Some years ago the provincial government here in Ontario decided to force the six municipalities that made up Metropolitan Toronto to amalgamate. The municipalities decided to hold a referendum. An widely publicized internet poll was conducted predicting that the public would vote strongly in favour of amalgamation. When the referendum was held, the public voted 4 to 1 against amalgamation.
I can't remember exactly how wildly off the poll favoured amalgamation. I think it was something like 2:1. So, the poll was off by a factor of 8. Wildly off.
Where does the factor of eight come from? If the online poll was 2:1 for and the referendum was 4:1 against, then the actual numbers were:
Online: 2/3 for, 1/3 against
Referendum: 1/5 for, 4/5 against
If we assume the online poll attempted to accurately predict the outcome of the referendum, then the number of votes for was off by a factor of 10/3 = 3.3 and the number of votes against was off by a factor of 12/5 = 2.4. Multiplying these numbers gives a factor of eight, but since the two factors are not independent that makes no sense.
Such disrepancies show that either the online poll sample size was woefully inadequate (by an order of magnitude) or somebody stuffed the poll.
One thing I don't get is the myth that if I operate a MS OS I'm locked into Microsoft software and paying MS eternally for updates etc. I just went through the software I use daily and while most of it runs on Windows XP, none of it's by Microsoft. Here's the list:
Notice especially how many great open-source or otherwise free packages there exist in fields that Microsoft haven't got anything to offer. Then why do I constantly read on/. that MS have a complete monopoly on software like nothing else was available?
Note also the complete lack of Office of any kind. I rarely need a word processor, and if I do there's Wordpad or KOffice and whatever spreadsheet it comes with on Linux. Oh, I guess I use WMP or RealPlayer (blegh) occasionally.
A study of honeypot projects that showed most wi-fi abuse was "bandwidth stealing" doesn't exactly fill me with a sense of dread.
Maybe it should. With the current state of "Internet crime" paranoia, having a wide-open anonymous access point, while not yet comparable to lending your gun to strangers on the street, might well be compared with leaving the keys to the ignition of your car with the exception that you know whoever takes it will bring it back.
In my experience with both Operating Systems, I have often found that a lot of the insecurity lies with the user. Again, this is just my observations and not hard fact, but I have found that the average Linux user is more aware and technologically savvy than the average Windows user.
This is a simple result of the law of large numbers. If we assume "technological savvy" is normally distributed within the population then very small samples can have on average very high "savviness" rates. Once the sample size grows the average "savviness" goes down and approaches the mean (which in today's world is still quite low) asymptotically.
Linux has traditionally served as a geek playground whereas Windows seeps into the marketplace on new-from-the-store PCs and thus is usually the first operating system most people learn on.
And herein lies the problem of making blanket statements: yes, most people who are not experienced with computers do run Windows at home. Of course they're going to get infected with something! They lack the experience to mitigate risks and to know what they should never do. DOS didn't have one tenth of the complexity of the latest versions of Windows and stupid DOS users still got viruses all the time.
Linux is also very community-minded (hence, the "Open Source Community.") We vehemently defend Linux and thus have greater stock in its success.
I'm pretty sure a bunch of CS majors deriding SCO on/. won't help Linux kernel development all that much or attribute to any possible success.
M$ developers are usually money-driven and thus focus more on how fast they can get a product on the shelves than how rock-solid they can make it. Linux developers seem to take more pride in their product as, since many of them donate their work, all they really have is that pride to guard.
You are Eric S. Raymond and I claim my free-as-in-beer Tux merchandise.
You won't find the Linux community only putting out one large, obscure patch a month and then declaring "AHA! We have less patches than M$.";) Hmmm... that seems vaguely familiar.:)
Naturally, since you won't find the "Linux community" putting out any patches at all, ever. They're always put out by individuals or by companies/devteams that simply wish to produce the best possible product for their users.
If I had to put my money down on which one was more secure, my money would go on Linux.
The best way to keep you computer system secure is to make sure it's not run by idiots. How do you accomplish this? Make sure it's as complicated as possible[1]. For a long time Unix had this going for it, which means that Unix administrators had to have a lot experience coupled with knowledge and consequently would usually run a secure network.
By comparison, since "any idiot can run a MS network", then idiots were hired to run MS networks, with predictable results.
[1] The same principle actually works on a broader scale. Intrinsically hard topics tend to gather a more knowledgeable crowd while idiots flock to the easy topics like politics, religion and such. Which usually means that the level of discussion over political topics is far lower than that, say, for hard sciences.
How about that unsecure Windows huh? What a piece of crap innit? I get virus-related spam all the time and I read in the newspaper that Windows-machines are really vulnerable so I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would run one.
I've never had a security incident so Linux must be 100% secure. I hear even MS themselves have gotten hacked, how's that for bad publicity? You'd never see that happen to people like the FSF, Debian or Gentoo. I say we should ban all MS software and move to using OSS on Linux. Then we could all stop patching our systems since they'd be secure forever. Think of all the money and effort we'd save!"
This story reminds me of what I hear many smokers say when they're challenged over smoking. They say that there has never been any proof that smoking causes lung cancer, just that it's circumstantial. When A happens, then B happens, this doesn't mean that A caused B. If B happens after A in 95% of cases, that's not proof, and merely circumstantial (although compelling).
Disregarding the carcinogen tests on mice, a pure statistical approach should at least tell you if there is some kind of correlation.
If the probability of getting lung cancer for smokers differs statistically significantly (there are tests for this) from the same probability for non-smokers, then you can say with a certain margin of error (say 99% certainty) that smoking and lung cancer are not independent variables but that they are correlated. Yes, correlation does not equal causality, but if the odds of getting lung cancer are less for non-smokers then I certainly know how not to spend my spare change. Others are free to auto-darwinize themselves with tobacco products.
The problem with fighting a theory backed by overwhelming evidence is that you'd really have to come up with your own bulletproof theory that explains all the results as well as predicts something previously unknown. This is where all the crackpot theories usually fail. They attack existing theories and ridicule their shortcomings then introduce new models which explain all the data adequately but do not accurately predict anything new. Worse, they usually introduce new assumptions and special conditions that the old theories didn't need in order to work.
...but will someone please kill all the "web boards" that:
a) Require you to click on each message to view it, inviting a host of contentless posts where everything is in the title.
b) Invite the users to implant 100+k images, signatures and icons for each and every "me too" post they make.
c) Have built-in smileys. Nuff said.
A lot of people complain that Usenet is nothing but spam, but if the average "web board" is the future of online discussion I think I'll go back to pen and paper.
Personally, I think it'll be cool, when they build a stadium that has a plastic membrane playing surface that they can use to display graphics on.
Personally, I'll pass. It's annoying enough to watch soccer mathes with advertisements projected on the pitch using computers. Thankfully they don't do that when the ball is in play.
I put it forth that this "review-like article" is competely "domestic bovine excrement"-like.
Here are some of the best/worst bits:
...a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever.
Huh? What exactly is return code 0, then? Or syslog entries? And how do you distinguish between cases where the program output was correct and cases where the output was incorrect but the program was unable to decide this?
By contrast, in the Windows culture, you're programming for Aunt Madge
Funny that. What does Aunt Madge do with all the hundreds of complicated scientific/industrial/financial/simulation software packages that exist for Windows (as well as Unix)?
Here again, we see that the Unix culture values creating code that is useful to other programmers, something which is rarely a goal in Windows programming.
Huh? What does reusability and well-documented interfaces between modules have to do with the platform? Did ESR really write this crap or is the "reviewer" making it up as he goes along?
The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.
I wonder which specific Windows programmer this sentence refers to. Hopefully one that's been fired for incompetence by now.
When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users. Computers were expensive, CPU time was expensive, and learning about computers meant learning how to program. It's no wonder that the culture which emerged valued things which are useful to other programmers. By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit.
And commercial Unixes are created with what goal again?
Aunt Marge can't really use Unix
Can't even keep the lame metaphors consistent.
That's OK; he's not a Windows programmer; we'll forgive that.
Huh? If somebody writes a book pretending to be an expert on something they're clearly not, I'd call that bornerline fraudulent and at least take any viewpoints offered with a huge mountain of salt.
If the actual book is even half as bad as the review makes it out to be, maybe Eric S. Raymond should go back to writing the Nethack Guidebook. It probably has more insight on Windows software development.
I'd assert that both Access and [insert SQL RDBMS here] are crap for a theory class. A real SQL database is less crappy, but unless doing nothing but teaching people to think about FKs and joins is the goal, the class should start on the chalk board. Explain set theory, have people work out the problems on paper.
Theoretical knowledge is all good and well, but the article mentioned a department of communications, not CS so I doubt this class is very theoretical (otherwise I doubt they'd even consider using Access). I think it would make more sense to first get the students familiar with databases using hand-on training and then, when they can grasp some of the basic concepts, drag them through the dreary details if that's really what they need. It does seem to me like the objective of this class is rather to teach the students how to work with data in a relational DB rather than implement theoretically super-efficient database designs for themselves.
How much theory does one need when it appears that the most common database implementation these days involves nothing more complicated than "SELECT * FROM Authors"?
It concerns certain types of differential equation systems where the solutions can approach a number of "attractors" (basically just complicated sets of points) and circulate around them periodically. The problem is classifying the maximum number of these periodic attractors (it has been shown to be a finite number) and their relative position in the vector field.
The Lorentz attractor is an example of a system which has two periodic attractors (you can see a Java-implementation here) and was the result of an attempt to predict the weather during the 60's.
Well, "SQL server" is a stupid way to refer to a RDBS. That's like calling Apache "perl-server". I'm not surprised the only people chosing to name their RDBS products as SQL-something-or-other are the open source developers and Microsoft. Also I've never heard of MS sueing MySQL or PostgreSQL for use of the term SQL in relation to a RDBS.
Besides, the product is officially called Microsoft SQL Server and has always been, just like Microsoft Windows, but everybody refers to it as SQL Server or, if there is possibility of confusion, MS SQL Server or MSSQL for short. Is it malevolence on the part of Microsoft if people can't be bothered to use the full name of each and every one of their products?
Looks like they managed to create a standing electromagnetic wave inside matter for a fraction of a second. Seems like a practical proof-of-concept experiment rather than anything that would give birth to new earth-shattering theories.
Creative people take risks and people who take risks make mistakes. Essentially, if you've ever had a DUI, taken any drug other than marijuana, bounced a check, or been in therapy you won't get a clearance.
Maybe, but people with unstable personal lives still pose a greater statistical risk of going "rogue". Would you really want someone like Adrian Lamo working for your government?
Network security is a black art, my friends. It involves inuition, mastery of a jillion different disciplines, paranoia, ego, and poor personal hygiene - pricisely the kind of personality bureaucrats are most afraid of.
Absolute, unmitigated bullshit. Paranoia - maybe up to a healthy level. Ego and poor hygiene haven't got anything to do with knowing your way in and out of information systems. What you've described is your average cracker/virus-writer who thinks very highly of himself but in truth has only a deep but very narrow (and not necessarily all that useful) knowledge base and almost no social skills so that employing them as anything other than a lone wolf is fruitless. Plus the fact the fact that such people simply can't be trusted, which is the ultimate problem of hiring people to administer your information systems.
"It's a great job... a magnificent physics puzzle, solvable with high level math and some acquired skill."
I hate to cast a damp towel on this, but personally, I find this is to be silly self-promotional drivel. What Weather forecasters won't tell you is that anything beyond a 3-5 day forecast is just a guess.
So what? There are a lot of fields in science where most of our knowledge is about making accurate guesses and then seeing how well they fit the reality. It's not just about weather, the same tools can then be used on other complicated dynamic systems.
Their accuracy rates beyond this period go down below 50%; which means that flipping a coin is more accurate.
Really? I'd hardly call predicting the weather a simple case of true-or-false. Otherwise they could simply always give the exact opposite result that the complicated computer simulation gives and arrive at over 50% accuracy.
Though there are some places (like Ireland, I've heard tell) where simply predicting rain every day will be correct 80% of the time.
You are better off saving your CPU cycles for something more valuable, like Primenet (www.mersenne.org), IMHO.
Computer scientists and their everlasting silly infatuation with primes... There are other important research areas, you know.
John Baez's Crackpot Index is a great way to quantify your ad hominem atacks in physics. http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
Once you've read that, treat yourself to a post where the poster attempts to achieve a maximum crackpot index score by violating all the rules in sequential order.
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory
He did? This is interesting since formal set theory wasn't formulated until the mid-nineteenth century. Aristotle did come up with the axiomatic system of deriving all possible truths from a basic set of simple truths, but that's hardly set theory as such.
which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Except of course the ones Euclid couldn't prove to be true so he assumed them to be axioms - some of which were later derived from the other axioms.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
Imaginary numbers were encountered by mathematicians in the sixteenth century and established as a concept by the early eighteenth century - hardly a modern concept. By comparison set theory, linear algebra and statistical probability theories didn't emerge until late nineteenth/early twentieth century!
I am still trying to figure out why Integral Calculus is forced down everyone's throat. Computer Scientists are better off studying proof theory, axiomatic set theory, lambda-calculi, etc...
There are subfields within CS that make use of Integral Calculus... but most subfields of CS do not use it and instead use things like proof theory, set theory, etc.
Not all problems potentially encountered by CS majors are discrete - maybe in the textbooks but real life differs from textbooks. You need a toolset for tackling both discrete and continous problems. Analysis (calculus is merely a small part of the whole shebang) is the tool for solving those continous problems and to not teach it would be as stupid as the practice of not teaching engineering students discrete mathematics because classical mechanics doesn't need it.
Sun changing licensing terms - prepare to migrate.
SCO threatens Linux users - prepare to migrate.
I've used to seeing "switch to another platform/software package" as the default answer on Slashdot to most articles about potential problems any piece of software in existence, but some people actually pay for these Gartner analyses.
When are people who constantly advocate jumping ship whenever a potential problem appears with a product your relying on in you're business going to stop breathing since you can potentially be poisoned by air-borne pollution?
One event? Could be anything. It could be two particles that happened to travel very close together. We are talking about one observation out of millions per second.
One event? The chart reads at least 40 events in a very limited range. Kind of a consistent fluke. Also I do believe the experiment was replicated elsewhere.
There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?)
Unless you're tone deaf, such things can be learned through practice. Spoken languages already convey much information through tone, pitch and accentuation that would be hard to include in the words themselves.
there's a limit to how much useful communication you could develop out of beeps and whistles.
No more than with a limited permutation of elementary phonetics that most languages work with. And natural languages even overload many words with double meanings depending on the context, how much sense does that make?
Slashdot Mirror
Some years ago the provincial government here in Ontario decided to force the six municipalities that made up Metropolitan Toronto to amalgamate. The municipalities decided to hold a referendum. An widely publicized internet poll was conducted predicting that the public would vote strongly in favour of amalgamation. When the referendum was held, the public voted 4 to 1 against amalgamation.
I can't remember exactly how wildly off the poll favoured amalgamation. I think it was something like 2:1. So, the poll was off by a factor of 8. Wildly off.
Where does the factor of eight come from? If the online poll was 2:1 for and the referendum was 4:1 against, then the actual numbers were:
Online: 2/3 for, 1/3 against
Referendum: 1/5 for, 4/5 against
If we assume the online poll attempted to accurately predict the outcome of the referendum, then the number of votes for was off by a factor of 10/3 = 3.3 and the number of votes against was off by a factor of 12/5 = 2.4. Multiplying these numbers gives a factor of eight, but since the two factors are not independent that makes no sense.
Such disrepancies show that either the online poll sample size was woefully inadequate (by an order of magnitude) or somebody stuffed the poll.
One thing I don't get is the myth that if I operate a MS OS I'm locked into Microsoft software and paying MS eternally for updates etc. I just went through the software I use daily and while most of it runs on Windows XP, none of it's by Microsoft. Here's the list:
Acrobat (Adobe)
Agent (Forte)
Eudora (Qualcomm)
Ghostscript (AFPL/OSS)
GSView (Ghostgum)
Mathematica (Wolfram Research)
MikTeX (OSS)
Mozilla (OSS)
Octave (OSS)
Paint Shop Pro (JASC)
PuTTY (OSS)
Winamp (Nullsoft)
Notice especially how many great open-source or otherwise free packages there exist in fields that Microsoft haven't got anything to offer. Then why do I constantly read on /. that MS have a complete monopoly on software like nothing else was available?
Note also the complete lack of Office of any kind. I rarely need a word processor, and if I do there's Wordpad or KOffice and whatever spreadsheet it comes with on Linux. Oh, I guess I use WMP or RealPlayer (blegh) occasionally.
A study of honeypot projects that showed most wi-fi abuse was "bandwidth stealing" doesn't exactly fill me with a sense of dread.
Maybe it should. With the current state of "Internet crime" paranoia, having a wide-open anonymous access point, while not yet comparable to lending your gun to strangers on the street, might well be compared with leaving the keys to the ignition of your car with the exception that you know whoever takes it will bring it back.
In my experience with both Operating Systems, I have often found that a lot of the insecurity lies with the user. Again, this is just my observations and not hard fact, but I have found that the average Linux user is more aware and technologically savvy than the average Windows user.
This is a simple result of the law of large numbers. If we assume "technological savvy" is normally distributed within the population then very small samples can have on average very high "savviness" rates. Once the sample size grows the average "savviness" goes down and approaches the mean (which in today's world is still quite low) asymptotically.
Linux has traditionally served as a geek playground whereas Windows seeps into the marketplace on new-from-the-store PCs and thus is usually the first operating system most people learn on.
And herein lies the problem of making blanket statements: yes, most people who are not experienced with computers do run Windows at home. Of course they're going to get infected with something! They lack the experience to mitigate risks and to know what they should never do. DOS didn't have one tenth of the complexity of the latest versions of Windows and stupid DOS users still got viruses all the time.
Linux is also very community-minded (hence, the "Open Source Community.") We vehemently defend Linux and thus have greater stock in its success.
I'm pretty sure a bunch of CS majors deriding SCO on /. won't help Linux kernel development all that much or attribute to any possible success.
M$ developers are usually money-driven and thus focus more on how fast they can get a product on the shelves than how rock-solid they can make it. Linux developers seem to take more pride in their product as, since many of them donate their work, all they really have is that pride to guard.
You are Eric S. Raymond and I claim my free-as-in-beer Tux merchandise.
You won't find the Linux community only putting out one large, obscure patch a month and then declaring "AHA! We have less patches than M$." ;) Hmmm... that seems vaguely familiar. :)
Naturally, since you won't find the "Linux community" putting out any patches at all, ever. They're always put out by individuals or by companies/devteams that simply wish to produce the best possible product for their users.
If I had to put my money down on which one was more secure, my money would go on Linux.
The best way to keep you computer system secure is to make sure it's not run by idiots. How do you accomplish this? Make sure it's as complicated as possible[1]. For a long time Unix had this going for it, which means that Unix administrators had to have a lot experience coupled with knowledge and consequently would usually run a secure network.
By comparison, since "any idiot can run a MS network", then idiots were hired to run MS networks, with predictable results.
[1] The same principle actually works on a broader scale. Intrinsically hard topics tend to gather a more knowledgeable crowd while idiots flock to the easy topics like politics, religion and such. Which usually means that the level of discussion over political topics is far lower than that, say, for hard sciences.
"Reflecting On Linux Security In 2003
How about that unsecure Windows huh? What a piece of crap innit? I get virus-related spam all the time and I read in the newspaper that Windows-machines are really vulnerable so I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would run one.
I've never had a security incident so Linux must be 100% secure. I hear even MS themselves have gotten hacked, how's that for bad publicity? You'd never see that happen to people like the FSF, Debian or Gentoo. I say we should ban all MS software and move to using OSS on Linux. Then we could all stop patching our systems since they'd be secure forever. Think of all the money and effort we'd save!"
Whatever happened to truth in advertising?
Likely the same thing that happened to "military intelligence", "living dead" and "jumbo shrimps".
This story reminds me of what I hear many smokers say when they're challenged over smoking. They say that there has never been any proof that smoking causes lung cancer, just that it's circumstantial. When A happens, then B happens, this doesn't mean that A caused B. If B happens after A in 95% of cases, that's not proof, and merely circumstantial (although compelling).
Disregarding the carcinogen tests on mice, a pure statistical approach should at least tell you if there is some kind of correlation.
If the probability of getting lung cancer for smokers differs statistically significantly (there are tests for this) from the same probability for non-smokers, then you can say with a certain margin of error (say 99% certainty) that smoking and lung cancer are not independent variables but that they are correlated. Yes, correlation does not equal causality, but if the odds of getting lung cancer are less for non-smokers then I certainly know how not to spend my spare change. Others are free to auto-darwinize themselves with tobacco products.
The problem with fighting a theory backed by overwhelming evidence is that you'd really have to come up with your own bulletproof theory that explains all the results as well as predicts something previously unknown. This is where all the crackpot theories usually fail. They attack existing theories and ridicule their shortcomings then introduce new models which explain all the data adequately but do not accurately predict anything new. Worse, they usually introduce new assumptions and special conditions that the old theories didn't need in order to work.
...but will someone please kill all the "web boards" that:
a) Require you to click on each message to view it, inviting a host of contentless posts where everything is in the title.
b) Invite the users to implant 100+k images, signatures and icons for each and every "me too" post they make.
c) Have built-in smileys. Nuff said.
A lot of people complain that Usenet is nothing but spam, but if the average "web board" is the future of online discussion I think I'll go back to pen and paper.
Personally, I think it'll be cool, when they build a stadium that has a plastic membrane playing surface that they can use to display graphics on.
Personally, I'll pass. It's annoying enough to watch soccer mathes with advertisements projected on the pitch using computers. Thankfully they don't do that when the ball is in play.
I put it forth that this "review-like article" is competely "domestic bovine excrement"-like.
Here are some of the best/worst bits:
Huh? What exactly is return code 0, then? Or syslog entries? And how do you distinguish between cases where the program output was correct and cases where the output was incorrect but the program was unable to decide this?
By contrast, in the Windows culture, you're programming for Aunt Madge
Funny that. What does Aunt Madge do with all the hundreds of complicated scientific/industrial/financial/simulation software packages that exist for Windows (as well as Unix)?
Here again, we see that the Unix culture values creating code that is useful to other programmers, something which is rarely a goal in Windows programming.
Huh? What does reusability and well-documented interfaces between modules have to do with the platform? Did ESR really write this crap or is the "reviewer" making it up as he goes along?
The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.
I wonder which specific Windows programmer this sentence refers to. Hopefully one that's been fired for incompetence by now.
When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users. Computers were expensive, CPU time was expensive, and learning about computers meant learning how to program. It's no wonder that the culture which emerged valued things which are useful to other programmers. By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit.
And commercial Unixes are created with what goal again?
Aunt Marge can't really use Unix
Can't even keep the lame metaphors consistent.
That's OK; he's not a Windows programmer; we'll forgive that.
Huh? If somebody writes a book pretending to be an expert on something they're clearly not, I'd call that bornerline fraudulent and at least take any viewpoints offered with a huge mountain of salt.
If the actual book is even half as bad as the review makes it out to be, maybe Eric S. Raymond should go back to writing the Nethack Guidebook. It probably has more insight on Windows software development.
I'd assert that both Access and [insert SQL RDBMS here] are crap for a theory class. A real SQL database is less crappy, but unless doing nothing but teaching people to think about FKs and joins is the goal, the class should start on the chalk board. Explain set theory, have people work out the problems on paper.
Theoretical knowledge is all good and well, but the article mentioned a department of communications, not CS so I doubt this class is very theoretical (otherwise I doubt they'd even consider using Access). I think it would make more sense to first get the students familiar with databases using hand-on training and then, when they can grasp some of the basic concepts, drag them through the dreary details if that's really what they need. It does seem to me like the objective of this class is rather to teach the students how to work with data in a relational DB rather than implement theoretically super-efficient database designs for themselves.
How much theory does one need when it appears that the most common database implementation these days involves nothing more complicated than "SELECT * FROM Authors"?
It concerns certain types of differential equation systems where the solutions can approach a number of "attractors" (basically just complicated sets of points) and circulate around them periodically. The problem is classifying the maximum number of these periodic attractors (it has been shown to be a finite number) and their relative position in the vector field.
The Lorentz attractor is an example of a system which has two periodic attractors (you can see a Java-implementation here) and was the result of an attempt to predict the weather during the 60's.
Well, "SQL server" is a stupid way to refer to a RDBS. That's like calling Apache "perl-server". I'm not surprised the only people chosing to name their RDBS products as SQL-something-or-other are the open source developers and Microsoft. Also I've never heard of MS sueing MySQL or PostgreSQL for use of the term SQL in relation to a RDBS.
Besides, the product is officially called Microsoft SQL Server and has always been, just like Microsoft Windows, but everybody refers to it as SQL Server or, if there is possibility of confusion, MS SQL Server or MSSQL for short. Is it malevolence on the part of Microsoft if people can't be bothered to use the full name of each and every one of their products?
Typical Microsoft calling their product something generic that should apply to any SQL server. Almost like calling a product .. Windows.
It was originally called Sybase SQL Server but was later picked up by MS who adapted the name. Typical /. objectivity.
Looks like they managed to create a standing electromagnetic wave inside matter for a fraction of a second. Seems like a practical proof-of-concept experiment rather than anything that would give birth to new earth-shattering theories.
Creative people take risks and people who take risks make mistakes. Essentially, if you've ever had a DUI, taken any drug other than marijuana, bounced a check, or been in therapy you won't get a clearance.
Maybe, but people with unstable personal lives still pose a greater statistical risk of going "rogue". Would you really want someone like Adrian Lamo working for your government?
Network security is a black art, my friends. It involves inuition, mastery of a jillion different disciplines, paranoia, ego, and poor personal hygiene - pricisely the kind of personality bureaucrats are most afraid of.
Absolute, unmitigated bullshit. Paranoia - maybe up to a healthy level. Ego and poor hygiene haven't got anything to do with knowing your way in and out of information systems. What you've described is your average cracker/virus-writer who thinks very highly of himself but in truth has only a deep but very narrow (and not necessarily all that useful) knowledge base and almost no social skills so that employing them as anything other than a lone wolf is fruitless. Plus the fact the fact that such people simply can't be trusted, which is the ultimate problem of hiring people to administer your information systems.
Havent we had enough of this "dangers of open source" crap?
Hear hear. Now let's get back to the objective "open-source perl-hack saves world"-reporting.
"It's a great job... a magnificent physics puzzle, solvable with high level math and some acquired skill."
I hate to cast a damp towel on this, but personally, I find this is to be silly self-promotional drivel. What Weather forecasters won't tell you is that anything beyond a 3-5 day forecast is just a guess.
So what? There are a lot of fields in science where most of our knowledge is about making accurate guesses and then seeing how well they fit the reality. It's not just about weather, the same tools can then be used on other complicated dynamic systems.
Their accuracy rates beyond this period go down below 50%; which means that flipping a coin is more accurate.
Really? I'd hardly call predicting the weather a simple case of true-or-false. Otherwise they could simply always give the exact opposite result that the complicated computer simulation gives and arrive at over 50% accuracy.
Though there are some places (like Ireland, I've heard tell) where simply predicting rain every day will be correct 80% of the time.
You are better off saving your CPU cycles for something more valuable, like Primenet (www.mersenne.org), IMHO.
Computer scientists and their everlasting silly infatuation with primes... There are other important research areas, you know.
John Baez's Crackpot Index is a great way to quantify your ad hominem atacks in physics. http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
Once you've read that, treat yourself to a post where the poster attempts to achieve a maximum crackpot index score by violating all the rules in sequential order.
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory
He did? This is interesting since formal set theory wasn't formulated until the mid-nineteenth century. Aristotle did come up with the axiomatic system of deriving all possible truths from a basic set of simple truths, but that's hardly set theory as such.
which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Except of course the ones Euclid couldn't prove to be true so he assumed them to be axioms - some of which were later derived from the other axioms.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
Imaginary numbers were encountered by mathematicians in the sixteenth century and established as a concept by the early eighteenth century - hardly a modern concept. By comparison set theory, linear algebra and statistical probability theories didn't emerge until late nineteenth/early twentieth century!
So the US military wants a switch it can throw to jam Galileo? Fine, anything for our friends.
There should also be another switch Europeans can throw to turn off the jamming capability. That way both parties get what they want.
I am still trying to figure out why Integral Calculus is forced down everyone's throat. Computer Scientists are better off studying proof theory, axiomatic set theory, lambda-calculi, etc...
There are subfields within CS that make use of Integral Calculus... but most subfields of CS do not use it and instead use things like proof theory, set theory, etc.
Not all problems potentially encountered by CS majors are discrete - maybe in the textbooks but real life differs from textbooks. You need a toolset for tackling both discrete and continous problems. Analysis (calculus is merely a small part of the whole shebang) is the tool for solving those continous problems and to not teach it would be as stupid as the practice of not teaching engineering students discrete mathematics because classical mechanics doesn't need it.
prepare plans to migrate...
Is this Gartner's answer to everything?
MS software insecure - prepare to migrate.
Sun changing licensing terms - prepare to migrate.
SCO threatens Linux users - prepare to migrate.
I've used to seeing "switch to another platform/software package" as the default answer on Slashdot to most articles about potential problems any piece of software in existence, but some people actually pay for these Gartner analyses.
When are people who constantly advocate jumping ship whenever a potential problem appears with a product your relying on in you're business going to stop breathing since you can potentially be poisoned by air-borne pollution?
One event? Could be anything. It could be two particles that happened to travel very close together. We are talking about one observation out of millions per second.
One event? The chart reads at least 40 events in a very limited range. Kind of a consistent fluke. Also I do believe the experiment was replicated elsewhere.
There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?)
Unless you're tone deaf, such things can be learned through practice. Spoken languages already convey much information through tone, pitch and accentuation that would be hard to include in the words themselves.
there's a limit to how much useful communication you could develop out of beeps and whistles.
No more than with a limited permutation of elementary phonetics that most languages work with. And natural languages even overload many words with double meanings depending on the context, how much sense does that make?