this reminds me of the old trick for solving NP-hard problems -- simply wait for better technology!
i.e. this is the class of situations (of say, length-N) which require an exponential amount of time for satisfactory results. since moore's law (compute power / memory space doubles every year or so), you solve a hard problem with just-large-enough-N by being patient.
Technically, the Miller/Wegman (IBM) algorithm describes "LZW" in patent #4,814,746, filed 11 August 1986, predating Welch's supposedly independent re-invention.
Because the WTO "Uruguay round" grandfathered such patents to file date + 20 years (vs. ye olde grant date + 17 years), LZW claims really only expired less than three months ago.
There is irony in Google's admission that it needs the very type of personnel for whom they have been alleged to treat shabbily, such as Brian Reid, whose age discrimination case is on appeal:
As part of the suggested settlement for the Reid v. Google suit, Google was admonished to bring about a drastic overhaul of hiring practices biased toward creating disparate impact.
Reid's eye-opening comments are in the public Santa Clara County case documents, as well as in John Battelle's "The Search". (At Amazon, one would do well to "search inside the book" [using A9 technology, not Google's!] to land on pages 223 and 233 or thereabouts.)
just like when sun microsystems bought cobalt for 2% of the value of SUNW to dip a toe into the linux server business...
even though SUNW crashed, the cobalt team & product line was disbanded, and everyone yelled at the CEO for "wasting $2B" when sun was supposed to fight off linux with solaris, ironically linux-on-sun still is worth more than two percent to them, with all the "goodwill" now written off.
yup, monopoly money is not cash.
these days, tech companies dilute their shares by 1-2% per year just for employee stock options, so spending another 1.25% on a "name brand" is peanuts.
... they use the public domain. public domain is the stem cell of licensing, whereby you can take such code and graft any damnfool license onto it if you have the inexplicable urge to think smaller.
oh, and real men don't use 'dtrace', they use 'printf()' -- if it's good enough for ritchie & thompson, it's good enough for me!
the EE Times piece (in the printed edition not up on the web) has a sidebar, with neat background on the inventor: ________
Christmas present leads to ratoary wave epiphany
The Rotary Traveling Wave technology was the brainchild of MultiGig Inc. founder and chief technology officer John Wood, a self-taught inventor and son of an inventor who developed a method for self-aligning installed underground water pipes. In a company filled with PhDs, Wood is the only employee without a college degree.
Wood earned millions from a patent on this technique for flash-welding plastic materials. His passion for technology drives him to order textbooks by the dozen when pursuing a new subject, sometimes noting their errors in scribbled notes in the margins, said MultiGig COO Haris Basit. "I've worked at research labs including Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs, and John is clearly a cut above," Basit said.
In the late 1990s, Wood was researching high-speed serial I/O using traditional ring and crystal oscillators. "As I started to explore alternatives, the first thing I looked at was transmission times," he said.
An intitial prototype, using coaxial cables, was "not very exciting." Then Christmas 1998 brought an ephiphany. "My son had just gotten a car racing game with a crossover on a single track. That gave me the idea for arranging the transmission line that way," said Wood.
After a few more months of work, Wood decided to use arrays of loops to create an approach that could work independently of any frequency or process technology.
"It took a year or two until we could find direct commercial applications. Before that, I was just working on it as hobby." said Wood. "But the more we looked at clock distribution, the more we realized this could be useful."
shades of ricochet! you mean they don't get to use the same lightpoles (the night/day solar sensor socket) for free antenna power?
ricochet was neat but weird, with never enough repeaters for hilly areas. come to think of it, plain dropout-ridden cell networks here in frisco don't have enough juice.
actually, the worst gaffe in that picture is apple hijacking the term 'HD' for the supersize version of the ads. the rez for those are just 848x480, which is EDTV, not HD.
harrumph, if apple thinks HD is just a wider 480p, that's snake oil.
Years ago, an amusing anecdote circulated regarding a Sun software contractor at a party, crowing about how he had it much better than the fulltime employees...
(As is typical, the conversation mentioned the better peak rate of pay which more than covered perceived lack of benefits like health/insurance, stock options, ESOP, doughnuts, etc.)
Then his buzz got a little more specific about how he could use the same codebase for another project at Sun competitor SGI, getting paid twice for the virtually the same thing.
Because some inebriation transpired at the event, the loudness level increased just at the point about how Sun was a sucker for such trickery, when the presence of CEO Scott McNealy at the party was noted by others (the contactor was oblivious to who #1 was).
It didn't take long for Sun to supposedly deplete the ranks of most software contractors, a practice that may still be in effect -- naturally now matter of little import during times of H1B visas, overseas engineering centers, and underwater stock options!
with the right attitude and tenure, one can more-than-substitute for a programmer's salary using 401(k) rollover funds from ex-employers. particularly gratifying is to earn a greater return trading an erstwhile employers stock itself than can be provided by a day-job there. watch others do the hard work, then profit.
announced 23 April 1984 on Usenet net.puzzle as a waste of 6 hours VAX 11/750 time by ames!jaw
Addressing two separate efforts, the oft-referenced Scientific American article of October, 1984 mixed up the nomenclature by referring to the Lee Sallows "pangram machine" which really spit out self-enumerating sentences.
The confusion stems from the fact that in that column, Prof. A. K. Dewdney discussed both Sallows' effort and my own (pure multi-word anagram software hacks) as kindred topics. Although, together with Mike Morton, we helped start a bit of a mania with non-numerical recursive Unix codes, it's always humbling to see mere mortals attempt such logological pasttimes "by hand", resorting to the crutch of Scrabble tiles only as needed.
hmm... word jazz combinatorics & chemical symbols -- reminds me of the playful "Lehrer" ordering of the element symbols, v.i.z. the "video iPod sample" demonstration at:
Extra credit homework (the kind Prof. Lehrer would have assigned at U. C. Santa Cruz): find the mathematical "fixed point" element of both the atomic number and Lehrer ordering.
"peaches" is a true anthem -- i'll never forget when frank, on late night TV, taught it to the NBC symphony orchestra (yup, like ian & ruth underwood, they could read actual sheet music) for real-time presentation.
because i'm a zappa/beefheart old-fart-at-play, i'll listen to it morning, noon, & night (even the contrived midi versions) don't trade that riff away...
excellent question, but one yielding highly idiosyncratic answers.
(i was a co-winner of the 1990 contest, severely dating myself.) brain cells have decayed so much that i must reference the abstract (and engineering notes + literary allusions) at:
in our case, a techno"seed" was planted, in one of those already-obscure usenet signatures by some unheralded genius (aka karl fox).
then whatever that was became hopelessly abstracted into some drug-addled concept that was even more grandiose but still sublime, like the industry's first practical decompression virus that would be shamefully illegal today.
then the incredibly tense work (by paul eggert, compiler guru extraordinaire) began in earnest, with email flurries and double espressos run rampant.
even then it was an effort whose time only arrived three years later after aborted early attempts, all pre-world-wide-web mind you, young whippersnappers...
after all that, other ignobel-stature contest winners contributed even more insane babel. i'm not sure if any of it helps on a resume, but don't let such ur-history discourage you!
Slashdot Mirror
shameless math plug(s) from my alma mater:
- cal berkeley leads stanford in william lowell putnam competition fellows
- as for killer math events
stanford had streleski (v.i.z. wikipedia)
but berkeley topped him with kaczynski (!)
seriously, best wishes for the cardinals shepherding
the putman team under prof. vakil last saturday.
this reminds me of the old trick for solving NP-hard problems --
simply wait for better technology!
i.e. this is the class of situations (of say, length-N) which require an
exponential amount of time for satisfactory results. since moore's law
(compute power / memory space doubles every year or so),
you solve a hard problem with just-large-enough-N by being patient.
technology itself, not algorithmic smarts, wins.
Technically, the Miller/Wegman (IBM) algorithm describes
"LZW" in patent #4,814,746, filed 11 August 1986, predating
Welch's supposedly independent re-invention.
Because the WTO "Uruguay round" grandfathered such patents
to file date + 20 years (vs. ye olde grant date + 17 years),
LZW claims really only expired less than three months ago.
We hope there was a party to celebrate this!
There is irony in Google's admission that it needs the very type
of personnel for whom they have been alleged to treat shabbily,
such as Brian Reid, whose age discrimination case is on appeal:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html
As part of the suggested settlement for the Reid v. Google suit,
Google was admonished to bring about a drastic overhaul
of hiring practices biased toward creating disparate impact.
Reid's eye-opening comments are in the public Santa Clara
County case documents, as well as in John Battelle's "The Search".
(At Amazon, one would do well to "search inside the book"
[using A9 technology, not Google's!] to land on pages
223 and 233 or thereabouts.)
just like when sun microsystems bought cobalt for 2% of the
value of SUNW to dip a toe into the linux server business...
even though SUNW crashed, the cobalt team & product line
was disbanded, and everyone yelled at the CEO for
"wasting $2B" when sun was supposed to fight off linux
with solaris, ironically linux-on-sun still is worth more
than two percent to them, with all the "goodwill" now written off.
yup, monopoly money is not cash.
these days, tech companies dilute their shares by 1-2% per year
just for employee stock options, so spending another 1.25% on a
"name brand" is peanuts.
see http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/001 .html
... they use the public domain. public domain is the stem cell
of licensing, whereby you can take such code and graft any damnfool
license onto it if you have the inexplicable urge to think smaller.
oh, and real men don't use 'dtrace', they use 'printf()' --
if it's good enough for ritchie & thompson, it's good enough for me!
keyword: cardiomyocytes
videlicit:
http://www.geron.com/pressview.asp?id=744
and
http://www.geron.com/showpage.asp?code=prodsthr
really? try both yahoo and google search on something
commercial, like "dog food". results are about the same.
now try something less so, like "ovshinsky", which elicits
no sidebar ads. yup, about the same.
without loss of generality, please ignore the typos from my
manual transcription (ratoary->rotary + ephiphany -> epiphany)
e.e. times is simply unhelpful in not linking human-interest
sidebars to the relevant web links.
about the subject at hand -- clearly, this cat is bent.
spoiler for the in-joke about "squares, not circles"
www.timecube.com
an engineer's muse need know no bounds.
In addition to the already cited
t ml;jsessionid=SG3NCFVRB3QWEQSNDBESKHA?articleID=18 7200783
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jh
the EE Times piece (in the printed edition not up on the web) has a sidebar,
with neat background on the inventor:
________
Christmas present leads to ratoary wave epiphany
The Rotary Traveling Wave technology was the brainchild of MultiGig Inc.
founder and chief technology officer John Wood, a self-taught inventor
and son of an inventor who developed a method for self-aligning installed
underground water pipes. In a company filled with PhDs, Wood is the only
employee without a college degree.
Wood earned millions from a patent on this technique for flash-welding
plastic materials. His passion for technology drives him to order textbooks
by the dozen when pursuing a new subject, sometimes noting their errors in
scribbled notes in the margins, said MultiGig COO Haris Basit. "I've worked at
research labs including Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs, and John is clearly
a cut above," Basit said.
In the late 1990s, Wood was researching high-speed serial I/O using
traditional ring and crystal oscillators. "As I started to explore alternatives,
the first thing I looked at was transmission times," he said.
An intitial prototype, using coaxial cables, was "not very exciting."
Then Christmas 1998 brought an ephiphany. "My son had just gotten a
car racing game with a crossover on a single track. That gave me the idea
for arranging the transmission line that way," said Wood.
After a few more months of work, Wood decided to use arrays of loops
to create an approach that could work independently of any frequency
or process technology.
"It took a year or two until we could find direct commercial applications.
Before that, I was just working on it as hobby." said Wood. "But the more we
looked at clock distribution, the more we realized this could be useful."
-- Rick Merritt
shades of ricochet! you mean they don't get to use
the same lightpoles (the night/day solar sensor socket)
for free antenna power?
ricochet was neat but weird, with never enough repeaters
for hilly areas. come to think of it, plain dropout-ridden
cell networks here in frisco don't have enough juice.
and, we really do need to surf at the beach.
actually, the worst gaffe in that picture is apple hijacking the term 'HD' for
the supersize version of the ads. the rez for those are just 848x480, which
is EDTV, not HD.
harrumph, if apple thinks HD is just a wider 480p, that's snake oil.
ask a "sun sigma black belt" what the metrics say should be forthcoming, ...
unless this GE-inspired scientology is going the way of the CEO
another apt lehrerism is "what good are laurels if you can't rest on them?"
scooter could have declared victory with better timing a few years back.
E$ is shorthand for the infamous server ecache problem,
0 2-April/001431.html
which cost sun dozens of millions to nail down.
http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/20
wherein sun didn't read the fine print on the specs for some alpha-particle-susceptible
memory from IBM...
sorry about your run-in with copyright maximalists insisting
upon advance permission for preparing derivative works.
meanwhile, according to The Onion, Apple owns your vacation videos:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47468
"looking at ways to keep terrorists off of spacecraft is not unreasonable."
not to mention people "worse" than terrorists, like
peaceful souls who can make people think.
imagine that same media soapbox handed over
(albeit temporarily until the microphone is cut off!)
to the rather truer subversive planetary heroes.
Years ago, an amusing anecdote circulated regarding ...
a Sun software contractor at a party, crowing about
how he had it much better than the fulltime employees
(As is typical, the conversation mentioned the better peak rate
of pay which more than covered perceived lack of benefits like
health/insurance, stock options, ESOP, doughnuts, etc.)
Then his buzz got a little more specific about how he
could use the same codebase for another project at Sun
competitor SGI, getting paid twice for the virtually the same thing.
Because some inebriation transpired at the event, the loudness
level increased just at the point about how Sun was a sucker
for such trickery, when the presence of CEO Scott McNealy at the party
was noted by others (the contactor was oblivious to who #1 was).
It didn't take long for Sun to supposedly deplete the ranks of
most software contractors, a practice that may still be in effect --
naturally now matter of little import during times of H1B visas,
overseas engineering centers, and underwater stock options!
with the right attitude and tenure, one can more-than-substitute for a
programmer's salary using 401(k) rollover funds from
ex-employers. particularly gratifying is to earn a greater return
trading an erstwhile employers stock itself than can be provided
by a day-job there. watch others do the hard work, then profit.
E.g.
Jocks vend, fix, quartz BMW glyph
announced 23 April 1984 on Usenet net.puzzle
as a waste of 6 hours VAX 11/750 time by ames!jaw
Addressing two separate efforts, the oft-referenced
Scientific American article of October, 1984 mixed up the
nomenclature by referring to the Lee Sallows "pangram machine"
which really spit out self-enumerating sentences.
The confusion stems from the fact that in that column,
Prof. A. K. Dewdney discussed both Sallows' effort and my own
(pure multi-word anagram software hacks) as kindred topics.
Although, together with Mike Morton, we helped start a
bit of a mania with non-numerical recursive Unix codes,
it's always humbling to see mere mortals attempt such logological
pasttimes "by hand", resorting to the crutch of Scrabble tiles
only as needed.
hmm ... word jazz combinatorics & chemical symbols --
reminds me of the playful "Lehrer" ordering of the element
symbols, v.i.z. the "video iPod sample" demonstration at:
http://homepage.mac.com/retiarius
Extra credit homework (the kind Prof. Lehrer would have
assigned at U. C. Santa Cruz): find the mathematical "fixed point"
element of both the atomic number and Lehrer ordering.
"peaches" is a true anthem -- i'll never forget when frank,
on late night TV, taught it to the NBC symphony orchestra
(yup, like ian & ruth underwood, they could read actual
sheet music) for real-time presentation.
because i'm a zappa/beefheart old-fart-at-play, i'll listen
to it morning, noon, & night (even the contrived midi versions)
don't trade that riff away...
excellent question, but one yielding highly idiosyncratic answers.
...
(i was a co-winner of the 1990 contest, severely dating myself.)
brain cells have decayed so much that i must reference the
abstract (and engineering notes + literary allusions) at:
http://www.es.ioccc.org/1990/jaw.hint
in our case, a techno"seed" was planted, in one of those already-obscure
usenet signatures by some unheralded genius (aka karl fox).
then whatever that was became hopelessly abstracted into some
drug-addled concept that was even more grandiose but still sublime,
like the industry's first practical decompression virus that would
be shamefully illegal today.
then the incredibly tense work (by paul eggert, compiler guru extraordinaire)
began in earnest, with email flurries and double espressos run rampant.
even then it was an effort whose time only arrived three years later
after aborted early attempts, all pre-world-wide-web mind you, young
whippersnappers
after all that, other ignobel-stature contest winners contributed even
more insane babel. i'm not sure if any of it helps on a resume,
but don't let such ur-history discourage you!