The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. It's definitely a more nuanced subject than this article (and most of the comments) suggest. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets:
For some reason I have been receiving a lot less spam in the past few days than I did before. So have a lot of my friends (and yes we are using different email servers, even in different continents). I doubt that we can thank the flawed CAN SPAM legislation, but what else could it be?
It would be interesting to hear if others have noticed the same and have theories on why this is happening.
Coincidentally, I am working day in and out these days in finalizing a conference called Digital Reykjavik. There we will have several influential people speaking about the business of fiber to the home, who should run the networks the technology behind it and the effects it will have on society.
We will keep our site updated after the event with key points from the conference, hopefully something juicy.
The "folks" you refer to is Professor Adrian Thompson of the University of Sussex. A paper describing his interesting experiment can be found here. It was actually a flawed FPGA chip he was programming.
Another example of this tendency of Genetic Algorithms to make use of helpful "flaws" in their environments can be found in the works of Karl Sims. A round-off error in his physics model resulted in some weird locomotion by a branch of virtual creatures.
You will find details of both examples in this entry on my Wetware blog.
Slashdot Mirror
The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. It's definitely a more nuanced subject than this article (and most of the comments) suggest. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets:
For some reason I have been receiving a lot less spam in the past few days than I did before. So have a lot of my friends (and yes we are using different email servers, even in different continents). I doubt that we can thank the flawed CAN SPAM legislation, but what else could it be?
It would be interesting to hear if others have noticed the same and have theories on why this is happening.
Coincidentally, I am working day in and out these days in finalizing a conference called Digital Reykjavik. There we will have several influential people speaking about the business of fiber to the home, who should run the networks the technology behind it and the effects it will have on society.
We will keep our site updated after the event with key points from the conference, hopefully something juicy.
The "folks" you refer to is Professor Adrian Thompson of the University of Sussex. A paper describing his interesting experiment can be found here. It was actually a flawed FPGA chip he was programming.
Another example of this tendency of Genetic Algorithms to make use of helpful "flaws" in their environments can be found in the works of Karl Sims. A round-off error in his physics model resulted in some weird locomotion by a branch of virtual creatures.
You will find details of both examples in this entry on my Wetware blog.