It's why Microsoft is reluctant to use open schemas in its Office products. The problem is that when you adopt this kind of thinking, you slowly rot from the inside out.
It's no secret that Microsoft is moving toward a much more open, accessible schema for Office files. Have you heard of Metro, perchance?
I have lost much of my formerly excellent Qwerty skills. If you want to maintain those, you have to type in Qwerty occasionally while you're learning Dvorak.
That said, Qwerty doesn't go away entirely; once you've hit a few keystrokes on it, you'll find your brain slowly shifting back into Qwerty mode. People who switch a lot are faster at switching, and some people who use both keyboards a lot report very fast typing speeds (80+wpm) on both with low error rates and fast context switching. Qwerty is like anything else: use it or lose it, and you'll be good at what you practice.
What I'd like to see is a Tivo-like feature where the player takes your preferences and downloads other songs that you might like as well.
This has actually already been done. Check out IRate Radio. It gives you a bunch of random tracks, and uses a collaborative rating system to autmatically download new tracks that you might like based on the ones you've indicated that you like.
Alan Turing proved that there are certain classes of problems that can't be solved by a computer.
One problem, for instance, that cannot be solved by a computer in general is the "halting problem." Given some program and the input to that program, will the program ever terminate? There is no way a computer can answer that question in a finite amount of time. Turing's theoretical model of a digital computer couldn't solve the problem, and his model was sufficiently general that no digital computer ever made will be able to solve the problem.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I think the approach of verifying the validity of the proofs that come out of the kind of system described in the article is fundamentally the wrong approach.
Instead, mathematicians ought to focus on formally proving the proof generator. If it could be fomally proved that the proof generator only generated valid proofs, we could automatically trust all the proofs that it generated. Program proof and verification is a complex topic, but it's a quickly maturing area of CS.
You really ought to check out GNU Screen, which AFAIK comes with OS X by default. Screen allows you to run a number of shells or other interactive programs in a single terminal, sort of like having tabbed interface. However, Screen gives you all kinds of extra goodies with this--you can lock your session, detach it and reattach from anywhere, monitor "tabs" for silence or activity, split the terminal between one or more tabs, and so on. Better than "tabbed" terminals by far.
As I understand it, most of the "infected" JPEG files are really files with additional extensions that are hidden by mail clients that are trying to do their users a favor by determining the file type for them.
For instance:
funny-sign.jpg.pif
It's not really a jpg file, but if emailed or even displayed by Windows Explorer with some settings, it may appear with a ".jpg" extension, leading a user to believe that it's a JPEG file. But when a user clicks on it, the PIF file (or EXE, etc) runs.
The main reason to use steganography is that it hides the fact that you are hiding something. If you use straight encryption, it is obvious that you have something sensitive that you want to encrypt (most people don't go to the trouble of encrypting things otherwise). Steganography helps you fly under the radar and send encrypted data without people knowing that you are sending encrypted data in the first place.
If someone is already suspicious of you, then of course they can analyze your communications and perhaps notice any steganographic attempts. But if not, you may be able to escape notice longer by exchanging seemingly innocuous data than by exchanging industrial-strengh encrypted data.
That's the internal code name, not the public released product name.
I somehow doubt that they would open themselves to a lawsuit that easily.
Anyone remember LiquidMotion? I bet Sparkle is headed in the same direction.
Keep in mind that it said Nasa's algorithm was genetic. This means that it had to dynamically evolve over time. The code you're looking at was likely grown "organically" by a genetic programming algorthithm--of course it's not going to be as clean and neat as your hand-optimized code.
Genetic programming is often implemented by taking little branches of a program's parse tree and swapping them around. Using a switch statement allows that swapping to occur easily, whereas using a lookup table would not allow that part of the code to mutate with the rest during evolution.
You guys are a bunch of hypocrites. You don't really want spam to stop. You love spam.
Every spam thread is the same: I use X, and it blocks 98% of my spam, with no false positives! I use Y, and it blocks 99.9% -- take that! Here, I use Z + Y with these custom Perl scripts I wrote that interface with procmail and stop 101% percent of spam! It doesn't matter, because I never get ANY spam! Spam is only because people buy things in spam! What morons! Bow before me, for I am 1337!
Spam gives you something to fight. Spam gives you an excuse to solve an interesting technical problem (i.e. separating spam from ham). Spam gives you a reason to boast. Spam gives you people to dislike.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel your pain--I'm in Redmond (yada yada evil yada yada) and we haven't had power for 4 days either.
It's no secret that Microsoft is moving toward a much more open, accessible schema for Office files. Have you heard of Metro, perchance?
I switched to Dvorak about a year ago.
I have lost much of my formerly excellent Qwerty skills. If you want to maintain those, you have to type in Qwerty occasionally while you're learning Dvorak.
That said, Qwerty doesn't go away entirely; once you've hit a few keystrokes on it, you'll find your brain slowly shifting back into Qwerty mode. People who switch a lot are faster at switching, and some people who use both keyboards a lot report very fast typing speeds (80+wpm) on both with low error rates and fast context switching. Qwerty is like anything else: use it or lose it, and you'll be good at what you practice.
Bushes Against Bush!
I've seen that several times and it's always brought a chuckle or two. I'm honored to meet the author. *shakes your hand* Good work, sir!
What I'd like to see is a Tivo-like feature where the player takes your preferences and downloads other songs that you might like as well.
This has actually already been done. Check out IRate Radio. It gives you a bunch of random tracks, and uses a collaborative rating system to autmatically download new tracks that you might like based on the ones you've indicated that you like.
Alan Turing proved that there are certain classes of problems that can't be solved by a computer. One problem, for instance, that cannot be solved by a computer in general is the "halting problem." Given some program and the input to that program, will the program ever terminate? There is no way a computer can answer that question in a finite amount of time. Turing's theoretical model of a digital computer couldn't solve the problem, and his model was sufficiently general that no digital computer ever made will be able to solve the problem.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I think the approach of verifying the validity of the proofs that come out of the kind of system described in the article is fundamentally the wrong approach.
Instead, mathematicians ought to focus on formally proving the proof generator. If it could be fomally proved that the proof generator only generated valid proofs, we could automatically trust all the proofs that it generated. Program proof and verification is a complex topic, but it's a quickly maturing area of CS.
... still is one.
-- me
You really ought to check out GNU Screen, which AFAIK comes with OS X by default. Screen allows you to run a number of shells or other interactive programs in a single terminal, sort of like having tabbed interface. However, Screen gives you all kinds of extra goodies with this--you can lock your session, detach it and reattach from anywhere, monitor "tabs" for silence or activity, split the terminal between one or more tabs, and so on. Better than "tabbed" terminals by far.
As I understand it, most of the "infected" JPEG files are really files with additional extensions that are hidden by mail clients that are trying to do their users a favor by determining the file type for them.
For instance:
funny-sign.jpg.pif
It's not really a jpg file, but if emailed or even displayed by Windows Explorer with some settings, it may appear with a ".jpg" extension, leading a user to believe that it's a JPEG file. But when a user clicks on it, the PIF file (or EXE, etc) runs.
You're missing the point.
The main reason to use steganography is that it hides the fact that you are hiding something. If you use straight encryption, it is obvious that you have something sensitive that you want to encrypt (most people don't go to the trouble of encrypting things otherwise). Steganography helps you fly under the radar and send encrypted data without people knowing that you are sending encrypted data in the first place.
If someone is already suspicious of you, then of course they can analyze your communications and perhaps notice any steganographic attempts. But if not, you may be able to escape notice longer by exchanging seemingly innocuous data than by exchanging industrial-strengh encrypted data.
That's the internal code name, not the public released product name. I somehow doubt that they would open themselves to a lawsuit that easily. Anyone remember LiquidMotion? I bet Sparkle is headed in the same direction.
Keep in mind that it said Nasa's algorithm was genetic. This means that it had to dynamically evolve over time. The code you're looking at was likely grown "organically" by a genetic programming algorthithm--of course it's not going to be as clean and neat as your hand-optimized code.
Genetic programming is often implemented by taking little branches of a program's parse tree and swapping them around. Using a switch statement allows that swapping to occur easily, whereas using a lookup table would not allow that part of the code to mutate with the rest during evolution.
You guys are a bunch of hypocrites. You don't really want spam to stop. You love spam.
Every spam thread is the same: I use X, and it blocks 98% of my spam, with no false positives! I use Y, and it blocks 99.9% -- take that! Here, I use Z + Y with these custom Perl scripts I wrote that interface with procmail and stop 101% percent of spam! It doesn't matter, because I never get ANY spam! Spam is only because people buy things in spam! What morons! Bow before me, for I am 1337!
Spam gives you something to fight. Spam gives you an excuse to solve an interesting technical problem (i.e. separating spam from ham). Spam gives you a reason to boast. Spam gives you people to dislike.
Admit it.
You love spam.