follow your dreams. If you feel absolutely in love with software development, then by all means go into it even if it means that you'll be writing QA scripts for $14/hr contract.
As for CS, I would suggest against going into computer programming per se, if for no other reason then assuming you are 28 now, that with another 5 - 10 years you'll be 33 - 38 before you enter the profession. Programming is a young man's job. Look at chess masters, mathematicians when they made their major discoveries or anyone else working in a similar field working with abstract problem solving. They are at their physiological best in their late 20s. After that the brain is simply less able to be productive and creative in those types of tasks and even when offset with accumulated experience absolute ability begins to decline after 35, 40 at the latest. Yes, of course you can always find exceptions to these rules, programmers who did their best work late in their careers. But these examples are very rare. More common exceptions are those programmers who were brilliant in their 20s and still managed to be quite good in their 30+.
Why not try product development or management in a computer technology related field? This will give you a closeness to the technology without becoming a past-his-prime common labourer.
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
I must confess I'm always puzzled by the insistence of computer manufacturers that computing as a utility is just around the corner and that will be the dominant way people and business will use computers. This was the original model that IBM tried to implement back in the 50s when computers were too expensive for all but the largest government and business organizations. Every year since then the claim is made both by IBM and the many upstarts who mysteriously decide they want to go after this phantasmal market that the reality of this is just a technology innovation away, remote terminals, modems, time sharing operating systems, interpreter technology, compiler technology, faster processing speed, larger storage capacity were all heralded as the last piece necessary to make this a reality.
Yet, here we are in the early 21st century and, as a percentage of total computing power, we are no closer then we were half a century ago. In reality we are probably much further. Why do corporations think that this is a realistic business model? Do we have TV on demand? No, for the most part we own our televisions; pick and choose from the content we want. Do we have beer on demand? No, we go to the local bar when we want to buy it by the glass or get it from the liquor store when we want to enjoy it at home or with friends. Do we have books by demand? No, we don't by a book because we want to read a certain number of pages. We buy a book because it has something interesting that we want to read.
There will of course always be outsourcing and their will always be hosting and its conceivable that these will be the dominant way to deliver IT services to companies, but these are not a computer utility. Why do people think we will ever get to the point where you my a certain number of CPU cycles or whatever the service metric is, and business will just get rid of their desktops, give everyone a terminal, and write a check once a month for the bill?
"I don't know, a proof is a proof. What kind of a proof is a proof? A proof is a proof and when you have a good proof it's because it's proven."
Actually I think you are correct about McBride but mistaken about Cretin who is essentially correct in his quote. If you assert something, such as Iraq has WMD and we must invade because of them or that Linux IP is tainted then it is your obligation to both justify the specific logic of your proof and the assumptions and premises on which it it based, including the machinery of your proof itself.
It would, for example, be totally erroneous, after having your proof of Fermat's last theorem rejected, to ask: "Well, if that wasn't good enough then what would be good enough?" That is your job as the one making the assertion. Any single flaw in logic or subtle unjustified assumption is sufficient grounds to toss a formal proof out. The person tossing it out is under no obligation to specify what might be an acceptable, only to be clear and correct on why yours specifically was not.
In Darl's case he has made an assertion (that Linux is IP tainted.) and puts the Open Source community in the position of proving that it is not. In fact, that is the very foundation of his argument is that open source must always prove that it is untainted against proprietary software and this is impossible.
The two systems are, in short, of comparable complexity.
Comparable in their complexity, yes. But, it is an imperical fact that people whose native written language is phonetic, find it much harder to learn an ideographic language then those who have learned an ideographic language do a phonetic one.
For example, it is very common to find an English speaker of Chinese or Japanese who is incapable of reading even the simplest text yet able to speak the language very fluently. It is quite rare to find the same situation in a Chinese speaker of English. Unless your claim is that Westerners are just very stupid or lazy, the conclusion is that ideographic written languages are very hard for non-natives to learn.
about literally seeing the roots of a language in the language
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Written Chinese (and therefore written Japanese) originated as a pictographic language, as did the Greek character set. (The letter 'A' for instance, used to be an ox, which you can still see if you rotate the character counter clockwise and think of the two little legs as horns.) Both languages abstracted out the literal meaning of the pictures that they represented, but Chinese became ideographic (not pictographic) while the ancestor of the Greek character set ultimately became phonetic. Nothing is 'wrong' with either system they are equally expressive and cultures using both systems can attain high levels of literacy. However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.
Speaking of 'bogosity' and lack of 'content', I think the article scores high on both. A news flash to the author, literary criticism is not a science and it's not mathematics. You can not prove something good.
All of the author's arguments were of the following form.
1) Criticism says Shakespeare is great writer because his writing is good.
2) Why is it good? Criticism says because of x, y, and z.
3) I compose or find a horrid work that contains x, y and z
4) I say that your criticism is bogus and content free because of the above contradiction of a bad work matching your specification.
5) Shakespeare is therefore not a good writer.
Since I can always perform the above operation on almost any statement in the field of literary criticism, then all literary criticism is bogus.
What the author has really proved is that he made a correct career choice by going into hard science or engineering rather then the humanities. Professors of literature are, by and large, one the lowest paid class of professors on college campuses and the competition for the positions is fierce. In the same way I don't begrudge Madonna for making a living out of something she loves and that some people find value in, I don't begrudge Lit professors their job. In truth, my fondest memories of college are from my English and American lit. classes.
Maybe if game developers could dream up a genre other than fantasy
Of course that's the irony isn't it. Fantasy gaming is perhaps the most unimaginative genre in computer games right now. It's a sad commentary that probably the best one on the market right now is Temple of Elemental evil, an old school Monty Hall dungeon crawl from 20+ years ago from the hack of all hacks Gary Gygax.
Uhm, I think you might want to cool down a bit before you sell everything and invest in this brave new world of mainframe computing.
Mainframes support 100s or 1000s of concurrent users. VMWare supports about 3. Don't get me wrong, it's a brilliant piece of software and there are tons of things that It's good for, from testing software on multiple platforms, to hosting several operating systems for a single user to use. However, it was never designed for and could never be used for hosting large numbers of users in a mainframe type environment.
Thank God it's them and not Microsoft. The thought made my blood run cold and has given me nightmares. (Suddenly you apply a patch and the little bug of VMWare allowing Linux to run is suddenly 'fixed')
Still, it's too bad they couldn't make a go of it independently. It's by far the best value, I actually shelled out $$ for a licensed version, of any piece of software that I've ever purchased.
Not true. 56K was the approximate theoretical limit of how much information the audible spectrum of the phone line could carry. (I think the theoretical limit is about 100K) That limit is just as valid now as when the prediction was made and is why 56K WAS the end of the line for true dial tone MODEMS (i.e. devices that transform analog audio spectrum signals to digital.) DSL exceeds that because it uses more bandwidth (all the bandwidth not being used to carry voice signals), not because it defeated a law of information theory.
Almost no branch of computer science has seen more countless hours of research devoted to it with more meager results then program verification theory. (And that is not primarily what Milner's work addresses.)
The fundament problem with program verification, and why you will not see any of the applications the you mentioned for at least the foreseeable future and probably ever, is that even after you've developed a language that is amenable to correctness analysis and after you have developed a specification requirements language to articulate the 'implication' of your programs written in the verifiable language, and after you have built a tool that allows you automate the construction of correctness proofs, you find that all you've done is push the real problem solving work of programming (where most of the errors come from) into a fuzzy realm of prerequirements that is even less conducive to the types of problem solving that programmers do then the original programming language.
These techniques can be useful for very narrow, specialized types of applications which must be correct. But can never work for something even as specialized as an operating system, let alone a general-purpose business application.
It's my observation as a casual user that it is becoming increasingly difficult, to the point of impossible, to install just a KDE or Gnome system. In fact, it's not even clear anymore what that would be. In effect what we have is a monstrous gnome/kde enviornment with at least two philosophical and technical ways to do everything.
My predication is that we will be spending the next 15 years reconciling this fundamental misstep.
Hoards allows up to 40th level attainment. That's too high. D&D, both the board game and the various computer rpgs is best at low to medium levels. Temple of Elemental Evil is a great example of this. The first half of NWN was great but once your characters get above 12th a lot of it becomes tedious.
Actually, I'm surprised that IBM made a counter suite so quickly. The more Darl spouts off about the case and pursues new extortion tactics the weaker his suite becomes.
The only conclusion that I can draw is that either that IBM thinks that they can finish of SCO right away, or they fear that the negative publicly has gotten so out of hand that it's hurting their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Just register them to be opened by ghostview. It starts up instantly and in a seperate window.
By contrast the best D&D that I played in, I admit to being a fairly mediocre DM, was in a group that played very fast loose with the rules, w/o miniatures, w/o maps. Just you, the DM and your imagination.
I remember debugging a Perl script that I was supporting. To paraphrase Truman Capote, I spent one day removing a backslash and the entire next day putting it back in. I never did fix the problem.
I have a lunch box there is a tuna fish sandwich and something spongy in a brown paper wrapper. I like tuna fish, that is a 'known' and i don't have to worry about it.
I don't know what's in the brown paper wrapper but I know better then to eat it. That's a 'known unknown' and since I'm not going to eat it, I don't have to worry about that either.
What I didn't have any idea about, however, was that my lunch box was trapped with a spring loaded poison needle, that's an 'unknown unknown'. Because I didn't have any idea my lunch box could be trapped, I'm dead.
The letter x has at least 3 things that make it seXy. 1) It is a relatively rare letter, especially at the beginning of words. This gives it a specialness. 2) Its primary use is to transliterate Greek words into English. Since Greek words and morphemes are borowed heavily in science and technology (and to a lesser extent religious) terminology, 'X' has been conspicuously associated with words and ideas in these fields. 3) It is the most famous of variable names and therefore is associated with mathamatics and abstract reasoning.
I had hoped that 'new paradigming' was an art that had died with the other vaporings of the dot-com boom. But I see some still cling to it tenaciasly.
The Wine conference was just here a few days ago, and the cold just about killed them all off.
I do have one good thing to say about Pierce Anthony. I was reading him one day and suddenly a little thought balloon formed over my head which read: "This is crap." I threw the book down in disgust and learned a valuable lesson: it's not a moral failing to give up on a bad book. Quite the opposite, it a sin to reward a horrible writer by plowing threw dreck just to finish it.
Yet, I have no doubt that if someone came up to them and warned them about the dangers of IP theft and showed them this solution, they would bite.
If they really wanted to do maximum damage to their competition they should have just released the source code and hoped their competitors tried to used that as guidance.
There are probably some rare instances when a specialized software technique is developed and you want to keep its implementation specifics secret. I have yet to run into a single instance of this after many years in the industry.
There are a couple faults in your analysis about the possibility of life on Mars.
The first is your statement about life being aggressively pervasive. This is only true in one sample that that we know about, Earth. We have no idea whether there are other types of life that are either not aggressively pervasive or pervasive but not not easily detected.
Second, there are areas, even on Earth, where life is existent but not aggressively pervasive. Ocean floor thermal ducts and the interior of Antarctica being notable examples. So, from even our limited sample, one could draw the conclusion that the aggressiveness and pervasiveness of life is proportional to the hospitableness of the environment. From that one would expect any life that exists on Mars to be very difficult to find.
As a disclaimer, I add that the following points are a couple of reasons to discount my below observation. - I work in the technology field and half of me, for rather selfish (and short sighted) reasons, would like to limit the supply in my current field. - Irrespective of nay sayers, it is always most important to follow your dreams. If you feel absolutely in love with software development, then by all means go into it even if it means that you'll be writing QA scripts for $14/hr contract. As for CS, I would suggest against going into computer programming per se, if for no other reason then assuming you are 28 now, that with another 5 - 10 years you'll be 33 - 38 before you enter the profession. Programming is a young man's job. Look at chess masters, mathematicians when they made their major discoveries or anyone else working in a similar field working with abstract problem solving. They are at their physiological best in their late 20s. After that the brain is simply less able to be productive and creative in those types of tasks and even when offset with accumulated experience absolute ability begins to decline after 35, 40 at the latest. Yes, of course you can always find exceptions to these rules, programmers who did their best work late in their careers. But these examples are very rare. More common exceptions are those programmers who were brilliant in their 20s and still managed to be quite good in their 30+. Why not try product development or management in a computer technology related field? This will give you a closeness to the technology without becoming a past-his-prime common labourer.
-- oldy but goody
I must confess I'm always puzzled by the insistence of computer manufacturers that computing as a utility is just around the corner and that will be the dominant way people and business will use computers. This was the original model that IBM tried to implement back in the 50s when computers were too expensive for all but the largest government and business organizations. Every year since then the claim is made both by IBM and the many upstarts who mysteriously decide they want to go after this phantasmal market that the reality of this is just a technology innovation away, remote terminals, modems, time sharing operating systems, interpreter technology, compiler technology, faster processing speed, larger storage capacity were all heralded as the last piece necessary to make this a reality. Yet, here we are in the early 21st century and, as a percentage of total computing power, we are no closer then we were half a century ago. In reality we are probably much further. Why do corporations think that this is a realistic business model? Do we have TV on demand? No, for the most part we own our televisions; pick and choose from the content we want. Do we have beer on demand? No, we go to the local bar when we want to buy it by the glass or get it from the liquor store when we want to enjoy it at home or with friends. Do we have books by demand? No, we don't by a book because we want to read a certain number of pages. We buy a book because it has something interesting that we want to read. There will of course always be outsourcing and their will always be hosting and its conceivable that these will be the dominant way to deliver IT services to companies, but these are not a computer utility. Why do people think we will ever get to the point where you my a certain number of CPU cycles or whatever the service metric is, and business will just get rid of their desktops, give everyone a terminal, and write a check once a month for the bill?
Actually I think you are correct about McBride but mistaken about Cretin who is essentially correct in his quote. If you assert something, such as Iraq has WMD and we must invade because of them or that Linux IP is tainted then it is your obligation to both justify the specific logic of your proof and the assumptions and premises on which it it based, including the machinery of your proof itself.
It would, for example, be totally erroneous, after having your proof of Fermat's last theorem rejected, to ask: "Well, if that wasn't good enough then what would be good enough?" That is your job as the one making the assertion. Any single flaw in logic or subtle unjustified assumption is sufficient grounds to toss a formal proof out. The person tossing it out is under no obligation to specify what might be an acceptable, only to be clear and correct on why yours specifically was not.
In Darl's case he has made an assertion (that Linux is IP tainted.) and puts the Open Source community in the position of proving that it is not. In fact, that is the very foundation of his argument is that open source must always prove that it is untainted against proprietary software and this is impossible.
Comparable in their complexity, yes. But, it is an imperical fact that people whose native written language is phonetic, find it much harder to learn an ideographic language then those who have learned an ideographic language do a phonetic one.
For example, it is very common to find an English speaker of Chinese or Japanese who is incapable of reading even the simplest text yet able to speak the language very fluently. It is quite rare to find the same situation in a Chinese speaker of English. Unless your claim is that Westerners are just very stupid or lazy, the conclusion is that ideographic written languages are very hard for non-natives to learn.
about literally seeing the roots of a language in the language I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Written Chinese (and therefore written Japanese) originated as a pictographic language, as did the Greek character set. (The letter 'A' for instance, used to be an ox, which you can still see if you rotate the character counter clockwise and think of the two little legs as horns.) Both languages abstracted out the literal meaning of the pictures that they represented, but Chinese became ideographic (not pictographic) while the ancestor of the Greek character set ultimately became phonetic. Nothing is 'wrong' with either system they are equally expressive and cultures using both systems can attain high levels of literacy. However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.
Speaking of 'bogosity' and lack of 'content', I think the article scores high on both. A news flash to the author, literary criticism is not a science and it's not mathematics. You can not prove something good. All of the author's arguments were of the following form. 1) Criticism says Shakespeare is great writer because his writing is good. 2) Why is it good? Criticism says because of x, y, and z. 3) I compose or find a horrid work that contains x, y and z 4) I say that your criticism is bogus and content free because of the above contradiction of a bad work matching your specification. 5) Shakespeare is therefore not a good writer. Since I can always perform the above operation on almost any statement in the field of literary criticism, then all literary criticism is bogus. What the author has really proved is that he made a correct career choice by going into hard science or engineering rather then the humanities. Professors of literature are, by and large, one the lowest paid class of professors on college campuses and the competition for the positions is fierce. In the same way I don't begrudge Madonna for making a living out of something she loves and that some people find value in, I don't begrudge Lit professors their job. In truth, my fondest memories of college are from my English and American lit. classes.
Of course that's the irony isn't it. Fantasy gaming is perhaps the most unimaginative genre in computer games right now. It's a sad commentary that probably the best one on the market right now is Temple of Elemental evil, an old school Monty Hall dungeon crawl from 20+ years ago from the hack of all hacks Gary Gygax.
Mainframes support 100s or 1000s of concurrent users. VMWare supports about 3. Don't get me wrong, it's a brilliant piece of software and there are tons of things that It's good for, from testing software on multiple platforms, to hosting several operating systems for a single user to use. However, it was never designed for and could never be used for hosting large numbers of users in a mainframe type environment.
Still, it's too bad they couldn't make a go of it independently. It's by far the best value, I actually shelled out $$ for a licensed version, of any piece of software that I've ever purchased.
Not true. 56K was the approximate theoretical limit of how much information the audible spectrum of the phone line could carry. (I think the theoretical limit is about 100K) That limit is just as valid now as when the prediction was made and is why 56K WAS the end of the line for true dial tone MODEMS (i.e. devices that transform analog audio spectrum signals to digital.) DSL exceeds that because it uses more bandwidth (all the bandwidth not being used to carry voice signals), not because it defeated a law of information theory.
Almost no branch of computer science has seen more countless hours of research devoted to it with more meager results then program verification theory. (And that is not primarily what Milner's work addresses.) The fundament problem with program verification, and why you will not see any of the applications the you mentioned for at least the foreseeable future and probably ever, is that even after you've developed a language that is amenable to correctness analysis and after you have developed a specification requirements language to articulate the 'implication' of your programs written in the verifiable language, and after you have built a tool that allows you automate the construction of correctness proofs, you find that all you've done is push the real problem solving work of programming (where most of the errors come from) into a fuzzy realm of prerequirements that is even less conducive to the types of problem solving that programmers do then the original programming language. These techniques can be useful for very narrow, specialized types of applications which must be correct. But can never work for something even as specialized as an operating system, let alone a general-purpose business application.
My predication is that we will be spending the next 15 years reconciling this fundamental misstep.
Hoards allows up to 40th level attainment. That's too high. D&D, both the board game and the various computer rpgs is best at low to medium levels. Temple of Elemental Evil is a great example of this. The first half of NWN was great but once your characters get above 12th a lot of it becomes tedious.
Actually, I'm surprised that IBM made a counter suite so quickly. The more Darl spouts off about the case and pursues new extortion tactics the weaker his suite becomes. The only conclusion that I can draw is that either that IBM thinks that they can finish of SCO right away, or they fear that the negative publicly has gotten so out of hand that it's hurting their products.