I'm surprized this is ranked as 80'th, because it's not that large by todays standards. Even some mid-sized geophysical processing companies, for example, can beat it. Large ones might have 5 or 10 times this capacity.
If they're going to market this capacity, they had better do it quick. The shelf life of computational power is not much greater than milk.
Okay, I haven't actually proven that proving P=NP is an NP-complete problem. I have proven, however, that if you did have a proof that proving P=NP is an NP-complete problem, then verifying its correctness would be easy. Unfortunately this posting is too large to hold the proof.
And so many SE books seem like lists and lists of lists and lists. Or "here are the 328 things you must do to write a line of code". They instil guilt rather than instilling ability.
After writing out a couple hundred lines of code, print it out. Then come in the next day and read it. I mean, truly read it, line by line.
Some may argue that this is not as good other programmers reading the code. Undoubtedly true, but you will still catch many errors. The fact that you've waited a day means you are, in a sense, a different programmer than the one that wrote the code. And the fact that it's printed rather than on the screen gives you a different perspective.
I suggest that running tests is not sufficient to ensure a reasonable level of quality. There are certain errors that are unlikely to be caught by testing, and yet are quite obvious in a read through.
In other word, testing is not a replacement for read throughs. In finding problems, a multi-faceted approach is needed.
Yeeesssss. It's the only damn thing I really want from a keyboard. Oh, and an Undo key. Oh yeah, and a foot pedal controlling the capitalization. And get rid of the Alt key. And the Escape, while your at it.
The definition of liberalism and conservatism has changed radically, indeed almost inverted, over the centuries. Much of what Ronald Reagan preached could be described as 18'th century liberalism. Reagan may have been aware of this when he said that he didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him.
Today liberalism means things like active government and strong wealth distribution, which is very different from centuries past. Modern liberalism also has nothing do with classic socialism, where the means of production, distribution, and transportation are in the hands of the state.
But this is pressure on their main product - their operating system. That's never happened before in any serious manner, and it can't be solved by just buying out the competition. This is a new situation for the misnamed MicroSoft.
Even when open source is not chosen, it's having an effect. This article clearly shows how open source is lowering costs for customers, and driving Microsoft to make important improvements.
Poor Microsoft. They've never really been exposed to competitve pressures before.
What is the private sector giving back? Let's make a list...
Employment for their personnel.
Taxes, and lots of them.
A product or service their customers value.
Business for their suppliers.
Shares that widows and orphans can invest in.
Support of charitable causes.
Support of research consortiums (including OSDL http://www.osdl.org/, where Linus Torvalds works).
Many, many valuable technical innovations, not all of which get patented.
An impressive list. Perhaps you can think of other items.
Adam Smith published a book in 1776 called "The Wealth of Nations", where he explained how people working in their own self interest tend to improve the lot of society as a whole. Given the above list, you can start to appreciate why.
Lord be praised, it's under the LGPL. This means corporations can use the package in their software, and have the resulting applications delivered externally, without having to make all of their source in the program publicly available. If it were released under the (full) GPL, the package would find much more limited use.
Root-Mean-Square (ie, Richard Stallman) won't like it, of course. The FSF strongly recommends all software be under the GPL, not the LGPL. Myself, I think that's a serious mistake. Private enterprise is not, and never has been, the enemy. It's particularly a mistake when you want a package to become a de facto standard, and then do your best to ensure the private sector can't use it.
I thought I would introduce some politics into what is a rather boring technical/. post.
Actually, it may be the exact opposite. If open source software makes programmers more productive (and I can't see why it wouldn't), then the demand for software developers may actually increase.
Taking an extreme example, if it cost $250,000 to make a flat-screen TV, there would be very few people employed making them because so few people would think they were worth it. Reduce that to $2,500 per TV, and suddenly everyone and their dog wants one. The result - far more employees making flat-screen TV's, despite the fact that it takes far fewer employees to make a single TV.
The only problem is coming up with worthwhile applications to invest in. We are a far cry from that, however.
The patent office patently does not have the resources to do a full search for prior art. Generally it searches previous patents, which is obviously inadequate. I don't really blame the patent office for this - they have a limited budget.
The courts, however, do care about prior art. Many patents have been brought down via legal challenges after the patent has been awarded. The problem with this is such legal challenges are expensive and time consuming mothers.
People are now talking about new ways to run the patent office, so that the public can view and comment on commercially important patents before they are awarded. I hope such changes are made.
You did, however, get in the obligatory "let's blame big business for everything" swipe. Well done.
He did a stand-up job running the royal mint, both making it more efficient and putting the pound on a solid footing.
It seems strange that someone who was so eccentric, and not at all a "people person", should be such an effective manager, but perhaps Newton was good at anything he cared to be good at.
When dealing with people, the law of unintended consequences is king.
When you make things too difficult for people, things get less, not more, secure. Remembering one's password becomes a real problem, so people start writing them on notes and sticking them on their monitors, or changing them in a predictable way (skooby_aug04, skooby_nov04, skooby_feb05).
The remembered and typed password has its limits. Some of the other ideas posted in this forum are a better way to improve security.
It's an axiom of law, whether civil or criminal, that when you are up to your neck in shit, keep your mouth shut.
One of the reasons for this is that by talking, you're providing your opponents with ammunition to shoot you with. A couple of times now IBM lawyers have presented the judge with public statements by Darl McBride to support their own case.
Darl just can't keep stop talking. I can understand why - he's got his company share price to promote - but making detailed public statements about ongoing court cases has and will continue to bite him on the ass.
If he had half a brain, Darl would let his lawyers do the talking. That's what they are paid for.
I know a lot of/.'s will read in all sorts of nefarious motives in this latest move. It could be, however, that SCO is just looking towards the day when they sell there Unix business. After all, they are not going to attract new clients while it's owned by SCO (small PR problem). The business is worth more if it were owned by someone else.
In preparation for selling they might want to rebrand their Unix business from "SCO UnixWare" to something without the SCO name. "Unix Systems Laboratories" would do just fine.
I agree, except that the applications for quantum computing are limited right now (eg, determining primes, secure computing). Fluid dynamics, a good candidate for super computing, is (so far as I know) not on that list. No doubt, however, that the applications for QC will expand with time.
By the way, I was told by an expert in the field that if someone claims they understand quantum computing, then they don't understand quantum computing.
I loved your reply. Thank you. But there is little point in debating, since we have no common viewpoint upon which to base our arguments. Cats may as well debate with kangaroos.
For many decades now, Hollywood has been using the big corporation as their favourite bad guy, so that now people accept this as a matter of course. That would, it seems, include you. You've bought into a modern day myth.
Yes, there are lots of examples of companies behaving badly (note - Martha Stewart was convicted for obstruction of justice over a personnal investment matter, not corporate malfeasance). But one could just as easily name people, or charities, or environmental groups, or governments, or whatever you care to name, who have behaved badly.
If you think corporations don't value their reputations, you know nothing about the modern corporation. Corporations exist only at the pleasure of their customers, and both the companies and their customers know it.
You argue that since companies are driven by the profit motive, they are evil and soulless. Nonsense. There is nothing more human than the profit motive, and it doesn't mean people act immorally. Long term success in business requires integrity. Only someone who's never been in business thinks otherwise.
I'm not saying big corporations are perfect (far, far from it). But it always seem odd to me that they are cast as so nefarious when everyone seems eager to work for them, do business with them, buy their products, and benefit from their tax dollars.
You think you're superior to big corporations? Fine, how many people did you hire today?
It's an article of faith that big corporations are greedy and nasty and the root of all evil. Heretic that I am, I don't buy it.
Although big corporations have very deep pockets, they also have something called a reputation that they value greatly. Attracting the wrath of IT managers throughout the world is no small matter to them. For this reason, their claws often remained sheathed.
Might I suggest that it's a new breed of company, small or mid-sized ones, whose very
raison d'etre is to collect valuable intellectual property, that we have the most to fear from.
They've got everything to win, little to lose, and they don't give rat's ass about their reputation.
One example - SCO. A near worthless organization (about $10 million in market capitalization) until they discovered they "owned" Linux. They have been accused of ties with Microsoft (there is some evidence through BlueStar), but I'm not convinced. The Justice Department is ever watchful these days.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're going to market this capacity, they had better do it quick. The shelf life of computational power is not much greater than milk.
Okay, I haven't actually proven that proving P=NP is an NP-complete problem. I have proven, however, that if you did have a proof that proving P=NP is an NP-complete problem, then verifying its correctness would be easy. Unfortunately this posting is too large to hold the proof.
I have a proof that proving P = NP is an NP-complete problem. Unfortunately this posting is too small to hold the proof.
And so many SE books seem like lists and lists of lists and lists. Or "here are the 328 things you must do to write a line of code". They instil guilt rather than instilling ability.
After writing out a couple hundred lines of code, print it out. Then come in the next day and read it. I mean, truly read it, line by line.
Some may argue that this is not as good other programmers reading the code. Undoubtedly true, but you will still catch many errors. The fact that you've waited a day means you are, in a sense, a different programmer than the one that wrote the code. And the fact that it's printed rather than on the screen gives you a different perspective.
I suggest that running tests is not sufficient to ensure a reasonable level of quality. There are certain errors that are unlikely to be caught by testing, and yet are quite obvious in a read through.
In other word, testing is not a replacement for read throughs. In finding problems, a multi-faceted approach is needed.
Yeeesssss. It's the only damn thing I really want from a keyboard. Oh, and an Undo key. Oh yeah, and a foot pedal controlling the capitalization. And get rid of the Alt key. And the Escape, while your at it.
Today liberalism means things like active government and strong wealth distribution, which is very different from centuries past. Modern liberalism also has nothing do with classic socialism, where the means of production, distribution, and transportation are in the hands of the state.
But this is pressure on their main product - their operating system. That's never happened before in any serious manner, and it can't be solved by just buying out the competition. This is a new situation for the misnamed MicroSoft.
Poor Microsoft. They've never really been exposed to competitve pressures before.
An impressive list. Perhaps you can think of other items.
Adam Smith published a book in 1776 called "The Wealth of Nations", where he explained how people working in their own self interest tend to improve the lot of society as a whole. Given the above list, you can start to appreciate why.
Which was precisely my point. You're a moron.
Root-Mean-Square (ie, Richard Stallman) won't like it, of course. The FSF strongly recommends all software be under the GPL, not the LGPL. Myself, I think that's a serious mistake. Private enterprise is not, and never has been, the enemy. It's particularly a mistake when you want a package to become a de facto standard, and then do your best to ensure the private sector can't use it.
I thought I would introduce some politics into what is a rather boring technical /. post.
Taking an extreme example, if it cost $250,000 to make a flat-screen TV, there would be very few people employed making them because so few people would think they were worth it. Reduce that to $2,500 per TV, and suddenly everyone and their dog wants one. The result - far more employees making flat-screen TV's, despite the fact that it takes far fewer employees to make a single TV.
The only problem is coming up with worthwhile applications to invest in. We are a far cry from that, however.
The courts, however, do care about prior art. Many patents have been brought down via legal challenges after the patent has been awarded. The problem with this is such legal challenges are expensive and time consuming mothers.
People are now talking about new ways to run the patent office, so that the public can view and comment on commercially important patents before they are awarded. I hope such changes are made.
You did, however, get in the obligatory "let's blame big business for everything" swipe. Well done.
Calculus itself would not be patentable since it's mathematics, but his many numerical computing algorithms (eg, "Newton's Method") would be.
It seems strange that someone who was so eccentric, and not at all a "people person", should be such an effective manager, but perhaps Newton was good at anything he cared to be good at.
When you make things too difficult for people, things get less, not more, secure. Remembering one's password becomes a real problem, so people start writing them on notes and sticking them on their monitors, or changing them in a predictable way (skooby_aug04, skooby_nov04, skooby_feb05).
The remembered and typed password has its limits. Some of the other ideas posted in this forum are a better way to improve security.
One of the reasons for this is that by talking, you're providing your opponents with ammunition to shoot you with. A couple of times now IBM lawyers have presented the judge with public statements by Darl McBride to support their own case.
Darl just can't keep stop talking. I can understand why - he's got his company share price to promote - but making detailed public statements about ongoing court cases has and will continue to bite him on the ass.
If he had half a brain, Darl would let his lawyers do the talking. That's what they are paid for.
In preparation for selling they might want to rebrand their Unix business from "SCO UnixWare" to something without the SCO name. "Unix Systems Laboratories" would do just fine.
By the way, I was told by an expert in the field that if someone claims they understand quantum computing, then they don't understand quantum computing.
I loved your reply. Thank you. But there is little point in debating, since we have no common viewpoint upon which to base our arguments. Cats may as well debate with kangaroos.
Yes, there are lots of examples of companies behaving badly (note - Martha Stewart was convicted for obstruction of justice over a personnal investment matter, not corporate malfeasance). But one could just as easily name people, or charities, or environmental groups, or governments, or whatever you care to name, who have behaved badly.
If you think corporations don't value their reputations, you know nothing about the modern corporation. Corporations exist only at the pleasure of their customers, and both the companies and their customers know it.
You argue that since companies are driven by the profit motive, they are evil and soulless. Nonsense. There is nothing more human than the profit motive, and it doesn't mean people act immorally. Long term success in business requires integrity. Only someone who's never been in business thinks otherwise.
I'm not saying big corporations are perfect (far, far from it). But it always seem odd to me that they are cast as so nefarious when everyone seems eager to work for them, do business with them, buy their products, and benefit from their tax dollars.
You think you're superior to big corporations? Fine, how many people did you hire today?
Although big corporations have very deep pockets, they also have something called a reputation that they value greatly. Attracting the wrath of IT managers throughout the world is no small matter to them. For this reason, their claws often remained sheathed.
Might I suggest that it's a new breed of company, small or mid-sized ones, whose very raison d'etre is to collect valuable intellectual property, that we have the most to fear from. They've got everything to win, little to lose, and they don't give rat's ass about their reputation.
One example - SCO. A near worthless organization (about $10 million in market capitalization) until they discovered they "owned" Linux. They have been accused of ties with Microsoft (there is some evidence through BlueStar), but I'm not convinced. The Justice Department is ever watchful these days.
A second example - Teleshuttle Technologies, subject of a recent post ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/21/15 39205&tid=155 ).
Expect to see more of them as time goes by.
News for turds. Stuff that splatters.