App's like that grammar checker have an amazing amount of leverage in today's society. When we were young, grammar was taught in a one-to-few setting across many schools. Now, kids can count on the crutch of software tools to handle spelling and grammar.
Perhaps this will lead to an evolution of language that is more able to be checked by mechanical checkers. This means a less-ambigious, more concrete form of communications that everyone uses.
I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Our language shouldn't be so complex that it takes years and years to learn all of the rules associated with it.
With the default install of RHEL3 verses Win2k3 I'd wager that RHEL3 is less secure. RHEL3 is really old though. Both were released around the same time but the thing about Linux is that it's a faster moving OS than Windows.
I would have preferred to see a comparision of SLES10 and Win2k3 or for them to compare a RHEL4 beta to Win2k3. Heck, compare it to a Longhorn beta for all I care.
It doesn't seem fair to do comparisions on things that aren't the best version available.
One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database".
I don't disagree, but it's still just tuning. It's heuristics.
It's like increasing performance of a garbage collector. It's really difficult and there have been a ton of PhD dissertations about it but it still comes down to a heuristical problem.
The hard problems in databases are scaling (speed and size), robustness (ability to recover from error), and security (prevention of unathorized viewing or changing).
Not really. These problems have been solved. Relational Algebra and transaction theory get the job done for the first two. Security really isn't gonna get much better than Kerberos.
The "hard problems" as you describe are all just heuristics. They aren't fundamental problems, is optimizing for the common case.
Personally, I find heuristical problems very unappealing. There's no elegance in them. I agree completely with Paul Graham.
Firefox warns the hell out of you about allowing a signed, but unverifiable applet from installing itself. Look at the screenshot, there's three separate big warning images.
If the web browser lets you download and install software, even if it warns you that doing so might be dangerous, the author contends this is a bug. That's silly. That's the *point* of a web browser. To download content from the internet.
The Lockheed Software Group, the people who write code for the space shuttle and other things, take this to the all-out extreme. They write EVERYTHING in a sort of human readable meta code, meta-comment THAT and then tranfer that to real code.
Not quite. What differs from most other shops is that they rigorously do design reviews, code reviews, unit testing, and integration testing. A product stays in a maintaince phase for years before ever being shipped.
There's not that much more commenting in the code than in any other large software product.
A good patent lawyer doesn't simply tell their client whether something is patentable. A good patent lawyer finds a way to make whatever their client brings them patentable in the broadest way possible.
If you have any doubts about how well the patent system works, this job is not for you. It's very much like a typically defense lawyer. Your job is to get the person the lightest sentence possible regardless of crime with faith in the fact that the system in general will work regardless of your abilities.
I'm not making a judgement about how well the system works or doesn't work. Just pointing out that you should consider this before you pursue this path.
And for what it's worth, dealing with IP lawyers has been the most pleasant lawyer-related experience I've had. Extremely bright people.
CLR has a smarter JIT. It caches large portions of the JIT'd code so that the JIT only has to be performed once.
It's actually a very interesting problem for them because once you make even the smallest update to a critical baseclass you could create this massive cascade of JIT'ing. This has influenced their class design significantly.
They've got a brillant team of the best folks in the industry. At the end of the day, it's still a Microsoft product though and I still don't believe that it's the right solution to the problem.
This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so.
Thank you. I 100% agree with you. This guy got what was coming to him.
There's a student in one of my sophomore classes who voluntarily chose Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for a quotation analysis exercise when she could've chosen any novel over 100 pages. If she chooses to sleep in my class, I don't bother her about it. She obviously knows what she's doing, and the only reason she's in my regular-level class is because she doesn't want to work as hard.
Or she realizes that honors classes are just as boring as regular classes and have the added benefit of containing some of the most obnoxious teenagers on the face of the earth. That's a whole other discuss though:-)
Any student who is in a situation such as the theoretical one I posited should simply approach the teacher about it.
Sure, and there were certainly teachers who took the extra time with me--and I am thankful for that. It's so disheartening though to have to fight to learn. You spend so much time "sleeping" in classes and doing the assignments that are not beneficial to you in the name of "fairness" that you just sort of give up and do the least amount that you can to get by.
This is why the system doesn't work.
I wasn't suggesting that books aren't useful learning tools. I'm just suggesting that the typical History class does such a poor job of teaching students that an hour long TV show can make up for a month of normal class time.
As for your Italian experience, that wasn't a one-time occurence?
Not at all. That's just one of dozens of these stories. This is why I was saying it's too late by the time the student gets to you. For every teacher that tries, there's ten that simply don't care.
Everyone talks about the wonderful effects of having a great teacher, but few people ever talk about the effects of bad ones. The fact that it could get this way, to me, suggests that the system is beyond repair.
Unless you're a math genius, you need repetition to get the concept down.
But some people are. There is nothing more disheartening that having to spend an hour doing repetition on something you understand better than the teacher.
History is just going to need some reading outside of class, period.
It's amazing how much more I know about the War of 1812 after spending an hour watching a special on the History Channel than I ever did from reading it in a history book. Maybe it's just how I learn, but I've found the same is true for most of the people I know.
I aim for a baseline of 15-20 pages per evening in a novel.
That's certainly reasonable. It's not unusual to have 50+ pages per night of reading in a college class.
Here's a good story for you. In high school I was in a small upper-division Italian class. My teacher had a review for a test and promised extra credit for whoever answers the most questions.
After answering every question instantly for the first 10 minutes of class, my teacher told me to stop answering and that she would give me the extra credit and also to someone else.
Since I couldn't participate in the review, I decided to read a book. My teacher immediately took the book away from me and told me to see her after class.
As I walked up to her I could tell she was ready to give me a detention until she actually looked at the book. It was a book on Differiental Geometry. She had no idea what that was and just handed me back the book and scolded me for disrupting class.
This was not a one-time occurance. School is not about allowing students to learn. All that matters is the majority of the students complete the required material and do well on whatever arbitrary set of assessment tests the teacher assigns.
This is not about education, it's about echo'ing back whatever is given to you without thinking.
This is exactly what the purpose of the American school system was. Training blue collar workers to perform repetitious jobs without question.
Why is it that teachers think that it's perfectly acceptable to assign 1 to 2 hours of homework each night to students? Such that by the time they get home, they have to spend a total of 4 hours doing nothing but homework?
Man, you're gonna hate college. I look forward to the weekend because it means that I'll get to catch up on all of the work I didn't get to do over the week because I opted to get 6 hours of sleep that night.
If you're in a top-tier school, expect to 3-4 hours per-class. The difference is that you're actually learning something instead of making sentences with words you'll never use again.
Part of my certification for teaching required me to study the history of public schools in America. Anytime I see this line about "babysitting" trotted out, I shudder.
Your original post indicated that the orgins of our equality-based education system stemmed from the "democratic" history of the educational system. That simply isn't true.
I'm not talking about a worksheet here. I abhor them, and they rarely grace my classroom.
Right, however, your students have been raised on them. It's been engrained in their minds. By the time you've gotten them, it's already far too late. This is a rare occasion where I full-heartedly agree with Bill Gates. There's no way to fix the system. It's fundamentally broken and needs to be redesigned.
This is not about languages and physics, it's about the ablity of the average high schooler to comprehend the verbal and math portions of the SAT, and how significantly that changed in the span of ten or so years.
Right, but there's been a dramatic shift in what it means to be successful in our society. Honestly, it's much less important to have a 20,000+ word vocabulary than it is to be creative, willing to take risks, and be able to apply knowledge.
The common traits of a 1,000 modern-day millionaires is not going to be high SAT scores. I believe these tests are antiquated.
Situations such as my reading assignments partially demonstrate this. Something significant took place that started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home, and I don't think it took place in the five hours a week I see them (and believe me, the homework deal is not an issue unique to my classroom).
There's something fundamentally broken about the typical classroom. I think that's what you're missing in this conversation. It's not that the students aren't responding appropriately to your techniques, it's simply that the whole system is broken.
One of the largest problems is the totalitarian nature of most classroom environments. It's only natural to rebel against an authority figure. As long as you have an attitude of "started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home".
The "kids" are more than old enough to know make choices about their future. If they do not feel that a particular class is worthwhile then they should not have to take it. Let the market determine what a student needs to learn. It works just fine for colleges. Is there really something that fundamentally changes when someone turns 18?
The US high school system is so obsessed with its democratic origins that it still strives to treat and educate every child the same.
I agree with your conclusion but disagree with your basis. The US education system was largely shaped during the industrial revolution as a method to babysit/train factory worker's children.
Homework is a lesser priority; I can't even assign an out-of-class reading, because it won't get done and my lesson the next day will be worthless.
I believe this stems from two roots. The first is the amount of "busy work" a typical student gets. Teachers often put very little thought into assignments and simply say "do these exercises from the book." A student then typically gets a "check" or something that just signifies completion.
If students are forced to spend their free time doing work that doesn't help them learn the material and receive no feedback on what they've done they get into a habit of just getting by with the least amount of work possible.
The second source of this is the level of expectation from a typical high school student with respect to extra-curricular activities. So much of the typical high school experience has so little to do with education. There's nothing wrong with students participating in athletics but there needs to be a stronger separation between education and these pursuits.
We've gotten "dumber."
I'm not sure this is fair. Knowledge is a very relativistic thing. 100 years ago, an education person was fluent in latin, probably french, and had read most of the "great" books.
Of course, they did not know anything about modern physics, information technology, or any of the modern sciences.
It's not fair to say one generation is dumber than another because what each generation is expected to know about changes.
A fair metric to use is how much Americans know relative to other countries. This is where we're failing. This could simply be that other countries are getting smarter.
Modern compilers use a intermediate representation called SSA. This dismantles all arthimetic states to simple, two variable statements.
This allows for easier code motion and the like. Negations are almost universally converted from:
!a to a == 0
At any rate, write code that you can read, then if you have performance problems, do profiling, find the critical path, and then optimize that.
You'll find 99% of your performance problems are poor algorithms and have almost nothing to do with your compiler (unless you're talking about very specific niche processors).
Municipal wireless is really just about a municipality subsidizing businesses. That's why they do it. Subsidizing businesses leads to more businesses moving in, which leads to more jobs, a better local economy, and re-election.
Why not offer a tax break then? Tax breaks have a long-term cost. You lose that revenue for as long as you're willing to offer the break. Wireless provides a "holy grail" in subsidizes though because the theory is that you spent a fixed amount, recoop that cost, and then the system pays for itself.
Money doesn't just appear out of thin air. Where do the subsidizes come from? Opportunity cost of the local broadband providers. You're asking one company to bear the brunt of breaks for other companies. It's just not inheritly fair.
There are two additional problems. 1) What happens when the municipality realizes they can generate revenue by increasing the cost of broadband? 2) Where does the money come from when the system needs to be completely revamped for the next break-through generation of technology?
I think what will happen is the programs will succeed in the short term, but begin to fail miserably five years from now.
The first one is strongly academic (making the source available with no strings attached, just requiring the user to give credits where they're due),
I'm not quite so sure about how well it models academia. Yes, I know it was developed at Berkley.
The analogy would be quoting someone else's research or publishing a new study based on an old study. I'm quite sure that there would be outrage in academia is someone published a study and had some sort of way to say "You cannot use any of the information in this study in any other form of research."
I think the GPL is more academic in that regard. You are certainly correct though about the reasons the GPL exist.
Not much of a proof, really. It's just the definition of the class "NP-complete", and how we prove problems are in that class.
Proving that all known NP-complete classes are isomorphic was quite a big deal.
And, in fact, reverse hashing (as you describe it) is certainly NOT an NP-complete problem.
I knew this would happen. Actually, composite factoring has *not* been proven to be NP-hard. Whether it's NP-complete depends largely on whether it's NP-hard.
No algorithm is all-powerful - it only withstands attacks for so long.
No, it didn't. In fact, this is the most important problem in CS. The theory is that there are certainly problems where checking a solution is easy (2 and 3 are unique factors of 6 because it's easy to see that 2*3 == 6) but where the only possible way to find the solution given the answer is to compute the solution for every possible answer.
It's not been proven whether hashing is this type of problem (whether it's NP-complete). Moreover, it's never been proven that there isn't a solution for problems we think are NP.
What's more, it *has* been proven that once we find a solution to an NP-complete problem we'll instantly have solutions for *every* NP-complete problem.
I disagree. Microsoft attracts and retains many of the best recent CS grads as well as experienced hires. The notion that there are not mature software development processes in place at a $288 billion software company whose core competency is execution is a little silly.
There's more to building good software than having the best raw talent. And Microsoft has some amazing engineers, well disciplined engineers, and has hired some of the greatest minds in the industry.
However, I think you would have to be a little jaded not to see that as a whole, the company has not developed software with the quality that it probably should have.
Yes, hind-sight is 20/20. Yes, they grew very quickly and perhaps didn't anticipate where they would be today. However, to deny that there hasn't been problems in their development methodologies in the past is, I believe, a little silly too.
I think it only needs standards awareness from a few of the low-level developers to bring about a change.
I've heard it said that Microsoft hires "hackers" and not necessarily good engineers. From visiting, I'd tend to agree with this. There is very much an emphasis on late night coding binges and not so much on spending the time to make sure designs are sound, standards are adhered to, etc.
I've actually had no problem in recent memory with new hardware or getting software to work.
Let me go further here. I recently setup a media pc. Very snazzy. I happened to have a wireless USB keyboard laying around that I wanted to use. Wanted to get the multimedia keys to work. There were only MacOS drivers for it.
It took me about two hours to look through the USB subsystem in the kernel, figure out the API for doing evdev, and write a small daemon that would launch user defined programs on extended key events.
There's no way I could do this in Windows. Not a chance in heck. This is precisely what I mean.
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App's like that grammar checker have an amazing amount of leverage in today's society. When we were young, grammar was taught in a one-to-few setting across many schools. Now, kids can count on the crutch of software tools to handle spelling and grammar.
Perhaps this will lead to an evolution of language that is more able to be checked by mechanical checkers. This means a less-ambigious, more concrete form of communications that everyone uses.
I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Our language shouldn't be so complex that it takes years and years to learn all of the rules associated with it.
With the default install of RHEL3 verses Win2k3 I'd wager that RHEL3 is less secure. RHEL3 is really old though. Both were released around the same time but the thing about Linux is that it's a faster moving OS than Windows.
I would have preferred to see a comparision of SLES10 and Win2k3 or for them to compare a RHEL4 beta to Win2k3. Heck, compare it to a Longhorn beta for all I care.
It doesn't seem fair to do comparisions on things that aren't the best version available.
One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database".
I don't disagree, but it's still just tuning. It's heuristics.
It's like increasing performance of a garbage collector. It's really difficult and there have been a ton of PhD dissertations about it but it still comes down to a heuristical problem.
The hard problems in databases are scaling (speed and size), robustness (ability to recover from error), and security (prevention of unathorized viewing or changing).
Not really. These problems have been solved. Relational Algebra and transaction theory get the job done for the first two. Security really isn't gonna get much better than Kerberos.
The "hard problems" as you describe are all just heuristics. They aren't fundamental problems, is optimizing for the common case.
Personally, I find heuristical problems very unappealing. There's no elegance in them. I agree completely with Paul Graham.
No way, RTFA.
Firefox warns the hell out of you about allowing a signed, but unverifiable applet from installing itself. Look at the screenshot, there's three separate big warning images.
If the web browser lets you download and install software, even if it warns you that doing so might be dangerous, the author contends this is a bug. That's silly. That's the *point* of a web browser. To download content from the internet.
The Lockheed Software Group, the people who write code for the space shuttle and other things, take this to the all-out extreme. They write EVERYTHING in a sort of human readable meta code, meta-comment THAT and then tranfer that to real code.
Not quite. What differs from most other shops is that they rigorously do design reviews, code reviews, unit testing, and integration testing. A product stays in a maintaince phase for years before ever being shipped.
There's not that much more commenting in the code than in any other large software product.
They probably have SELinux installed on the system. You may be able to exploit one of the services but that won't be enough.
You'd have to find an unpublished local root exploit in the Linux kernel. Good luck with that one.
A good patent lawyer doesn't simply tell their client whether something is patentable. A good patent lawyer finds a way to make whatever their client brings them patentable in the broadest way possible.
If you have any doubts about how well the patent system works, this job is not for you. It's very much like a typically defense lawyer. Your job is to get the person the lightest sentence possible regardless of crime with faith in the fact that the system in general will work regardless of your abilities.
I'm not making a judgement about how well the system works or doesn't work. Just pointing out that you should consider this before you pursue this path.
And for what it's worth, dealing with IP lawyers has been the most pleasant lawyer-related experience I've had. Extremely bright people.
CLR has a smarter JIT. It caches large portions of the JIT'd code so that the JIT only has to be performed once.
It's actually a very interesting problem for them because once you make even the smallest update to a critical baseclass you could create this massive cascade of JIT'ing. This has influenced their class design significantly.
They've got a brillant team of the best folks in the industry. At the end of the day, it's still a Microsoft product though and I still don't believe that it's the right solution to the problem.
This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so.
Thank you. I 100% agree with you. This guy got what was coming to him.
There's a student in one of my sophomore classes who voluntarily chose Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for a quotation analysis exercise when she could've chosen any novel over 100 pages. If she chooses to sleep in my class, I don't bother her about it. She obviously knows what she's doing, and the only reason she's in my regular-level class is because she doesn't want to work as hard.
:-)
Or she realizes that honors classes are just as boring as regular classes and have the added benefit of containing some of the most obnoxious teenagers on the face of the earth. That's a whole other discuss though
Any student who is in a situation such as the theoretical one I posited should simply approach the teacher about it.
Sure, and there were certainly teachers who took the extra time with me--and I am thankful for that. It's so disheartening though to have to fight to learn. You spend so much time "sleeping" in classes and doing the assignments that are not beneficial to you in the name of "fairness" that you just sort of give up and do the least amount that you can to get by.
This is why the system doesn't work.
I wasn't suggesting that books aren't useful learning tools. I'm just suggesting that the typical History class does such a poor job of teaching students that an hour long TV show can make up for a month of normal class time.
As for your Italian experience, that wasn't a one-time occurence?
Not at all. That's just one of dozens of these stories. This is why I was saying it's too late by the time the student gets to you. For every teacher that tries, there's ten that simply don't care.
Everyone talks about the wonderful effects of having a great teacher, but few people ever talk about the effects of bad ones. The fact that it could get this way, to me, suggests that the system is beyond repair.
That's just my take on the matter.
Unless you're a math genius, you need repetition to get the concept down.
But some people are. There is nothing more disheartening that having to spend an hour doing repetition on something you understand better than the teacher.
History is just going to need some reading outside of class, period.
It's amazing how much more I know about the War of 1812 after spending an hour watching a special on the History Channel than I ever did from reading it in a history book. Maybe it's just how I learn, but I've found the same is true for most of the people I know.
I aim for a baseline of 15-20 pages per evening in a novel.
That's certainly reasonable. It's not unusual to have 50+ pages per night of reading in a college class.
Here's a good story for you. In high school I was in a small upper-division Italian class. My teacher had a review for a test and promised extra credit for whoever answers the most questions.
After answering every question instantly for the first 10 minutes of class, my teacher told me to stop answering and that she would give me the extra credit and also to someone else.
Since I couldn't participate in the review, I decided to read a book. My teacher immediately took the book away from me and told me to see her after class.
As I walked up to her I could tell she was ready to give me a detention until she actually looked at the book. It was a book on Differiental Geometry. She had no idea what that was and just handed me back the book and scolded me for disrupting class.
This was not a one-time occurance. School is not about allowing students to learn. All that matters is the majority of the students complete the required material and do well on whatever arbitrary set of assessment tests the teacher assigns.
This is not about education, it's about echo'ing back whatever is given to you without thinking.
This is exactly what the purpose of the American school system was. Training blue collar workers to perform repetitious jobs without question.
Why is it that teachers think that it's perfectly acceptable to assign 1 to 2 hours of homework each night to students? Such that by the time they get home, they have to spend a total of 4 hours doing nothing but homework?
Man, you're gonna hate college. I look forward to the weekend because it means that I'll get to catch up on all of the work I didn't get to do over the week because I opted to get 6 hours of sleep that night.
If you're in a top-tier school, expect to 3-4 hours per-class. The difference is that you're actually learning something instead of making sentences with words you'll never use again.
Part of my certification for teaching required me to study the history of public schools in America. Anytime I see this line about "babysitting" trotted out, I shudder.
Your original post indicated that the orgins of our equality-based education system stemmed from the "democratic" history of the educational system. That simply isn't true.
I'm not talking about a worksheet here. I abhor them, and they rarely grace my classroom.
Right, however, your students have been raised on them. It's been engrained in their minds. By the time you've gotten them, it's already far too late. This is a rare occasion where I full-heartedly agree with Bill Gates. There's no way to fix the system. It's fundamentally broken and needs to be redesigned.
This is not about languages and physics, it's about the ablity of the average high schooler to comprehend the verbal and math portions of the SAT, and how significantly that changed in the span of ten or so years.
Right, but there's been a dramatic shift in what it means to be successful in our society. Honestly, it's much less important to have a 20,000+ word vocabulary than it is to be creative, willing to take risks, and be able to apply knowledge.
The common traits of a 1,000 modern-day millionaires is not going to be high SAT scores. I believe these tests are antiquated.
Situations such as my reading assignments partially demonstrate this. Something significant took place that started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home, and I don't think it took place in the five hours a week I see them (and believe me, the homework deal is not an issue unique to my classroom).
There's something fundamentally broken about the typical classroom. I think that's what you're missing in this conversation. It's not that the students aren't responding appropriately to your techniques, it's simply that the whole system is broken.
One of the largest problems is the totalitarian nature of most classroom environments. It's only natural to rebel against an authority figure. As long as you have an attitude of "started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home".
The "kids" are more than old enough to know make choices about their future. If they do not feel that a particular class is worthwhile then they should not have to take it. Let the market determine what a student needs to learn. It works just fine for colleges. Is there really something that fundamentally changes when someone turns 18?
The US high school system is so obsessed with its democratic origins that it still strives to treat and educate every child the same.
I agree with your conclusion but disagree with your basis. The US education system was largely shaped during the industrial revolution as a method to babysit/train factory worker's children.
Homework is a lesser priority; I can't even assign an out-of-class reading, because it won't get done and my lesson the next day will be worthless.
I believe this stems from two roots. The first is the amount of "busy work" a typical student gets. Teachers often put very little thought into assignments and simply say "do these exercises from the book." A student then typically gets a "check" or something that just signifies completion.
If students are forced to spend their free time doing work that doesn't help them learn the material and receive no feedback on what they've done they get into a habit of just getting by with the least amount of work possible.
The second source of this is the level of expectation from a typical high school student with respect to extra-curricular activities. So much of the typical high school experience has so little to do with education. There's nothing wrong with students participating in athletics but there needs to be a stronger separation between education and these pursuits.
We've gotten "dumber."
I'm not sure this is fair. Knowledge is a very relativistic thing. 100 years ago, an education person was fluent in latin, probably french, and had read most of the "great" books.
Of course, they did not know anything about modern physics, information technology, or any of the modern sciences.
It's not fair to say one generation is dumber than another because what each generation is expected to know about changes.
A fair metric to use is how much Americans know relative to other countries. This is where we're failing. This could simply be that other countries are getting smarter.
Modern compilers use a intermediate representation called SSA. This dismantles all arthimetic states to simple, two variable statements.
This allows for easier code motion and the like. Negations are almost universally converted from:
!a to a == 0
At any rate, write code that you can read, then if you have performance problems, do profiling, find the critical path, and then optimize that.
You'll find 99% of your performance problems are poor algorithms and have almost nothing to do with your compiler (unless you're talking about very specific niche processors).
Municipal wireless is really just about a municipality subsidizing businesses. That's why they do it. Subsidizing businesses leads to more businesses moving in, which leads to more jobs, a better local economy, and re-election.
Why not offer a tax break then? Tax breaks have a long-term cost. You lose that revenue for as long as you're willing to offer the break. Wireless provides a "holy grail" in subsidizes though because the theory is that you spent a fixed amount, recoop that cost, and then the system pays for itself.
Money doesn't just appear out of thin air. Where do the subsidizes come from? Opportunity cost of the local broadband providers. You're asking one company to bear the brunt of breaks for other companies. It's just not inheritly fair.
There are two additional problems. 1) What happens when the municipality realizes they can generate revenue by increasing the cost of broadband? 2) Where does the money come from when the system needs to be completely revamped for the next break-through generation of technology?
I think what will happen is the programs will succeed in the short term, but begin to fail miserably five years from now.
The first one is strongly academic (making the source available with no strings attached, just requiring the user to give credits where they're due),
I'm not quite so sure about how well it models academia. Yes, I know it was developed at Berkley.
The analogy would be quoting someone else's research or publishing a new study based on an old study. I'm quite sure that there would be outrage in academia is someone published a study and had some sort of way to say "You cannot use any of the information in this study in any other form of research."
I think the GPL is more academic in that regard. You are certainly correct though about the reasons the GPL exist.
Ok, I checked Wikipedia: if the entry is right, factorization is known (of course) to be in NP and coNP
I tried not to state that factorization was NP-complete. It's just merely a simple example of an NP problem that most people can easily understand.
Not much of a proof, really. It's just the definition of the class "NP-complete", and how we prove problems are in that class.
Proving that all known NP-complete classes are isomorphic was quite a big deal.
And, in fact, reverse hashing (as you describe it) is certainly NOT an NP-complete problem.
I knew this would happen. Actually, composite factoring has *not* been proven to be NP-hard. Whether it's NP-complete depends largely on whether it's NP-hard.
Had to happen, didn't it?
No algorithm is all-powerful - it only withstands attacks for so long.
No, it didn't. In fact, this is the most important problem in CS. The theory is that there are certainly problems where checking a solution is easy (2 and 3 are unique factors of 6 because it's easy to see that 2*3 == 6) but where the only possible way to find the solution given the answer is to compute the solution for every possible answer.
It's not been proven whether hashing is this type of problem (whether it's NP-complete). Moreover, it's never been proven that there isn't a solution for problems we think are NP.
What's more, it *has* been proven that once we find a solution to an NP-complete problem we'll instantly have solutions for *every* NP-complete problem.
automake is a nightmare.
Autoconf is painful but is still useful. automake is just unneccessary pain.
I disagree. Microsoft attracts and retains many of the best recent CS grads as well as experienced hires. The notion that there are not mature software development processes in place at a $288 billion software company whose core competency is execution is a little silly.
There's more to building good software than having the best raw talent. And Microsoft has some amazing engineers, well disciplined engineers, and has hired some of the greatest minds in the industry.
However, I think you would have to be a little jaded not to see that as a whole, the company has not developed software with the quality that it probably should have.
Yes, hind-sight is 20/20. Yes, they grew very quickly and perhaps didn't anticipate where they would be today. However, to deny that there hasn't been problems in their development methodologies in the past is, I believe, a little silly too.
I think it only needs standards awareness from a few of the low-level developers to bring about a change.
I've heard it said that Microsoft hires "hackers" and not necessarily good engineers. From visiting, I'd tend to agree with this. There is very much an emphasis on late night coding binges and not so much on spending the time to make sure designs are sound, standards are adhered to, etc.
I've actually had no problem in recent memory with new hardware or getting software to work.
Let me go further here. I recently setup a media pc. Very snazzy. I happened to have a wireless USB keyboard laying around that I wanted to use. Wanted to get the multimedia keys to work. There were only MacOS drivers for it.
It took me about two hours to look through the USB subsystem in the kernel, figure out the API for doing evdev, and write a small daemon that would launch user defined programs on extended key events.
There's no way I could do this in Windows. Not a chance in heck. This is precisely what I mean.