It seems that karma expires over a fixed time horizon. Is this true? If so then could you change that to a horizon of a fixed number of posts?
As things stand someone who posts occasionally but has consistently excellent posts will be less likely to be automoderated up than someone who posts frequently and has OK to good posts. But I would prefer to see the consistently excellent posts automoderated up, and the frequency of posting not matter.
Thanks, Ben
PS Any chance of adding a CODE tag one of these days...?
Please read the relevant FAQs before spouting off again. Evolution does not contradict evidence, logic, religion, or the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution and abiogenesis are different issues, and Behe's book is about the latter, not the former. Punctuated Equilibrium, whatever caricatures you may have heard notwithstanding, is really Darwinian evolution. And please don't say, "It is just a theory" or "What evidence do they really have?" until you have actually looked at what evidence has been uncovered from the combined efforts of several scientific fields for 150 years.
Oh, and those who claim that there is a debate, there is not. The last serious scientific challenge to the theory of Evolution was in the first decade of this century. (Brownie points to anyone who knows the substance of the challenge and/or the resolution!) If you think that you can turn up quotes contradicting this, check the original reference for the quotes before repeating them. There are a lot of out-of-context quotes which are spouted that do not - in context - mean what Creationists claim that they do. And there are a lot of upset scientists who are good and tired of being misquoted.
In a talk he gave a week ago, Bob Young mentioned in passing that SAP apparently has 5 full-time people working on Linux. Fixing bugs, adding features, finding performance tweaks to help SAP run faster on Linux.
It is nice to see that this is paying off. Perhaps some other application vendors will get the point?
A buffer overflow that they know about, is not publicized and is not getting fixed.
In fact this is absolutely indistinguishable from an honest mistake of a sort that is so common that nobody would think twice. But still it allows any access that they want.
Now all of that said, there is more. Remember a long time ago that Bruce Perens came out with warning that a proprietary company could submit a patch with a backdoor which they could then exploit later against OSS? Remember how he got flamed over it? People were saying, "What are they going to do? If they put in an if condition, anyone can see it and remove it. They would never do that!"
Um, not quite. They could do it by putting a buffer overflow in a known place. It looks just like an honest mistake, there are lots more just like it scattered through plenty of OSS projects. If caught it is a minor oops, not even a hint of suspicion.
The moral is that as long as buffer overflows are accepted and common, backdoors for those we don't want to have them will be easy to come by.
The Gaussian distribution is 'the universal distribution' in the following sense: Consider a series of events that generate some value. For example, rolling of a dice, which generates a value from 1 to 6. Assume that these events are independent, meaning that, say, the 10th outcome will in no way influence, say, the 20th outcome. Now take the first N outcomes, add them together and divide by N. The larger you take N, the better the distribution of this average follows the Gaussian distribution. (And I should add that there are some mild conditions that have to be satisfied).
Perhaps you should get the calculation right. You have to subtract N times the expected value, then divide by the square root of N to see a real Gaussian distribution emerge.
Now what are they saying here? That the 'rareness' of species does not follow the Gaussian distribution? How do you quantify 'rareness'? How can this satisfy any kind of independence condition (where there's one rare animal, there are bound to be more).
What's the weirdest of all, is the statement that rare species are more common that expected. What a joke! If something is more common than expected, then by definition it is not as rare as you thought!
I would have thought that to be pretty darned obvious. The species is rare if there are few members of that species. Their claim is that there are more species with only a few members than one would expect. (My retort is that humans have a lot to do with how many rare species there are!)
Let me say that again slowly.
Step 1: Categorize species based on how many members they have.
Step 2: Look at the distribution of species by the population of the species.
The non-technical articles don't tell us anything useful when it comes to judging their math. But given your math, when it comes to labelling things mathematical nonsense I can only think, pot, kettle, black.
Normal distributions only make sense if your fundamental operation is addition. If, however, your fundamental operation is multiplying the random variables of interest, then you get a distribution whose logarithm is normal. Hence the name lognormal.
This is just as natural as a normal distribution, and appears more often than straight normal distributions in subjects like finance and stochastic analysis.
I had not heard about the New Scientist article, but I have known about Benford's law for some years. Indeed without a description of what curve these people think that they have, I am not sure how it *differs* from Benford's law in practical import!
Indeed I suspect that they just have some variation on a lognormal curve. (Which does indeed show up in many different places.)
Incidentally one of the few things that I disagree with in Knuth is his presentation on Benford's law. Sure they toy mathematical model he generates is fun and all, but he says nothing about why it applies to the real world. And hence his "proof" says nothing about why real numbers that appear in real computers follow Benford's law. I personally find the general explanation in the article you listed to be far more convincing...
Friend of mine a few weeks ago when it was really hot. He was running Linux on a box with 256 M of RAM, and with / on a RAID 1 system. On a very hot day.
His system began acting very strangely. Strangely as in, "ls" would work on a particular directory, but "ls -lt" would not. After some playing around he realized that he was not hearing his drives and he had some *ahem* interesting looking errors in his logs.
Well he found out that RAID 1 does you no good when your disks are next to each other and both overheat at once! So he has no hard drives and is only running because Linux caches stuff for you.
Hmmm...
Well first step is to bring over a fan.
The second step is to check that the "mount" command still works, and to mount a CD-ROM with all utilities working. That gives him access to known working copies of basic utilities that he needs.
The third step is to take one (non-functioning) drive offline.
The fourth is to bring it back online.
Then he takes the other drive offline and voila! He now has a working RAID system. 1 drive and it works. Well as you can guess, Linux cheers and immediately starts flushing to disk everything that have been stored up for a while.
Then he brings up the other disk, synchs them, and breathes a sigh of relief.
So, when was the last time that you lost your root filesystem and recovered without a reboot?
In case you did not notice, RedHat is funding a security audit of their distribution. As a result there are many announcements of security holes - but this is a side-effect of improving security.
OpenBSD did this a while ago you say? Sure. But read those announcements because if you are using the same applications that the Linux folks are, then you are vulnerable. Security holes are things that tend to build up over time.
In fact security is a constant problem with the *nix organization. If you want to see a fundamental design which can lead to far more security than either OpenBSD or Linux, take a look at EROS.
(Solution to root-exploits, get rid of the possibility!)
I have a list of easy features to request, and nowhere to request them. But an ongoing discussion would quickly turn unwieldly. Instead I would prefer to see a link for requests, with responses given and regularly interesting requests with answers returned.
In case anyone is interested, here are my requests:
- Allow the <CODE> tag.
- Replace leading white-space with (allowing indentation to work in Plain Old Text mode). I will even gladly supply the needed regular expression to do this.
- Add a simpler means of giving this kind of feedback.:-)
It depends upon what you want to do. The basic problem you face here is that NT assumes single-user. If you don't want to use Terminal Server then you *will* need 5 copies of NT going. But here are some options.
If you really want to be able to throw the desktop remotely, look at VNC.
If the application that you are interested in can run on Linux (or has a Linux-friendly replacement), you can cheerfully install the application on one Linux box, run multiple copies of VNC server, and get the capabilities of NT Terminal Server with Citrix MetaFrame with the only software cost being the cost of the application. And your uptime will be better, bandwidth usage will be lower, and the result can be used from your choice of OS.
You don't even need VNC if you are willing to use it from a client that runs X-Windows. Any window can be thrown elsewhere. In a Linux environment *every* machine is the equivalent of NT Terminal Server. But unless you install software locally, Windows will not act as a client.
VMWare in Linux is mainly useful for dealing with a mixed Windows/Linux environment. With VNC you can throw a window elsewhere. However it will show up as a window containing Linux desktop within which you have a window whose contents are the NT machine. Can you say "blech"? For that set-up I would suggest using straight VNC on NT (unforunately you will then pay hardware rather than software).
Of course, as I mentioned before, in an all-Linux environment you would have had this functionality without needing additional software or multiple machines.
The question was what kinds of additional documentation are available to help an outside person get up to speed on how it works, and figure out where they can start pitching in. Getting source is not the problem, reading all of it is (however) untenable.
By any measure that I know, kids today are worse educated than kids 20-30 years ago. Sure, there has been grade inflation, and the SATs were adjusted a few years back to stop the average scores sinking to ridiculously low levels, but that does not reflect reality folks.
And your kids who know "calculus, elementary diff eq's and physics", don't. Trust me, I taught introductory Calculus to them at Dartmouth College not that long ago. They thought they knew it, but what had happened is that they had not even learned algebra and had a few muddled concepts about Calculus that got in the way. Most of them would have been better prepared with another year of algebra. And the kid who thought he had taken Calculus before but still did not know why -1 times -1 is 1 could have used some elementary arithmetic!
For instance the comparisons with other primates drove home how deep the connection is across primates between sex, violence, and domination. We are far more subtle about it than most (when was the last time a boss told you to bend over while he faked sex on you?), but I don't think our choice of choice of a four letter word is any accident...
Of course Sagan and Druyan don't come out and say that so bluntly. But after the wealth of behavioral information it is hard to draw a different conclusion. No matter how much you might (like me and from the intro I suspect the authors as well) prefer to draw a different one.
You do have evidence against what is today a very solidly accepted piece of research? Or do you only know how to throw stupid insults while hiding behind anonymity?
Perhaps because I have known a lot of people who smoke pot? Perhaps because I have known more people who died from alcohol and cigarettes than pot? Perhaps because I know people who have successfully used it as medicine? Perhaps because I know that doctors seriously discuss the medical problems and benefits and say nothing that agrees with your crap?
Try all of the above.
The stuff is not great for you. Smoking it all of the time does affect most people's motivation negatively. I personally think that it encourages escapism. However it is not a great evil and it is certainly less harmful than alcohol. Additionally the plant itself has lots of "non-recreational" uses (including a very valuable fruit and excellent fibre for making paper, rope, etc).
By contrast criminalizing it brings all of the negative effects that black markets always bring. And the much vaunted "gateway" effect IMNSHO is more an effect of kids finding out that adults are lying about one drug (like you just did), and then leaping to the erroneous conclusion that they lied about the others. By the time they find out that the effects of cocaine, heroin, etc were not exaggerated it is too late.
Feynman's interest in hallucinations got him disqualified from the US Army in WW II! Absolutely hilarious story. You can read the details in Surely you must be Joking, Mr. Feynman...
Carl Sagan's work seemed pretty left-wing. And considering who his wife was, it would be pretty astounding if he was stuck up about it.
Incidentally he and Anne also co-wrote Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors which IMHO is one of the most interesting and disturbing books that I have read. Highly recommended.
To the best of my knowledge, more intellectual energy is being thrown at the problem of factoring in the mathematical community than the NSA and friends can probably muster. For that reason I doubt that they can get, let alone maintain, a significant lead for very long on the theoretical side.
However on the practical side using routine application of current theory and sufficient money (ie hardware) you can indeed get better results than are publically available. It is a safe bet that various 3 letter agencies have made this investment and can crank through tremendous volumes of material encrypted with legally exportable encryption.
Incidentally anyone with any questions on encryption should wander over to the RSA folks.
Slashdot Mirror
perl -e 'print map{pack("B8", $_)} split /\s+/, '
The map statement is so handy...
It seems that karma expires over a fixed time horizon. Is this true? If so then could you change that to a horizon of a fixed number of posts?
As things stand someone who posts occasionally but has consistently excellent posts will be less likely to be automoderated up than someone who posts frequently and has OK to good posts. But I would prefer to see the consistently excellent posts automoderated up, and the frequency of posting not matter.
Thanks,
Ben
PS Any chance of adding a CODE tag one of these days...?
Please read the relevant FAQs before spouting off again. Evolution does not contradict evidence, logic, religion, or the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution and abiogenesis are different issues, and Behe's book is about the latter, not the former. Punctuated Equilibrium, whatever caricatures you may have heard notwithstanding, is really Darwinian evolution. And please don't say, "It is just a theory" or "What evidence do they really have?" until you have actually looked at what evidence has been uncovered from the combined efforts of several scientific fields for 150 years.
Oh, and those who claim that there is a debate, there is not. The last serious scientific challenge to the theory of Evolution was in the first decade of this century. (Brownie points to anyone who knows the substance of the challenge and/or the resolution!) If you think that you can turn up quotes contradicting this, check the original reference for the quotes before repeating them. There are a lot of out-of-context quotes which are spouted that do not - in context - mean what Creationists claim that they do. And there are a lot of upset scientists who are good and tired of being misquoted.
So please, read those FAQs before posting.
Thank you,
Ben Tilly
In a talk he gave a week ago, Bob Young mentioned in passing that SAP apparently has 5 full-time people working on Linux. Fixing bugs, adding features, finding performance tweaks to help SAP run faster on Linux.
It is nice to see that this is paying off. Perhaps some other application vendors will get the point?
:-)
Ben
Nobody was hitting "Enter" and it was being unhelpful for travellers...which is the same diff to me.
Ben
A buffer overflow.
A buffer overflow that they know about, is not publicized and is not getting fixed.
In fact this is absolutely indistinguishable from an honest mistake of a sort that is so common that nobody would think twice. But still it allows any access that they want.
Now all of that said, there is more. Remember a long time ago that Bruce Perens came out with warning that a proprietary company could submit a patch with a backdoor which they could then exploit later against OSS? Remember how he got flamed over it? People were saying, "What are they going to do? If they put in an if condition, anyone can see it and remove it. They would never do that!"
Um, not quite. They could do it by putting a buffer overflow in a known place. It looks just like an honest mistake, there are lots more just like it scattered through plenty of OSS projects. If caught it is a minor oops, not even a hint of suspicion.
The moral is that as long as buffer overflows are accepted and common, backdoors for those we don't want to have them will be easy to come by.
Cheers,
Ben
The Gaussian distribution is 'the universal distribution' in the following sense:
Consider a series of events that generate some value. For example, rolling of a dice, which generates a value from 1 to 6. Assume that these events are independent, meaning that, say, the 10th outcome will in no way influence, say, the 20th outcome. Now take the first N outcomes, add them together and divide by N. The larger you take N, the better the distribution of this average follows the Gaussian distribution. (And I should add that there are some mild conditions that have to be satisfied).
Perhaps you should get the calculation right. You have to subtract N times the expected value, then divide by the square root of N to see a real Gaussian distribution emerge.
Now what are they saying here? That the 'rareness' of species does not follow the Gaussian distribution? How do you quantify 'rareness'? How can this satisfy any kind of independence condition (where there's one rare animal, there are bound to be more).
What's the weirdest of all, is the statement that rare species are more common that expected. What a joke! If something is more common than expected, then by definition it is not as rare as you thought!
I would have thought that to be pretty darned obvious. The species is rare if there are few members of that species. Their claim is that there are more species with only a few members than one would expect. (My retort is that humans have a lot to do with how many rare species there are!)
Let me say that again slowly.
Step 1: Categorize species based on how many members they have.
Step 2: Look at the distribution of species by the population of the species.
The non-technical articles don't tell us anything useful when it comes to judging their math. But given your math, when it comes to labelling things mathematical nonsense I can only think, pot, kettle, black.
Sincerely,
Ben
Just in case people don't know where in the heck the above jokes are coming from, go out, buy some books by Terry Pratchett, and have a ball...
Ben
Normal distributions only make sense if your fundamental operation is addition. If, however, your fundamental operation is multiplying the random variables of interest, then you get a distribution whose logarithm is normal. Hence the name lognormal.
This is just as natural as a normal distribution, and appears more often than straight normal distributions in subjects like finance and stochastic analysis.
Cheers,
Ben
I had not heard about the New Scientist article, but I have known about Benford's law for some years. Indeed without a description of what curve these people think that they have, I am not sure how it *differs* from Benford's law in practical import!
Indeed I suspect that they just have some variation on a lognormal curve. (Which does indeed show up in many different places.)
Incidentally one of the few things that I disagree with in Knuth is his presentation on Benford's law. Sure they toy mathematical model he generates is fun and all, but he says nothing about why it applies to the real world. And hence his "proof" says nothing about why real numbers that appear in real computers follow Benford's law. I personally find the general explanation in the article you listed to be far more convincing...
Cheers,
Ben
Friend of mine a few weeks ago when it was really hot. He was running Linux on a box with 256 M of RAM, and with / on a RAID 1 system. On a very hot day.
His system began acting very strangely. Strangely as in, "ls" would work on a particular directory, but "ls -lt" would not. After some playing around he realized that he was not hearing his drives and he had some *ahem* interesting looking errors in his logs.
Well he found out that RAID 1 does you no good when your disks are next to each other and both overheat at once! So he has no hard drives and is only running because Linux caches stuff for you.
Hmmm...
Well first step is to bring over a fan.
The second step is to check that the "mount" command still works, and to mount a CD-ROM with all utilities working. That gives him access to known working copies of basic utilities that he needs.
The third step is to take one (non-functioning) drive offline.
The fourth is to bring it back online.
Then he takes the other drive offline and voila! He now has a working RAID system. 1 drive and it works. Well as you can guess, Linux cheers and immediately starts flushing to disk everything that have been stored up for a while.
Then he brings up the other disk, synchs them, and breathes a sigh of relief.
So, when was the last time that you lost your root filesystem and recovered without a reboot?
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
In case you did not notice, RedHat is funding a security audit of their distribution. As a result there are many announcements of security holes - but this is a side-effect of improving security.
OpenBSD did this a while ago you say? Sure. But read those announcements because if you are using the same applications that the Linux folks are, then you are vulnerable. Security holes are things that tend to build up over time.
In fact security is a constant problem with the *nix organization. If you want to see a fundamental design which can lead to far more security than either OpenBSD or Linux, take a look at EROS.
(Solution to root-exploits, get rid of the possibility!)
Cheers,
Ben
I have a list of easy features to request, and nowhere to request them. But an ongoing discussion would quickly turn unwieldly. Instead I would prefer to see a link for requests, with responses given and regularly interesting requests with answers returned.
:-)
In case anyone is interested, here are my requests:
- Allow the <CODE> tag.
- Replace leading white-space with (allowing indentation to work in Plain Old Text mode). I will even gladly supply the needed regular expression to do this.
- Add a simpler means of giving this kind of feedback.
Ben
It depends upon what you want to do. The basic problem you face here is that NT assumes single-user. If you don't want to use Terminal Server then you *will* need 5 copies of NT going. But here are some options.
If you really want to be able to throw the desktop remotely, look at VNC.
If the application that you are interested in can run on Linux (or has a Linux-friendly replacement), you can cheerfully install the application on one Linux box, run multiple copies of VNC server, and get the capabilities of NT Terminal Server with Citrix MetaFrame with the only software cost being the cost of the application. And your uptime will be better, bandwidth usage will be lower, and the result can be used from your choice of OS.
You don't even need VNC if you are willing to use it from a client that runs X-Windows. Any window can be thrown elsewhere. In a Linux environment *every* machine is the equivalent of NT Terminal Server. But unless you install software locally, Windows will not act as a client.
VMWare in Linux is mainly useful for dealing with a mixed Windows/Linux environment. With VNC you can throw a window elsewhere. However it will show up as a window containing Linux desktop within which you have a window whose contents are the NT machine. Can you say "blech"? For that set-up I would suggest using straight VNC on NT (unforunately you will then pay hardware rather than software).
Of course, as I mentioned before, in an all-Linux environment you would have had this functionality without needing additional software or multiple machines.
Regards,
Ben
The question was what kinds of additional documentation are available to help an outside person get up to speed on how it works, and figure out where they can start pitching in. Getting source is not the problem, reading all of it is (however) untenable.
Ben
Is it larger than a factor of 2? I am willing to put up with a factor of 2 difference if it buys significant speed...
Ben
By any measure that I know, kids today are worse educated than kids 20-30 years ago. Sure, there has been grade inflation, and the SATs were adjusted a few years back to stop the average scores sinking to ridiculously low levels, but that does not reflect reality folks.
And your kids who know "calculus, elementary diff eq's and physics", don't. Trust me, I taught introductory Calculus to them at Dartmouth College not that long ago. They thought they knew it, but what had happened is that they had not even learned algebra and had a few muddled concepts about Calculus that got in the way. Most of them would have been better prepared with another year of algebra. And the kid who thought he had taken Calculus before but still did not know why -1 times -1 is 1 could have used some elementary arithmetic!
Sincerely,
Ben
I liked Tessa's comments about the affair.
Hmmm..transparent windows over a Scottish loch with waves gently rippling? No *wonder* he is happy with the speed!
:-)
Ben
For instance the comparisons with other primates drove home how deep the connection is across primates between sex, violence, and domination. We are far more subtle about it than most (when was the last time a boss told you to bend over while he faked sex on you?), but I don't think our choice of choice of a four letter word is any accident...
Of course Sagan and Druyan don't come out and say that so bluntly. But after the wealth of behavioral information it is hard to draw a different conclusion. No matter how much you might (like me and from the intro I suspect the authors as well) prefer to draw a different one.
Regards,
Ben
You do have evidence against what is today a very solidly accepted piece of research? Or do you only know how to throw stupid insults while hiding behind anonymity?
Ben
Try this one.
Cheers,
Ben
Perhaps because I have known a lot of people who smoke pot? Perhaps because I have known more people who died from alcohol and cigarettes than pot? Perhaps because I know people who have successfully used it as medicine? Perhaps because I know that doctors seriously discuss the medical problems and benefits and say nothing that agrees with your crap?
Try all of the above.
The stuff is not great for you. Smoking it all of the time does affect most people's motivation negatively. I personally think that it encourages escapism. However it is not a great evil and it is certainly less harmful than alcohol. Additionally the plant itself has lots of "non-recreational" uses (including a very valuable fruit and excellent fibre for making paper, rope, etc).
By contrast criminalizing it brings all of the negative effects that black markets always bring. And the much vaunted "gateway" effect IMNSHO is more an effect of kids finding out that adults are lying about one drug (like you just did), and then leaping to the erroneous conclusion that they lied about the others. By the time they find out that the effects of cocaine, heroin, etc were not exaggerated it is too late.
Regards,
Ben Tilly
PS I don't personally use it.
Feynman's interest in hallucinations got him disqualified from the US Army in WW II! Absolutely hilarious story. You can read the details in Surely you must be Joking, Mr. Feynman...
Cheers,
Ben
Carl Sagan's work seemed pretty left-wing. And considering who his wife was, it would be pretty astounding if he was stuck up about it.
Incidentally he and Anne also co-wrote Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors which IMHO is one of the most interesting and disturbing books that I have read. Highly recommended.
Cheers,
Ben
To the best of my knowledge, more intellectual energy is being thrown at the problem of factoring in the mathematical community than the NSA and friends can probably muster. For that reason I doubt that they can get, let alone maintain, a significant lead for very long on the theoretical side.
However on the practical side using routine application of current theory and sufficient money (ie hardware) you can indeed get better results than are publically available. It is a safe bet that various 3 letter agencies have made this investment and can crank through tremendous volumes of material encrypted with legally exportable encryption.
Incidentally anyone with any questions on encryption should wander over to the RSA folks.
Cheers,
Ben