I wonder whether Bullfighter, Deloitte's freeware program for detecting buzzwords, uses Bayesian filtering? Deloitte discovered a direct linkage between clear business talk and good business performance. In examining Enron's communications during its last three years, they found that as Enron began to sink, its press releases, financial reports, letters to shareholders, and speeches by top executives, became increasingly laden with ambiguous words and sentences.
Just like that. Yes they do, even rigging up their own generators from wire and magnets...there are photos on the site. You ever wanted to tell the power company to eat your shorts? There's how its done.
We have seen a doc like this on/. before...its been around long enough. NSA put out a report [ Report # C43-002R-2004 ] In June of
04. I downloaded it on Nov 5 because it was in a/. post The layered security doc adresses worms and viruses and is NEWER than the document mentioned in this post. Both are good stuff but the older one has lots of IP nuts and bolts that are interesting and useful.
Many programmers would want to print out table 5 and tape in on their cube wall. [If they don't have default port assingments memorized by heart.]
wicked strong magnets...well technically, wondermagnet is selling but rumage through the website and see if you can figure out their business relation ship to otherpower, I can't.
If you are into this DIY power generation, do visit their site...they also homebrew hydroelectric systems. And the participants in their discussion groups include a few very well versed engineers with good ideas for off the grid living.
If the retarded fundies can't beat on the school board to use genesis instead of a biology text, what will they do? ID is not yet available as an on line text is it?
You and other's suggest a refresh mech. But this is NOT a conventional memory bit with a definite 1 or 0 state that we are talking about. It is a Qbit. You destroy coherence by sampling or reading a quantized state. Its not clear to me in this case what "refresh" means.
read the article. The biggest problem, and apparently a surprise to some, is that the instability is inversely proportional to the number of quantized states of particles, electrons or what-have-you that are aggregated to compose the Qbit. Hence all of the cool tricks we know have in our repetoire for minitatureization will work against us. In other words, your 64+8 ECC would not be adequate unless fairly bulky implementations [I know, we need some numbers here] of Qbits were used. An 8086 the size of a football field? The size of a toaster? the size of L.A.? [but of course, it could do the computing of all the 8086's on the planet CONCURRENTLY if only you could cul your answer from all the others it was spewing] Alternatively, we could use conventional photolithographic techniques but find a way to load, execute and decode results for the entire computation in less then the decay time of a Qbit. Not many useful calculations can be done that fast. not many programmers can parallelize that thoroughly. Its a wierd space/time computing trade off where the shorter the entire computation can be made, the less x has to be in 64+x ECC.
will always be with us. The expression "call a spade a spade" goes back
to ancient Greek city states and what they thought of each others directness in speech.
As long as you have to catch someone with your words, promote something with your pitch etc you will always have to make this choice: be honest and say up front "I'd like to make the following impression on you..." or be dishonest. The latter allows you to cover your hook with some bait of words: to use a vocabulary that obscures the nasty and disarms the thinking of your victim. Your vocabulary is a bit like your wardrobe too: You don't go to a business meeting in cutoffs and T-shirt [well I do but...] and you don't use freehand drawings for presentation graphics...some situtations call for wrapping the contents in ostentation and formality. Makes me glad I'm just a coder.
Re:we all mostly program in OO paradigms
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 1
...you pretend that there's a progression of BETTER programming methods acros those years...
Pretend? no, there are a lot of tools and standards and practices that we have now that are improvements over the way we used to do the work. And OO, though it is not one but a collection of improvements and it has arrived in its present form [analysis and design tools like Rational Rose, languages like C++] after many false starts and discarded techniques. "Pretend" may be a bit harsh but I certainly did not give the whole picture: improvement in methodologies has been anything but straight forward or smooth.
...Fact is some skills survive, some other simply vanishes,...
definitely. I helped write an early 911 police dispatch system in the '70s. We wrote in assembler, 80,000 lines if I recall. Flowcharts and HIPO diagrams were the height of design expression. The schedule and staff turnover were nervewracking. We achieved up time by running two completely separate systems that shadowed each other...it was crude material by today's standards. Yet we delivered a system that ran at the required 99.999% uptime [no halts, freezes, crashes or missed events] within 1 month of first power-up at the police station. I have not been party to such a level of technical success since. [we also underbid the job by a factor of 4:( ] We used a buddy system for initial code review and then structured walk-thru prior to submission to the build. The quality was simply excellent. The human side of the buisness, the fact that programmers are still people has been downplayed by much of the "progress" I extoll.
Re:we all mostly program in OO paradigms
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 1
You are asking a guy with a BS in physics for a MS thesis in some combination of Business Administration and CS. but I'll take a stab at it....
If you are saying you belive we [i.e. most programmers who are actively devloping SW] think of software designs in terms of functional decomposition...well I just don't know how to prove anything about how
people think but I would disagree. Thought is conducted with language and really sets the limits of what and how you concieve ideas...we have C++ and Java among others, for thought-tools. Once you have designed down to the methods on your objects, i.e. the function level, yes, tools are less important and you could write in Fortran or Assembler. You can do LOWER level thinking in a higher level tool. Heck, I wrote pidgen C++ [C++ would compile it but I was stuck with C thinking modes and I was not getting the milage of proficient C++ programmers "he speaks C++ with a thick C accent"] for a few years...actually took Java for me to get the religion. You can't do HIGHER level programming than your tool supports without some added set of practices or discipline. For instance, you could write a multithreading server in C using a bunch of Posix thread library calls sprinkled around your code but if you had to do it from scratch, you'd be done in days instead of weeks to start with the HttpServlet classes and just drop your handler method implementations into that....you'd only have to think explicitly about threads in one or two lines of code.
I think programmers worked right to the limits of the common OO languages and started pushing for even bigger 7-league boots: patterns.
The books that are selling well among programmers are also an indication of continuous evolution to higher and higher level constructs as the building blocks. We have patterns cookbooks for several of our OO languages now and those really do help adept programmers cover a lot of ground. Code reuse was and still is the holy grail of effective use of software engineer's time. Functional re-use is epitomized in Clib and RogueWave. If C libraries and Posix had really solved the reuse problem well and delivered high levels of reuse in code, why would we have pushed on to C++, Java and an O'Reilly zoo of others? Objects delivered, or at least did better and patterns promise to go beyond that, makeing objects more generic and reusable...and THAT is how you solve problems better and better, THAT is the evolution of our craft.
The great classics of functional programming like Sedgwick's Algorithms tome were only the cookbooks for individual dishes, not the banquet that had to be delivered. And even that book got updated to OO with
Algorithms in Java wherein, classes, not just methods, appear in the example code.
Nice to have on the bookshelf...for a few of us
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My occasional run-ins with languages go back to the days of BLISS and kicking around the Strawman and Ironman RFPs. I think there is a lot of value in a work like this for CS professors and software CTOs and maybe some flavors of project technical leads but at 1600 pages, not many of the rest of us would run out to buy it. ACM would seem a likely home for such a book...it reads like one of their Computing Surveys articls that got out of hand. [any book with > 1400 reference citations is definitely in the academic tome category...not sure I can fault AW's decision as a purely business decision. ON the other hand, the contents here are a musty treasure and I downloaded it immediately. I am grateful for this.]
Also, choosing to make deep commentary on the suitability of a computer language as a tool for solving problems but then going light on the dominant OO languages is just too big an omission. e.g. on pg 24:
Your author's experience with many C developers is that they tend to have a C is the only language worth
knowing attitude. This section is unlikely to change that view and does not seek to. Some knowledge of
how other languages do things never hurt.
There are a few languages that have stood the test of time, Cobol and Fortran for example. While Pascal
and Ada may have had a strong influence on the thinking about how to write maintainable, robust code,
they have come and gone in a relatively short period of time. At the time of this writing there are six
implementations of Ada 95. A 1995 survey[571] of language usage found 49.5 million lines of Ada 83
(C89 32.5 million, other languages 66.18 million) in DoD weapon systems. The lack of interest in the
Pascal standard is causing people to ask whether it should be withdrawn as a recognized standard (ISO
rules require that a standard be reviewed every five years). The Java language is making inroads into the
embedded systems market (the promise of it becoming the lingua franca of the Internet does not seem to
have occurred). It is also trendy, which keeps it in the public eye. Lisp continues to have a dedicated user
base 40 years after its creation. A paper praising its use, over C, has even been written.[398]
The references for the other languages mentioned in this book are: Ada,[625] Algol 68,[1347] APL,[634]
BCPL,[1113] CHILL,[636] Cobol,[614] Fortran,[620] Lisp[630] (Scheme[693]), Modula-2,[626] Pascal,[619] Perl,[1375]
PL/1,[613] Snobol 4,[504] and SQL.[621]
Since we all mostly program in OO paradigms these days, the author's perspectives on C++, though they would lengthen an already long book, should have been prominently featured instead of downplayed.
additional data point: I ordered the new OpenBSD CDs and a T-shirt [I am such a tourist!] the day their puffy write-up hit/. It was a month before they showed up...from Alberta.CA not Berkely, CA. Amazon.com these guys are not.
When I downloaded Mepis, I paid a bit extra for the high speed... that is the way to go if you have the bandwidth and want your "free" OS PDQ.
Shuttleworth coughed up the $10m himself if I haven't misread TFA. Not just a beau geste, I hope. This directly addresses the concern a lot of us lukewarm Linux wannabe users have: product life. Where and when do Shuttleworth and co. get back their $10m marketing investment? [RH's support is not free, is that where Ubuntu is going to get paid back?] They must think so to lay out that much cash.
how the hell was my little post off topic?..lysenko was, for all the wrong reasons of course, one of the first biologists to claim genetics alone did not determine, at birth, all that an organism would be and do. That/is/ the topic of TFA!
In the early 80's, we worked at DEC when they were Wallstreet's darling and could do no wrong. My wife worked on CAD software at the mill in Maynard. Across the street was a goldsmith [Richard Goddard,who is still there]who, in addition to generally good and creative work in tradtional materials, was turning rejected microvax parts into ear rings. As manufactured, they had enough gold plate for the lead bonding that they actutually looked like jewelry when you pried them open. I bought her a pair. Now I guess the fashion world has come back around...she probably tossed them out.
Its odd the NYT article doesn't mention Lysenko whose promotion in stalinist russia [ok, here it comes: in soviet russia the traits determine your genes. satisfied?] was, amongst other things, a refutation of darwinian evolution, which did not fit comfortably in to Salin's idea of how the state should be able to make a new, improved kind of human being.
I think the lesson is that
you don't want to get on the wrong side of a government that has its own ideas about biology (are you listenin' Dubya?) and
ANYTHING that touches your ability to reproduce yourself (reputed to be a natural and extremely strong urge, though I myself am just a nerd so;) is dangerous turf that religions have all staked out.
TFA doesn't mention the vendor lock a certain proprietary OS has on applications. The lock is part marketing and part technology. The tecnology part is the lukewarm to downright hostile attitude of that proprietary OS vendor toward open API and FILE FORMAT standards for application classes the proprietary OS vendor did not even invent: word processors, spread sheets, business graphics. Most users need to get work done,not to hack...they couldn't care less what the os is if they know how to access, share and manipulate their business documents. They aren't programmers, they aren't sysadmins but they pay all the bills for software development directly or indirectly because they are the majority of the customers. Two areas where lots of innovation has proliferated in the market and throws its weight around as easily as products from the proprietary OS company is e-mail clients and browsers. Why?
Because in these application spaces, well established standards preceded or were co-created with the applications: HTTP, HTML, XML, SMTP so no vendor lock, no user disincentive of fearing their choice of application will be unworkable or won't interoperate with other business users. What does posix or win32 mean to a user? Who smears the line between API and OS platform interface standards?
I pay universal service "tax" [its not a tax,..its, its uh, well see if you can get a sensible explanation out of YOUR phone company] for my phone useage. Didn't we just get a ruling that broadband is specically NOT common carrier, i.e. it is NOT the phone commpany?
why I don't read /. science posts any more
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 1
"...fundamental structure of matter begins to crack..."
The fundamental structure of matter? That would be subatomic physics. Ed.s: please get someone with a science background on board!
I still have my old mac. I got my hands on the MS Basic for Mac in March
of 84 and had to wait a month [and pay $3000] for delivery of the Mac and and imagewriter I. When the power supply fried, I upgraded to the 1 meg that had become available. It STILL runs and I STILL haven't filled up the 80meg outboard hard drive I added to it [perhaps as much an indication of how many apps DID NOT materialize for Mac users as of my overzealous housekeeping]. I eventually junked Basic for lightspeed C.
yeah and i kinda missed the point of TFA: proprietary office productivity tool formats were what the ministry has in mind. My reply mingles the idea of proprietary with the idea of copy protected...not that they are unrelated. But unless the Norwegian govt is concerned about exchanging audio and video content between citizens and branches of govt, MS formats is all that is threatened.
I assumed he was an embarassment because, after all, he was charged, and, if he was ultimately found innocent, he was still not clearly innocent.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like that. Yes they do, even rigging up their own generators from wire and magnets...there are photos on the site. You ever wanted to tell the power company to eat your shorts? There's how its done.
We have seen a doc like this on /. before...its been around long enough. NSA put out a report [ Report # C43-002R-2004 ] In June of
04. I downloaded it on Nov 5 because it was in a /. post The layered security doc adresses worms and viruses and is NEWER than the document mentioned in this post. Both are good stuff but the older one has lots of IP nuts and bolts that are interesting and useful.
Many programmers would want to print out table 5 and tape in on their cube wall. [If they don't have default port assingments memorized by heart.]
wicked strong magnets...well technically, wondermagnet is selling but rumage through the website and see if you can figure out their business relation ship to otherpower, I can't.
If you are into this DIY power generation, do visit their site...they also homebrew hydroelectric systems. And the participants in their discussion groups include a few very well versed engineers with good ideas for off the grid living.
If the retarded fundies can't beat on the school board to use genesis instead of a biology text, what will they do? ID is not yet available as an on line text is it?
You and other's suggest a refresh mech. But this is NOT a conventional memory bit with a definite 1 or 0 state that we are talking about. It is a Qbit. You destroy coherence by sampling or reading a quantized state. Its not clear to me in this case what "refresh" means.
read the article. The biggest problem, and apparently a surprise to some, is that the instability is inversely proportional to the number of quantized states of particles, electrons or what-have-you that are aggregated to compose the Qbit. Hence all of the cool tricks we know have in our repetoire for minitatureization will work against us. In other words, your 64+8 ECC would not be adequate unless fairly bulky implementations [I know, we need some numbers here] of Qbits were used. An 8086 the size of a football field? The size of a toaster? the size of L.A.? [but of course, it could do the computing of all the 8086's on the planet CONCURRENTLY if only you could cul your answer from all the others it was spewing]
Alternatively, we could use conventional photolithographic techniques but find a way to load, execute and decode results for the entire computation in less then the decay time of a Qbit. Not many useful calculations can be done that fast. not many programmers can parallelize that thoroughly. Its a wierd space/time computing trade off where the shorter the entire computation can be made, the less x has to be in 64+x ECC.
My pilot friends sometimes mention IFR flights that end in an encounter with cumulo-granite.
will always be with us. The expression "call a spade a spade" goes back to ancient Greek city states and what they thought of each others directness in speech.
As long as you have to catch someone with your words, promote something with your pitch etc you will always have to make this choice: be honest and say up front "I'd like to make the following impression on you..." or be dishonest. The latter allows you to cover your hook with some bait of words: to use a vocabulary that obscures the nasty and disarms the thinking of your victim.
Your vocabulary is a bit like your wardrobe too: You don't go to a business meeting in cutoffs and T-shirt [well I do but...] and you don't use freehand drawings for presentation graphics...some situtations call for wrapping the contents in ostentation and formality. Makes me glad I'm just a coder.
...you pretend that there's a progression of BETTER programming methods acros those years...
...Fact is some skills survive, some other simply vanishes,... :( ] We used a buddy system for initial code review and then structured walk-thru prior to submission to the build. The quality was simply excellent. The human side of the buisness, the fact that programmers are still people has been downplayed by much of the "progress" I extoll.
Pretend? no, there are a lot of tools and standards and practices that we have now that are improvements over the way we used to do the work. And OO, though it is not one but a collection of improvements and it has arrived in its present form [analysis and design tools like Rational Rose, languages like C++] after many false starts and discarded techniques. "Pretend" may be a bit harsh but I certainly did not give the whole picture: improvement in methodologies has been anything but straight forward or smooth.
definitely. I helped write an early 911 police dispatch system in the '70s. We wrote in assembler, 80,000 lines if I recall. Flowcharts and HIPO diagrams were the height of design expression. The schedule and staff turnover were nervewracking. We achieved up time by running two completely separate systems that shadowed each other...it was crude material by today's standards. Yet we delivered a system that ran at the required 99.999% uptime [no halts, freezes, crashes or missed events] within 1 month of first power-up at the police station. I have not been party to such a level of technical success since. [we also underbid the job by a factor of 4
You are asking a guy with a BS in physics for a MS thesis in some combination of Business Administration and CS.
but I'll take a stab at it....
If you are saying you belive we [i.e. most programmers who are actively devloping SW] think of software designs in terms of functional decomposition...well I just don't know how to prove anything about how people think but I would disagree. Thought is conducted with language and really sets the limits of what and how you concieve ideas...we have C++ and Java among others, for thought-tools. Once you have designed down to the methods on your objects, i.e. the function level, yes, tools are less important and you could write in Fortran or Assembler. You can do LOWER level thinking in a higher level tool. Heck, I wrote pidgen C++ [C++ would compile it but I was stuck with C thinking modes and I was not getting the milage of proficient C++ programmers "he speaks C++ with a thick C accent"] for a few years...actually took Java for me to get the religion. You can't do HIGHER level programming than your tool supports without some added set of practices or discipline.
For instance, you could write a multithreading server in C using a bunch of Posix thread library calls sprinkled around your code but if you had to do it from scratch, you'd be done in days instead of weeks to start with the HttpServlet classes and just drop your handler method implementations into that....you'd only have to think explicitly about threads in one or two lines of code.
I think programmers worked right to the limits of the common OO languages and started pushing for even bigger 7-league boots: patterns. The books that are selling well among programmers are also an indication of continuous evolution to higher and higher level constructs as the building blocks. We have patterns cookbooks for several of our OO languages now and those really do help adept programmers cover a lot of ground. Code reuse was and still is the holy grail of effective use of software engineer's time. Functional re-use is epitomized in Clib and RogueWave. If C libraries and Posix had really solved the reuse problem well and delivered high levels of reuse in code, why would we have pushed on to C++, Java and an O'Reilly zoo of others? Objects delivered, or at least did better and patterns promise to go beyond that, makeing objects more generic and reusable...and THAT is how you solve problems better and better, THAT is the evolution of our craft.
The great classics of functional programming like Sedgwick's Algorithms tome were only the cookbooks for individual dishes, not the banquet that had to be delivered. And even that book got updated to OO with Algorithms in Java wherein, classes, not just methods, appear in the example code.
Also, choosing to make deep commentary on the suitability of a computer language as a tool for solving problems but then going light on the dominant OO languages is just too big an omission. e.g. on pg 24: Since we all mostly program in OO paradigms these days, the author's perspectives on C++, though they would lengthen an already long book, should have been prominently featured instead of downplayed.
additional data point: I ordered the new OpenBSD CDs and a T-shirt [I am such a tourist!] the day their puffy write-up hit /. It was a month before they showed up...from Alberta .CA not Berkely, CA.
... that is the way to go if you have the bandwidth and want your "free" OS PDQ.
Amazon.com these guys are not.
When I downloaded Mepis, I paid a bit extra for the high speed
Shuttleworth coughed up the $10m himself if I haven't misread TFA. Not just a beau geste, I hope. This directly addresses the concern a lot of us lukewarm Linux wannabe users have: product life. Where and when do Shuttleworth and co. get back their $10m marketing investment? [RH's support is not free, is that where Ubuntu is going to get paid back?] They must think so to lay out that much cash.
how the hell was my little post off topic?..lysenko was, for all the wrong reasons of course, one of the first biologists to claim genetics alone did not determine, at birth, all that an organism would be and do. That /is/ the topic of TFA!
In the early 80's, we worked at DEC when they were Wallstreet's darling and could do no wrong. My wife worked on CAD software at the mill in Maynard. Across the street was a goldsmith [Richard Goddard,who is still there]who, in addition to generally good and creative work in tradtional materials, was turning rejected microvax parts into ear rings. As manufactured, they had enough gold plate for the lead bonding that they actutually looked like jewelry when you pried them open. I bought her a pair. Now I guess the fashion world has come back around...she probably tossed them out.
I think the lesson is that
I'd hate to be a biologist just now finding out Lysenko might have been on to something.
TFA doesn't mention the vendor lock a certain proprietary OS has on applications. The lock is part marketing and part technology. The tecnology part is the lukewarm to downright hostile attitude of that proprietary OS vendor toward open API and FILE FORMAT standards for application classes the proprietary OS vendor did not even invent: word processors, spread sheets, business graphics. Most users need to get work done,not to hack...they couldn't care less what the os is if they know how to access, share and manipulate their business documents. They aren't programmers, they aren't sysadmins but they pay all the bills for software development directly or indirectly because they are the majority of the customers. Two areas where lots of innovation has proliferated in the market and throws its weight around as easily as products from the proprietary OS company is e-mail clients and browsers.
Why?
Because in these application spaces, well established standards preceded or were co-created with the applications: HTTP, HTML, XML, SMTP so no vendor lock, no user disincentive of fearing their choice of application will be unworkable or won't interoperate with other business users. What does posix or win32 mean to a user? Who smears the line between API and OS platform interface standards?
Where was that in TFA?
I pay universal service "tax" [its not a tax,..its, its uh, well see if you can get a sensible explanation out of YOUR phone company] for my phone useage. Didn't we just get a ruling that broadband is specically NOT common carrier, i.e. it is NOT the phone commpany?
"...fundamental structure of matter begins to crack..."
The fundamental structure of matter? That would be subatomic physics. Ed.s: please get someone with a science background on board!
I still have my old mac. I got my hands on the MS Basic for Mac in March of 84 and had to wait a month [and pay $3000] for delivery of the Mac and and imagewriter I. When the power supply fried, I upgraded to the 1 meg that had become available. It STILL runs and I STILL haven't filled up the 80meg outboard hard drive I added to it [perhaps as much an indication of how many apps DID NOT materialize for Mac users as of my overzealous housekeeping]. I eventually junked Basic for lightspeed C.
OMG, thats 20 years old!
Lets see what the false accept and false reject rates are...might wind up being a misfortune teller.
Thanks....I was not so well informed as you.
yeah and i kinda missed the point of TFA: proprietary office productivity tool formats were what the ministry has in mind. My reply mingles the idea of proprietary with the idea of copy protected...not that they are unrelated. But unless the Norwegian govt is concerned about exchanging audio and video content between citizens and branches of govt, MS formats is all that is threatened. I assumed he was an embarassment because, after all, he was charged, and, if he was ultimately found innocent, he was still not clearly innocent.