They are experienced and can offer advice.
My tax situation is nontrivial due to home ownership, mortgage, kids, etc.
They keep a set of records, so if my house were to burn down or some other tragedy destroyed my copies, I could always get a replacement copy.
They would help me in the event that I'm audited (hasn't happened yet thank god!).
While I double check and estimate my taxes,
this actually saves considerable time, as I'm pretty slow and methodical in reading the rules which are complicated.
I could be misunderstanding, but the problem may not necessarily be the particular directory that something resides in or the particular calling/command line argument convention, but the fact that a plethora of evolving conventions appears to be used. If one conevention would be adopted across all U*ix/Linux flavors for configuration tools/Daemons and systems software, then userland application/tool developers could make reliable install kits that work well across distributions/versions rather than keep rewriting to target different targets.
No they won't. They would be expensed at the market price
of the option, if such a thing existed, which it typically does not.
Your assertion about the value being correlated to the options value is correct.
However, options actually options do have a price as they are traded publicly. As they approach
the time that they are exercised, if they are options to buy (calls) and the strike price is below the stocks market value, the options value tends to converge to the (market price - strike price). For sell options, (puts) the price tends to be (strike price - market price) where in this case strike price corresponds to the price the owner is allowed to sell the shares at.
Calls with strike price greater than market price and puts with strike price less than market price would have negative value if they were exercised.
I am not sure, but I think puts may be riskier,
since it may obligate you to trade the stock
at a particular price on a given date (they may sell matching puts and calls) so our risk is
bounded only by how much the stock's price increases.
However, since options are usually granted
well before when they are exercised, their
value is more volatile (and sometimes depressed).
However, if the company is publicly traded and
options exist on the market, then the market may provide an indicator of the options value.
Shannon described this in his seminal paper
Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems and called it equivocation (i.e. the property that multiple candidate keys will generate the plausible but different plain text messages from the same cipher text). Cryptographers consider this a good thing. The related notion of
Unicity Distance refers to how much cipher text is needed to uniquely identify the that generated it (assuming that the cryptographic algorithm is known) with high probability. By keeping number of bits of information in the key sufficiently large relative to the message length, it is possible to make the Unicity distance larger than the message size.
Interesting. After the obligatory image search I tried to figure out what her research was, but didn't find much in the way of publication listings or research projects. Anybody have an idea of what sorts of math work she has done/published besides the book mentioned in the article?
Don't forget Kirsten Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl who invented object oriented programming.
I had the pleasure of meeting Nygaard before he passed away and he was a very dynamic and interesting person with interests outside computer science (he was active in Norwegian politics), and was very engaging. He will be missed. I believe Dahl also passed away, but unfortunately I never got to meet him.
why? evolution is not a process of "optimisation" it is a selection process. Those who are "good enough" survive.
This isn't quite right, this contradicts the modern "Darwinian" evolution where genetic history influences fitness from birth.
In this model, we really have a dynamic optimization problem where the fitness function varies over time. Selection is only part of evolution. Selection tends to remove diversity. Recombination (sexual reproduction/crossover) and mutation are critical as well, since they introduce diversity. Furthermore, fitness criteria vary over time, due to environmental changes. As in computational genetic algorithms models, since the shape of the search space is not well known, local optima are tolerated, but randomized search is used to probe and get the system to diverge occasionally from local optima.
First a fwe points both regarding this post and the grand parent.
Multicell processors don't require processes/threads to cooperate/communicate via shared memory. What they do is permit a cheap version of SMP by packaging multiple processor cores in a single chip. Given the complexities of dynamic scheduling (I think an exponential number of gates may be required per stalled instruction that is tolerated without stalling the instruction stream). They can allow these cores to stall and cores that are not stalled can use the pins on the chip to signal the rest of the system. Much like on an SMP machine, not all jobs have to be parallelized, if you keep enough jobs running they can be farmed out over the processor/cores and the system will put them to use. Thus, I don't think multi-core/cell approaches will need more sophisticated languages/compiler/code generation techniques that are employed in VLIW, Simultaneous Multithreading/Hyperthreading environments.
The cores will contend for access to the
system bus, since the pinout will not scale
with the number of cores used. This could
be tricky and form a bottleneck. The run time O/S scheduler may need to be smartened up to handle this (or maybe I was wrong above and some smart compile time techniques can help, but I'm not sure how that would work).
I don't think X86 is dead yest (at least
not for the 64 bit variants). They fix some
of the serious security issues (e.g. separate
execute and write permissions bits for pages),
and have a combination of a large amount of
market share (hence big economy of scale) and
a large amount of working deployed software. People aren't likely to walk away from that (yet).
This may mean that early approaches could require X86 emulation to be adopted, which probabably means that speedups by a factor of 10 or more are going to be needed if software emulation approaches are used. It will be tough to get that.
I suspect that different people have different
working styles that are effective for them.
Many people I know seem to be effective with
regular work hours, but for me it is different.
Interestingly, I think I really learned some lessons during the protracted coding periods
(sometimes doing a really stupid thing at 3:00 in the morning really drills in a lesson that I'd ordinarily only pay lip service to).
I tend to work in bursts, so when I'm on a roll, I can be putting in 80-100 hours/week and I'm O.K. with that for a modest amount of time (say a few months before physical fatigue starts to become insurmountable). However, I also tend to slack at times and do stuff like post to slashdot:-) and don't sustain above 55-60 hours per week for any protracted time and after a big push I need a break.
When I was younger (about 10-15 years ago) I could still code for a 24+ hour burst, now that just isn't feasible, I don't think I can productively code at all for above a 20 hour burst. I also noticed that I need a vacation every year or two. In the past, I would get unhappy but was still able to work, but in the last 10 years or so, I get burnt out without the break. I also am finding as I'm getting older that I'm susceptible to more severe colds/bronchitis and even pneumonia, so I have to guard a bit more against becoming overly fatigued.
I didn't fully understand the article when I read it, but I think the termination fees aren't related to the internet, but to the local phone system.
So Suppose that I'm calling from long distance to a friend of mine using VOIP, and that
friend uses a traditional phone. Then what most VOIP vendors do is provide a sort of central office in each area code, and route the VOIP traffic there, and from the central office make a local phone call to establish connectivity. Traditionally this last hop has been cheap, however (if I understand correctly) SBC wants to charge more for local phone service when it is the last hop of a VOIP call. Since this kind of discriminatory pricing appears to be anticompetitive, I suspect that the govt. may prevent it.
I've heard menbtion of attacks by ISPs that label the packets from their competitors as lower priority, giving their competitors inferior service. I'm uncertain whether the govt. has/will have/will enforce regulations about that.
Greg Ganger and the folks at CMU have worked on sled based MEMS storage devices which use nanotechnology combined with improved materials for higher density electromagnetic storage (like how hard disks work, except the media is on a moving sled). In Ganger's case they explored head motion but decided against it as the area required for equipment to move the heads exceeded the heads range of motion, resulting in reduced storage capacity.
Ivan Sutherland discussed this topic in his
Turing Award lecture (he called it Micropipelines) in 1989, using clock transitions to trigger state changes.
One problem with high clock rates is
that clocks are now so fast that they may not propagate to the entire chip in a single cycle.
While I'm not sure that a purely clockless arcihtecture is at hand (since handshaking is not
entirely free of cost), clocking could be used
within regions on the chips (to reduce gate
count and propagation distance) and clockless coordination could be used between regions.
After my daughter learned to speak already, I heard about some people that had started teaching infants sign language (to give them a small vocabulary, such as bottle, toy, pick me up, etc.) so that they could be more specific about their needs. I didn't get to try it myself, but it is an interesting hypothesis.I think parents and children do some non-structured variants of this, e.g. crying behavior with head nods and one foot kicking may be a learned "sign" that you and her agree upon. However a structured variant might allow the baby a wider vocabulary.
I seem to recall hearing about a sports radio
(maybe with cassette player) for skiers
(It looked like a scarf or a head band
in the pictures) called the "bone phone", this
was sold about 15 years ago if memory serves.
However, googling on "bone phone" seems to bring up articles about more recent vintage Japanese cell phones using skeletal sound propagation.
Constructors and destructors are a source of implicit changes to flow of control that that
can cause errors in large rapidly evolving projects.
Consider a piece of code that looks like:
SomeType x, y;
y = 3; x = y + 5;
Suppose this code is written in C++, can
you tell me what it does?
In fact that is only possible if you have
read all the definitions of SomeType and any
classes that it may inherit from.
Operator overloading forces the reader to look at all definitions inherited when
determining what the "=" and "+" operators
do. Add exception handlng to the mix and
it will be very hard to make the kinds of
guarantees about layout, timing, flow control
and order of evaluation that need to be
enforced in a working kernel. While C
is far from perfect, C++ doesn't appear to be
a viable solution for kernel devleopment.
Other than for testing on the ground, this thing will not be use inside an atmosphere.
I thought the manned mission was supposed to land on Mars.Is that the case? If so, how are the astronauts going to get to and from the Martian surface if they don't use this engine?
I've programmed extensively in both languages
and like both, but there are some compelling reasons why C caught on software development and Pascal (in its original form) did not.
The C language specifies prototyping and separate compilation interfaces. These are not specified for the Pascal programming language (although I'm sure tools like Delphi have hooks, this isn't part of the original standard Pascal).
Pascal lacks bit manipulation operators. C has a strong de facto standard that allows precise control over memory layout (using short, long and char data types).
For systems programming C allows type conversions and "typeless" pointers (char * or unsigned char * in the old days, now void *).
Pascal lacks an address of operator (the & operator in C)
Pascal originally did not have conformant arrays so functions handling arrays used the array dimensions for type checking. Later versions allowed array dimensions to be set at run time.
There are no static variables or compile time initializatoin (only globals with run time initialization).
The I/O model was hard to implement (as it assumed look-ahead) and record oriented.
Furthermore it was part of the language and NOT
in a standard library like C.
Labels (destinations of gotos) had to be numeric values.
Many (maybe all) of these points are covered in
Kernighan's Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language.
Although many posters seemed to indicate writing a
Pascal compiler was hard, actually Pascal is a relatively easy language to parse (due to its grammar) and became wide spread because implementing it was not too hard.
I had similar thoughts and did a quick check
(although I'm a U.S. citizen, and may be biased).
Interestingly, the Althing (Icelandic parliament)
has a very long tradition, but Iceland was colonized by Norway (and later Denmark?), and was disbanded for a while in the 1800's. So Iceland might actually not be more stable than the U.S. which has has a sovereign democratic government that predates the current incarnation of the Althing.
Can I create a devide that plugs into my broadband network that does VOIP without a service?
It depends on who initiates the call (are you calling out or receiving calls?) and the devices
at the other end of the line. Some networks, e.g. Skype, if I understand correctly (I'm not a skype user, but I'm considering it), permits remote connections between internet clients on the same service (Skype does this free of charge), and you don't need special equipment (beyond a microphone and speakers). However, to reach a traditional telephone or receive calls from a traditional telephone, you'll need infrastructure and support for connecting to the phone service at the other end (bridging from ineternet to the phone system).
This is at the core of the services of VOIP providers.
America has the lowest rate of TB infection because we manage the disease differently than the rest of the world.
The rest of the world gives the ineffective TB vaccine, while the US doesn't. The TB vaccine is known not to work, and it ruins the best test we have to screen for infection - the ppd (TB skin test).
In America, we treat everyone that converts their skin test and we don't administer the TB vaccine. Our public health officials deserve a big pat on the back for this decision.
You make some interesting claims, but supply no references. I'm not an expert in T.B. but google is my friend:-). Let's examine these claims and some of the Google results.
"In most countries of western Europe, reported TB incidence is below 15 per 100 000 and continues to decrease slowly. In central Europe, reported TB incidence ranges from 20 to 40 per 100 000 and is decreasing in most countries. TB incidence is much higher in Bosnia-Herzegovina (65/100 000) and Romania (124/100 000), where it has increased significantly in recent years. In eastern Europe, a further increase in reported incidence was observed in 2000 to an overall 89/100 000, a 56% increase since 1995. In countries providing representative data, the overall levels of drug resistance at the beginning of treatment remained low both in Western and Central Europe (less than 1% of patients never previously treated had primary multidrug resistance) and remained extremely high in the Baltic states (9-12%)."
So the U.S. may have a lower rate of TB than western europe, and definitely has a lower rate
than central or eastern Europe. However, I was not able to find a supporting reference for the U.S. having the lowest Rate of infection.
Khaled Mohammed Abu Khadra's thesis abstract (Ph.D. thesis?)
(the thesis itself was not directly linked), but the abstract gave hard numbers of preventive vaccination (vaccination prior to exposure) for the BCG vaccine in Jordan.
The last paragraph of the abstract reads:
"The overall vaccine effectiveness was 88% ; 85% for pulmonary TB and 95% for Extra-pulmonary TB. The vaccine was more effective (92%) when given shortly after birth, compared to 62% when given at school age."
However, vaccines appear to become less effective after widespread usage (try googling on Ineffective TB vaccine), so they may be ineffective after all (a BBC Article gives 70% effectiveness ratings).
Potential Public Health Impact of New Tuberculosis Vaccines by Ziv E, Daley CL and Blower, S.
describes the outcome of a mathematical epidemiological model of Tuberculosis, which appears to indicate that vaccination
AFTER exposure (post exposure) is likely to be more effective than pre-exposure vaccination at preventing disease (the authors make an interesting point that disease prevention is more important than preventing infection).
I wasn't able to directly refute the claims, and I suspect some of them may be true given the information turned up.
Unfortunately we occasionally (not every year,
but it has happened) temperatures have gone
that low in the winter. On days like that you
Really do not want your heat to fail.
Do heat pumps require that the winter not have
extended periods below freezing? I live in a cold part of the U.S. and thought that these weren't an option.
Slashdot Mirror
I could be misunderstanding, but the problem may not necessarily be the particular directory that something resides in or the particular calling/command line argument convention, but the fact that a plethora of evolving conventions appears to be used. If one conevention would be adopted across all U*ix/Linux flavors for configuration tools/Daemons and systems software, then userland application/tool developers could make reliable install kits that work well across distributions/versions rather than keep rewriting to target different targets.
However, options actually options do have a price as they are traded publicly. As they approach the time that they are exercised, if they are options to buy (calls) and the strike price is below the stocks market value, the options value tends to converge to the (market price - strike price). For sell options, (puts) the price tends to be (strike price - market price) where in this case strike price corresponds to the price the owner is allowed to sell the shares at. Calls with strike price greater than market price and puts with strike price less than market price would have negative value if they were exercised. I am not sure, but I think puts may be riskier, since it may obligate you to trade the stock at a particular price on a given date (they may sell matching puts and calls) so our risk is bounded only by how much the stock's price increases.
However, since options are usually granted well before when they are exercised, their value is more volatile (and sometimes depressed). However, if the company is publicly traded and options exist on the market, then the market may provide an indicator of the options value.
Shannon described this in his seminal paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems and called it equivocation (i.e. the property that multiple candidate keys will generate the plausible but different plain text messages from the same cipher text). Cryptographers consider this a good thing. The related notion of Unicity Distance refers to how much cipher text is needed to uniquely identify the that generated it (assuming that the cryptographic algorithm is known) with high probability. By keeping number of bits of information in the key sufficiently large relative to the message length, it is possible to make the Unicity distance larger than the message size.
Interesting. After the obligatory image search I tried to figure out what her research was, but didn't find much in the way of publication listings or research projects. Anybody have an idea of what sorts of math work she has done/published besides the book mentioned in the article?
Thanks, this is interesting (even if the geographic area and climate is not an exact match.
Don't forget Kirsten Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl who invented object oriented programming. I had the pleasure of meeting Nygaard before he passed away and he was a very dynamic and interesting person with interests outside computer science (he was active in Norwegian politics), and was very engaging. He will be missed. I believe Dahl also passed away, but unfortunately I never got to meet him.
This isn't quite right, this contradicts the modern "Darwinian" evolution where genetic history influences fitness from birth.
In this model, we really have a dynamic optimization problem where the fitness function varies over time. Selection is only part of evolution. Selection tends to remove diversity. Recombination (sexual reproduction/crossover) and mutation are critical as well, since they introduce diversity. Furthermore, fitness criteria vary over time, due to environmental changes. As in computational genetic algorithms models, since the shape of the search space is not well known, local optima are tolerated, but randomized search is used to probe and get the system to diverge occasionally from local optima.
I tend to work in bursts, so when I'm on a roll, I can be putting in 80-100 hours/week and I'm O.K. with that for a modest amount of time (say a few months before physical fatigue starts to become insurmountable). However, I also tend to slack at times and do stuff like post to slashdot :-) and don't sustain above 55-60 hours per week for any protracted time and after a big push I need a break.
When I was younger (about 10-15 years ago) I could still code for a 24+ hour burst, now that just isn't feasible, I don't think I can productively code at all for above a 20 hour burst. I also noticed that I need a vacation every year or two. In the past, I would get unhappy but was still able to work, but in the last 10 years or so, I get burnt out without the break. I also am finding as I'm getting older that I'm susceptible to more severe colds/bronchitis and even pneumonia, so I have to guard a bit more against becoming overly fatigued.
So Suppose that I'm calling from long distance to a friend of mine using VOIP, and that friend uses a traditional phone. Then what most VOIP vendors do is provide a sort of central office in each area code, and route the VOIP traffic there, and from the central office make a local phone call to establish connectivity. Traditionally this last hop has been cheap, however (if I understand correctly) SBC wants to charge more for local phone service when it is the last hop of a VOIP call. Since this kind of discriminatory pricing appears to be anticompetitive, I suspect that the govt. may prevent it.
I've heard menbtion of attacks by ISPs that label the packets from their competitors as lower priority, giving their competitors inferior service. I'm uncertain whether the govt. has/will have/will enforce regulations about that.
Greg Ganger and the folks at CMU have worked on sled based MEMS storage devices which use nanotechnology combined with improved materials for higher density electromagnetic storage (like how hard disks work, except the media is on a moving sled). In Ganger's case they explored head motion but decided against it as the area required for equipment to move the heads exceeded the heads range of motion, resulting in reduced storage capacity.
Ivan Sutherland discussed this topic in his Turing Award lecture (he called it Micropipelines) in 1989, using clock transitions to trigger state changes. One problem with high clock rates is that clocks are now so fast that they may not propagate to the entire chip in a single cycle. While I'm not sure that a purely clockless arcihtecture is at hand (since handshaking is not entirely free of cost), clocking could be used within regions on the chips (to reduce gate count and propagation distance) and clockless coordination could be used between regions.
After my daughter learned to speak already, I heard about some people that had started teaching infants sign language (to give them a small vocabulary, such as bottle, toy, pick me up, etc.) so that they could be more specific about their needs. I didn't get to try it myself, but it is an interesting hypothesis.I think parents and children do some non-structured variants of this, e.g. crying behavior with head nods and one foot kicking may be a learned "sign" that you and her agree upon. However a structured variant might allow the baby a wider vocabulary.
I seem to recall hearing about a sports radio (maybe with cassette player) for skiers (It looked like a scarf or a head band in the pictures) called the "bone phone", this was sold about 15 years ago if memory serves. However, googling on "bone phone" seems to bring up articles about more recent vintage Japanese cell phones using skeletal sound propagation.
- The C language specifies prototyping and separate compilation interfaces. These are not specified for the Pascal programming language (although I'm sure tools like Delphi have hooks, this isn't part of the original standard Pascal).
- Pascal lacks bit manipulation operators. C has a strong de facto standard that allows precise control over memory layout (using short, long and char data types).
- For systems programming C allows type conversions and "typeless" pointers (char * or unsigned char * in the old days, now void *).
Pascal lacks an address of operator (the & operator in C)
- Pascal originally did not have conformant arrays so functions handling arrays used the array dimensions for type checking. Later versions allowed array dimensions to be set at run time.
- There are no static variables or compile time initializatoin (only globals with run time initialization).
- The I/O model was hard to implement (as it assumed look-ahead) and record oriented.
Furthermore it was part of the language and NOT
in a standard library like C.
- Labels (destinations of gotos) had to be numeric values.
Many (maybe all) of these points are covered in Kernighan's Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. Although many posters seemed to indicate writing a Pascal compiler was hard, actually Pascal is a relatively easy language to parse (due to its grammar) and became wide spread because implementing it was not too hard.Interestingly, the Althing (Icelandic parliament) has a very long tradition, but Iceland was colonized by Norway (and later Denmark?), and was disbanded for a while in the 1800's. So Iceland might actually not be more stable than the U.S. which has has a sovereign democratic government that predates the current incarnation of the Althing.
Switzerland appears to have instituted a democratic tradition later than the U.S. (in 1798 if I understand correctly), although the city states did not succumb to a central authority.
- The CDC (U.S. center for disease control) inTrends in Tuberculosis --- United States, 1998--2003 states
- Khaled Mohammed Abu Khadra's thesis abstract (Ph.D. thesis?)
(the thesis itself was not directly linked), but the abstract gave hard numbers of preventive vaccination (vaccination prior to exposure) for the BCG vaccine in Jordan.
The last paragraph of the abstract reads:
- However, vaccines appear to become less effective after widespread usage (try googling on Ineffective TB vaccine), so they may be ineffective after all (a BBC Article gives 70% effectiveness ratings).
- Potential Public Health Impact of New Tuberculosis Vaccines by Ziv E, Daley CL and Blower, S.
describes the outcome of a mathematical epidemiological model of Tuberculosis, which appears to indicate that vaccination
AFTER exposure (post exposure) is likely to be more effective than pre-exposure vaccination at preventing disease (the authors make an interesting point that disease prevention is more important than preventing infection).
I wasn't able to directly refute the claims, and I suspect some of them may be true given the information turned up."During 2003, a total of 14,871 tuberculosis (TB) cases (5.1 cases per 100,000 population) were reported in the United States."
While Eurosurveillance in 2002 reports on data (which may have been gathered in 2000) at Tuberculosis control in Europe needs expanded DOTS, linked HIV/TB control, and improved surveillance reports:
"In most countries of western Europe, reported TB incidence is below 15 per 100 000 and continues to decrease slowly. In central Europe, reported TB incidence ranges from 20 to 40 per 100 000 and is decreasing in most countries. TB incidence is much higher in Bosnia-Herzegovina (65/100 000) and Romania (124/100 000), where it has increased significantly in recent years. In eastern Europe, a further increase in reported incidence was observed in 2000 to an overall 89/100 000, a 56% increase since 1995. In countries providing representative data, the overall levels of drug resistance at the beginning of treatment remained low both in Western and Central Europe (less than 1% of patients never previously treated had primary multidrug resistance) and remained extremely high in the Baltic states (9-12%)."
So the U.S. may have a lower rate of TB than western europe, and definitely has a lower rate than central or eastern Europe. However, I was not able to find a supporting reference for the U.S. having the lowest Rate of infection.
"The overall vaccine effectiveness was 88% ; 85% for pulmonary TB and 95% for Extra-pulmonary TB. The vaccine was more effective (92%) when given shortly after birth, compared to 62% when given at school age."
Unfortunately we occasionally (not every year, but it has happened) temperatures have gone that low in the winter. On days like that you Really do not want your heat to fail.
Do heat pumps require that the winter not have extended periods below freezing? I live in a cold part of the U.S. and thought that these weren't an option.