Evolution is the process of ongoing modification in existing life. We know a fair amount about it.
Abiogenesis is how the ball got rolling in the first place, and we have large areas of ignorance about that.
In short I would say that we have good reason for believing that we know the basic cause of the the changes believed to have occurred over the last few hundred million years. Before that we have a lot of basic open questions.
The distinction between micro and macro evolution is a line in the sand invented by creationists who realized that micro-evolution was absolutely provably.
However nobody has ever come up with any decent reason why gradual changes cannot add up to big ones. In fact we have excellent documentation that they can and do. And to top it off, the predicted rates of small changes combined with the independently measured timescales are in agreement with the large scale changes predicted.
In short claiming that there is a distinction is an intellectually dishonest attempt to redefine the debate in terms where people can be left with the impression that you proved something.
Thinking that the process of small changes cannot add up to big ones is a classic mistake of creationists. Sorry, there isn't a line in the sand. You don't want to believe that small changes from population to population cannot add up to a change in species? Well keep your head in the sand if you want, but you are wrong.
And giving people choice is wrong?? A person should not have to have creationism shoved down his or throat, just like a person should not have to the (the theory of) evolution shoved down his or her throat.
Letting people mistakenly believe that they can pick and choose what to call facts and calling the result still science is wrong. It is a disservice to students to cut science at a politically convenient point.
Truth is not a matter to be decided in the court of public opinion. The truth is that evolution is part and parcel of the scientific world-view. You can legitimately not teach science, or you can teach science and also teach evolution. But saying that you can validly teach one without the other is a pure and simple lie.
It deals with models of the world at various levels of confirmation.
The theory of evolution is not "proven fact", philosophers long ago proved that to be an unattainable goal. However an intelligent person today who is familiar with the facts can no more reasonably deny evolution than an educated scientist of the 1700's could deny that the Earth was round.
I was strongly reminded of what I see a lot of people doing. Putting things on the resume that they were exposed to, don't know, and cannot answer questions on when asked.
BTW I would be seriously impressed if I gave an interview to you on my particular area of expertise (Perl) and you knew more than I did.
Once again, sitting on the other side of the table as someone who asks technical questions, I don't care one fig whether you know the toolset. If you can learn, then I can quickly teach you that. But I do not know how to teach people good judgement and a sense for fundamentals.
I don't ever want to work at a job where I have to fix what you broke, and I doubt I will have to.
Yes, I work at one of that 10% of companies that actually asks techie questions in the interview. If you claim to know it, we will ask you about it. Whether or not we are interested in that skill. We don't care whether you know our skillset, we care that you can learn it. The simplest way to do that is to see how well you hve learned what else you said you knew.
If you listed stuff that you didn't learn, you might as well not show up.
And you know what? It is a lot more fun dealing with people with a clue than bullshit artists.
Caldera is the Linux distributer whose policy centers on targeting the Value Added Reseller channel. This is exactly the market that SCO has the best ties in. So this gets rid of the considerable stigma that was associated with SCO's repeated attempts to knife Linux in the back, while taking advantage of that channel.
Therefore this deal is a very natural fit.
Cheers, Ben
One point the reporter was too vague on
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 2
The reporter mentioned that DeCSS or other programs could be used to rip DVDs. I wish that it had been made crystal clear to the lay audience that programs had existed for quite a while before DeCSS that could rip the content and put it into another format.
They worked by stealing the decrypted content as it was being sent to the video card.
So the main thing that DeCSS adds to the mix is that it allows more fair use. The infringing uses of DeCSS were already possible prior to DeCSS!
People will pay for content. (At least I regularly do.) But they are generally not interested in paying a random person for a plentiful resource.
What this is is some moron seeing ebay, and seeing Napster, and asking himself how he can cash in on this phenomena without having a clue about what is going on. Some clueburgers.
1. The equivalent is available free. 2. He is at more legal risk than Napster.
What is going to happen is that nobody will bother to show up, and even if they did the lawyers would show up right after. And yet another huckster will be left thinking that he would have made it rich had he just had the right idea before someone else did.
Ever seen those web bots (like purl) that answer newbie questions on IRC channels?
A thought I have kicked around for a while now is that the same idea could be used to create an interactive "tip" program. Not enough to really teach you anything or get anything done, but enough to point you in the right direction when you are confused...
For instance a traditional wavelet transform cannot touch Wim's lifting scheme. There is no way that any standard that was written before he came up with it could have taken it into account.
I saw him give a talk on it a few years ago. One of the coolest visual effects that I have ever seen was a picture of a ballroom with a metal ball in the middle. He laid down a wavelet transform on the ball, and another on everything else. He strengthened the detail on the ball, and weakened it everywhere else. The room faded to a blur, while the ball was in some sort of super-focus. And the blur did not look like a smudge like you sometimes see, it looked exactly like things look when they are out of focus.
As for the data ordering, let me give you the issue in a simple form. When all is said and done a picture takes a certain amount of data. But data is not created equal. Some pieces (eg the most significant bit of the number for the average color of the whole picture) say more about the picture as a whole than others (eg the least significant bit distinguishing one dot from another).
Mathematically you can calculate the energy of each piece of information. Now wouldn't it be nice to send the information ordered from the most significant to the least significant bit? Then once the receiver has an acceptable picture they can just cut the transmission short.
OTOH now stop and think about this in context of a song. The basic tune at the end of the song is going to come through before the first word is clear! Streaming media really needs information sent in an order that is time-sensitive. Sure, some information can be sent ahead, but ideally you want to be able to have a fairly small buffer of stuff sent ahead, and be receiving the details in order of execution.
Compression works by coming up with a compact description of "predictable data". After a wavelet transform most of your data is predictable - it is in terms close to 0.
This allows wavelets to be used for efficient lossless compression (compress the small terms using their predictability) as well as decent lossy term (ah heck, throw away small terms).
Wavelet transform just turns data with local similarity of information (think about a picture for a second) into an alternate format where the fast majority of your information is squeezed into a small fraction of the terms.
It is useless on things like text where from point to point things jump around. Feeding a sentence of English into a wavelet transform would be silly.
Now what does this transform give you? Three things. First of all you now have your significant information in a small number of terms that can be easily analyzed. (Think speech recognition.) Secondly you now know that the majority of your data consists of numbers close to zero, which is something we know how to say efficiently. And thirdly we know what the least significant information is (all those little terms) and we can just chop it out for a lossy algorithm.
So wavelets are useful for data processing (visual and auditory recognition, etc), lossless compression, and lossy compression of visual, audio, and other similar data. It is particularly valuable with data that has a mix of boundaries and smooth regions. (Fourier transforms are good on smooth regions only.)
With wavelets at a very basic level there are too many options. Wavelet researchers don't talk about a wavelet transform, they have entire families of wavelet transforms algorithms to argue over. Each is better in different circumstances.
This makes standardization harder. There are a lot of tradeoffs. Do we go with the one that works better on smooth data? Or on boundaries? The one which is symmetric so that the errors it produces tend to be harder for the human ear to pick up? Or the one which is orthogonal, giving it a ton of nice mathematical properties? Shall we have a simple wavelet transform? Or a dynamic wavelet packet transform? Do we work from the most significant bit of data to the least? Do we try to order the data in some way? (The first allows for bandwidth to determine the compression level chosen, the second is key for streaming output.)
The basic idea of a wavelet is very flexible. So you get a lot of choices, none of which is obviously better than the others. This makes it hard to decide which should be made a standard...
But the FFT has a much better constant, and so is generally faster on real-world data sets.
The real win with wavelets isn't speed, it is the match to the real world data. A sharp boundary in the FFT has to have a "long tail" in the coefficients, causing Fourier transforms to suffer from things like the Gibbs effect. Wavelets allow you to make a deliberate tradeoff between smoothness and sharp boundaries. So more information is in fewer coefficients.
BTW a lot of the better wavelet algorithms (eg wavelet packets) are no longer O(n). Why not? Because they allow you to dynamically choose the best representation out of a family of representations. That extra freedom requires processing time...
There are exceptions. The ones that I know of are small, niche publishers. But then again being small, being in a niche, they have to do what they can to compete with "the big boys".
For instance in the Celtic category, Green Linnet makes it a policy to make available (unfortunately not in MP3 format though - their clues are limited) all of their songs.
Here is an essay that gives some background for you. With Google you can easily track down any references that look interesting. For instance here is what Jefferson had to say on the topic. The original rationale is what he said, and by their definition it has definitely been corrupted.
For instance the record industry bullies musicians into signing, and then owns the copyrights for the rest of that musician's life. Read that description and tell me that the system has *not* been corrupted!
In short, please don't mistake your ignorance on the topic for his.
Intellectual property is an artificially granted monopoly for the purpose of encouraging people to create and give away useful ideas. Key to that concept was a limited term. Today the industry is doing everything to make that term "forever minus a day" (in Jack Valenti's words).
Check out Microwindows. If you need an interface for an application which may run on a Linux PDA, you are likely to use this little beauty. Plus anyone who thinks that X is awful should take note. By developing things using Microwindows you can get applications - today - that run under X and also can run with a far lighter windowing interface...
I said 4% of the desktop market. Not server market. Desktops. Up from an estimated 0.6% the year before IIRC.
It has a nice big chunk of the server market. That is not counted in this figure.
Given as little as 50% growth/year (observed growth has been exceeding 100%), it will be hitting 10% in a couple of years from now.
Given current trends in 2 years we could see an absolute majority of CPUs that are being sold running Linux in the embedded space. Linux looks to again be a significant portion of the small server space. Clustering technology has already made it viable for a lot of high performance computing tasks, and even in its weakest area - the desktop - it looks like it will have noticable penetration.
Of all of these initiatives the weakest is the desktop. OTOH the gaming market is quite aware that Microsoft's long-term game plan is to kill the Win9x line whenever it can. Given the choice between Linux and NT for a gaming platform, there is a real chance that Linux will win.
And yes, the chip companies are quite aware of these trends and make plans accordingly. Why do you think that Intel has been so supportive of Linux on the Itanium?
Linux is currently estimated at 4% of the desktop.
That is substantially better than the 1% figure using open source that you pulled out of your rear end. By the end of the year it could be better still.
At current exponential growth rates Linux will be an economically significant niche for chip makers very soon. (It is already significant in their planning.)
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is the process of ongoing modification in existing life. We know a fair amount about it.
Abiogenesis is how the ball got rolling in the first place, and we have large areas of ignorance about that.
In short I would say that we have good reason for believing that we know the basic cause of the the changes believed to have occurred over the last few hundred million years. Before that we have a lot of basic open questions.
Cheers,
Ben
The distinction between micro and macro evolution is a line in the sand invented by creationists who realized that micro-evolution was absolutely provably.
However nobody has ever come up with any decent reason why gradual changes cannot add up to big ones. In fact we have excellent documentation that they can and do. And to top it off, the predicted rates of small changes combined with the independently measured timescales are in agreement with the large scale changes predicted.
In short claiming that there is a distinction is an intellectually dishonest attempt to redefine the debate in terms where people can be left with the impression that you proved something.
Regards,
Ben
Thinking that the process of small changes cannot add up to big ones is a classic mistake of creationists. Sorry, there isn't a line in the sand. You don't want to believe that small changes from population to population cannot add up to a change in species? Well keep your head in the sand if you want, but you are wrong.
Regards,
Ben
And giving people choice is wrong?? A person should not have to have creationism shoved down his or throat, just like a person should not have to the (the theory of) evolution shoved down his or her throat.
Letting people mistakenly believe that they can pick and choose what to call facts and calling the result still science is wrong. It is a disservice to students to cut science at a politically convenient point.
Truth is not a matter to be decided in the court of public opinion. The truth is that evolution is part and parcel of the scientific world-view. You can legitimately not teach science, or you can teach science and also teach evolution. But saying that you can validly teach one without the other is a pure and simple lie.
Regards,
Ben
It deals with models of the world at various levels of confirmation.
The theory of evolution is not "proven fact", philosophers long ago proved that to be an unattainable goal. However an intelligent person today who is familiar with the facts can no more reasonably deny evolution than an educated scientist of the 1700's could deny that the Earth was round.
Cheers,
Ben
I was strongly reminded of what I see a lot of people doing. Putting things on the resume that they were exposed to, don't know, and cannot answer questions on when asked.
BTW I would be seriously impressed if I gave an interview to you on my particular area of expertise (Perl) and you knew more than I did.
Once again, sitting on the other side of the table as someone who asks technical questions, I don't care one fig whether you know the toolset. If you can learn, then I can quickly teach you that. But I do not know how to teach people good judgement and a sense for fundamentals.
Cheers,
Ben
You are thinking from the PoV of the person trying to get the job. I am thinking from the PoV of the person trying to fill the job.
The fact that the average interviewer doesn't know what to look for isn't very interesting to me...
Cheers,
Ben
People who go with what they think they know (but don't) are simply a hazard to your code-base.
A person who can recognize and be up front on their ignorance is much more valuable than someone who tries to BS their way through.
Cheers,
Ben
I don't ever want to work at a job where I have to fix what you broke, and I doubt I will have to.
Yes, I work at one of that 10% of companies that actually asks techie questions in the interview. If you claim to know it, we will ask you about it. Whether or not we are interested in that skill. We don't care whether you know our skillset, we care that you can learn it. The simplest way to do that is to see how well you hve learned what else you said you knew.
If you listed stuff that you didn't learn, you might as well not show up.
And you know what? It is a lot more fun dealing with people with a clue than bullshit artists.
Regards,
Ben
Caldera is the Linux distributer whose policy centers on targeting the Value Added Reseller channel. This is exactly the market that SCO has the best ties in. So this gets rid of the considerable stigma that was associated with SCO's repeated attempts to knife Linux in the back, while taking advantage of that channel.
Therefore this deal is a very natural fit.
Cheers,
Ben
The reporter mentioned that DeCSS or other programs could be used to rip DVDs. I wish that it had been made crystal clear to the lay audience that programs had existed for quite a while before DeCSS that could rip the content and put it into another format.
They worked by stealing the decrypted content as it was being sent to the video card.
So the main thing that DeCSS adds to the mix is that it allows more fair use. The infringing uses of DeCSS were already possible prior to DeCSS!
Why didn't they go after the earlier programs?
Cheers,
Ben
People will pay for content. (At least I regularly do.) But they are generally not interested in paying a random person for a plentiful resource.
What this is is some moron seeing ebay, and seeing Napster, and asking himself how he can cash in on this phenomena without having a clue about what is going on. Some clueburgers.
1. The equivalent is available free.
2. He is at more legal risk than Napster.
What is going to happen is that nobody will bother to show up, and even if they did the lawyers would show up right after. And yet another huckster will be left thinking that he would have made it rich had he just had the right idea before someone else did.
*sigh*
Ben
I mean more like...
m l.
>tip Where can I learn about firewalls?
I have heard good things about http://www.sanyips.com/slug/tutorials/ipchains.ht
You ask it, it volunteers a real reference (if it can).
Cheers,
Ben
Ever seen those web bots (like purl) that answer newbie questions on IRC channels?
A thought I have kicked around for a while now is that the same idea could be used to create an interactive "tip" program. Not enough to really teach you anything or get anything done, but enough to point you in the right direction when you are confused...
Cheers,
Ben
For instance a traditional wavelet transform cannot touch Wim's lifting scheme. There is no way that any standard that was written before he came up with it could have taken it into account.
I saw him give a talk on it a few years ago. One of the coolest visual effects that I have ever seen was a picture of a ballroom with a metal ball in the middle. He laid down a wavelet transform on the ball, and another on everything else. He strengthened the detail on the ball, and weakened it everywhere else. The room faded to a blur, while the ball was in some sort of super-focus. And the blur did not look like a smudge like you sometimes see, it looked exactly like things look when they are out of focus.
As for the data ordering, let me give you the issue in a simple form. When all is said and done a picture takes a certain amount of data. But data is not created equal. Some pieces (eg the most significant bit of the number for the average color of the whole picture) say more about the picture as a whole than others (eg the least significant bit distinguishing one dot from another).
Mathematically you can calculate the energy of each piece of information. Now wouldn't it be nice to send the information ordered from the most significant to the least significant bit? Then once the receiver has an acceptable picture they can just cut the transmission short.
OTOH now stop and think about this in context of a song. The basic tune at the end of the song is going to come through before the first word is clear! Streaming media really needs information sent in an order that is time-sensitive. Sure, some information can be sent ahead, but ideally you want to be able to have a fairly small buffer of stuff sent ahead, and be receiving the details in order of execution.
Cheers,
Ben
Compression works by coming up with a compact description of "predictable data". After a wavelet transform most of your data is predictable - it is in terms close to 0.
This allows wavelets to be used for efficient lossless compression (compress the small terms using their predictability) as well as decent lossy term (ah heck, throw away small terms).
Cheers,
Ben
Wavelet transform just turns data with local similarity of information (think about a picture for a second) into an alternate format where the fast majority of your information is squeezed into a small fraction of the terms.
It is useless on things like text where from point to point things jump around. Feeding a sentence of English into a wavelet transform would be silly.
Now what does this transform give you? Three things. First of all you now have your significant information in a small number of terms that can be easily analyzed. (Think speech recognition.) Secondly you now know that the majority of your data consists of numbers close to zero, which is something we know how to say efficiently. And thirdly we know what the least significant information is (all those little terms) and we can just chop it out for a lossy algorithm.
So wavelets are useful for data processing (visual and auditory recognition, etc), lossless compression, and lossy compression of visual, audio, and other similar data. It is particularly valuable with data that has a mix of boundaries and smooth regions. (Fourier transforms are good on smooth regions only.)
Cheers,
Ben
With wavelets at a very basic level there are too many options. Wavelet researchers don't talk about a wavelet transform, they have entire families of wavelet transforms algorithms to argue over. Each is better in different circumstances.
This makes standardization harder. There are a lot of tradeoffs. Do we go with the one that works better on smooth data? Or on boundaries? The one which is symmetric so that the errors it produces tend to be harder for the human ear to pick up? Or the one which is orthogonal, giving it a ton of nice mathematical properties? Shall we have a simple wavelet transform? Or a dynamic wavelet packet transform? Do we work from the most significant bit of data to the least? Do we try to order the data in some way? (The first allows for bandwidth to determine the compression level chosen, the second is key for streaming output.)
The basic idea of a wavelet is very flexible. So you get a lot of choices, none of which is obviously better than the others. This makes it hard to decide which should be made a standard...
Cheers,
Ben
Sure, wavelets are O(n), FFT is O(n log(n)).
But the FFT has a much better constant, and so is generally faster on real-world data sets.
The real win with wavelets isn't speed, it is the match to the real world data. A sharp boundary in the FFT has to have a "long tail" in the coefficients, causing Fourier transforms to suffer from things like the Gibbs effect. Wavelets allow you to make a deliberate tradeoff between smoothness and sharp boundaries. So more information is in fewer coefficients.
BTW a lot of the better wavelet algorithms (eg wavelet packets) are no longer O(n). Why not? Because they allow you to dynamically choose the best representation out of a family of representations. That extra freedom requires processing time...
Cheers,
Ben
There are exceptions. The ones that I know of are small, niche publishers. But then again being small, being in a niche, they have to do what they can to compete with "the big boys".
:-)
For instance in the Celtic category, Green Linnet makes it a policy to make available (unfortunately not in MP3 format though - their clues are limited) all of their songs.
Strangely enough, I buy the CDs anyways...
Cheers,
Ben
Here is an essay that gives some background for you. With Google you can easily track down any references that look interesting. For instance here is what Jefferson had to say on the topic. The original rationale is what he said, and by their definition it has definitely been corrupted.
For instance the record industry bullies musicians into signing, and then owns the copyrights for the rest of that musician's life. Read that description and tell me that the system has *not* been corrupted!
In short, please don't mistake your ignorance on the topic for his.
Intellectual property is an artificially granted monopoly for the purpose of encouraging people to create and give away useful ideas. Key to that concept was a limited term. Today the industry is doing everything to make that term "forever minus a day" (in Jack Valenti's words).
That is too much.
Regards,
Ben
Several years ago there was an excellent essay on ubiquitous technology, it was called Calm Computing.
Well worth the read.
Cheers,
Ben
Check out Microwindows. If you need an interface for an application which may run on a Linux PDA, you are likely to use this little beauty. Plus anyone who thinks that X is awful should take note. By developing things using Microwindows you can get applications - today - that run under X and also can run with a far lighter windowing interface...
Cheers,
Ben
I said 4% of the desktop market. Not server market. Desktops. Up from an estimated 0.6% the year before IIRC.
It has a nice big chunk of the server market. That is not counted in this figure.
Given as little as 50% growth/year (observed growth has been exceeding 100%), it will be hitting 10% in a couple of years from now.
Given current trends in 2 years we could see an absolute majority of CPUs that are being sold running Linux in the embedded space. Linux looks to again be a significant portion of the small server space. Clustering technology has already made it viable for a lot of high performance computing tasks, and even in its weakest area - the desktop - it looks like it will have noticable penetration.
Of all of these initiatives the weakest is the desktop. OTOH the gaming market is quite aware that Microsoft's long-term game plan is to kill the Win9x line whenever it can. Given the choice between Linux and NT for a gaming platform, there is a real chance that Linux will win.
And yes, the chip companies are quite aware of these trends and make plans accordingly. Why do you think that Intel has been so supportive of Linux on the Itanium?
Cheers,
Ben
Linux is currently estimated at 4% of the desktop.
That is substantially better than the 1% figure using open source that you pulled out of your rear end. By the end of the year it could be better still.
At current exponential growth rates Linux will be an economically significant niche for chip makers very soon. (It is already significant in their planning.)
Regards,
Ben