The argument that "nobody needs a faster computer, anyway" was rubbish 20 years ago and it's rubbish now. As a programmer, every time I compile something I feel the need for more CPU speed, and if compilation starts to become I/O bound there's always more optimizations that can be done to soak up that time.
Want something considerably more mainstream? Digital video editing, which is going to take off like crazy over the next few years, as people realise that you can use it to produce watchable movies instead of the unbearable tripe that is an unedited amateur video. It's going to be a hardware manufacturer's dream, because it places huge loads on CPU (compression), memory, and I/O.
Of course, edit capabilities just bring us back to what you could do with Super 8 movies decades ago, but anyway . ..)
As I said, the open / evolution style development, the releases alpha/beta mean very little.
They are still useful in indicating to your users/fellow developers how stable a release (by which I mean a numbered tarball/package) is likely to be. Calling a development release a beta release seems to drag a bunch of users out of the woodwork and throws up a pile of bugs. This is a pain, but it's a heck of a lot better than finding the bugs *after* the release is declared "stable" . . .
I can't believe you don't think anything has changed. Lets see, Pentiums are new. Athlons are new. Highspeed memory is new. PCI is new. Ten more years of ongoing research by the top universities and corporations has happened.
Faster hardware is essentially irrelevant to this argument. Any of the algorithms that run on a modern PC would have run on a VAX or the facilities that universities and corporations had available through the 70's and 80's. They may have taken minutes rather than seconds to run, but for research that's generally not considered a problem. What hasn't changed all that much is the algorithms used to do natural language processing, and their limitations are still pretty much the same as ever - difficulties with ambiguity, and extremely limited vocabulary and contextual knowledge (the last difficulty being the fundamental problem with all AI-related research). Oh, and by the way, mainframes of the 70's and 80's, and probably high-end departmental servers, had I/O architectures that were considerably more advanced in many respects than the PCI bus.
Where have you been?
At one of the best universities in the Asia-Pacific. While I wasn't involved in NLP research, colleagues were, and if there was some fundamental improvement I would have heard about it.
_Many_ (if not most?) security attacks involve buffer overflows. You have to _work_ and _think_ to free yourself of buffer overflows in C/C++. In other languages, this protection comes for free.
What about that huge chunk of interpreter, written in C or C++? Have you audited that, too?
In a higher-level language, the simplest code can have side effects that might provide a security hole, so to reassure yourself you're going to effectively have to audit the behaviour of the interpretation of your program, not just the program itself. In C, at least, you know when you're making a function call, and you can be reasonably confident everything your program does is done explicitly rather than being hidden.
I went to a rather informative lecture by a person whose business is selling security services and also works on OpenBSD. His view was that C programs, calling a minimal set of libraries (excluding GUI libraries, amongst others), are the only things that should ever be suid root.
This Jargon File entry describes what happens when computers try to interpret ambiguity in user input. When compared to the interpretation that the system referred to was attempting, a NLP user interface would be immensely more complex.
People tried natural-language interfaces in the 70's and 80's, and they failed miserably to scale up. I don't believe anything has changed.
If everyone had to compile, I'm sure you'd get more complaints. As it is, I seem to be the only one.
Isn't it fair enough? If you want *very* easy installation, you use packages. If you want to compile stuff yourself, you live with the difficulty of that process. That sounds like a reasonable choice to me.
Or, why don't you try *BSD? Don't they have a "make world" that can automatically update *everything* from source in one go?
We have no means to protect our astronauts effectively from space radiation. The space radiation environment in terms of energetic protons is worse on Mars than it was for the recent solar flare. That solar flare would likely have killed any astronauts had we put them in as little shielding as Mars missions will have.
According to The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin's excellent book on manned Mars exploration, solar flares are relatively low-energy and can be shielded against without too much trouble. Essentially, you put the food store in the centre of the ship, and when a flare comes (the dangerous charged particles arrive well after the storm is detected) everybody hops in the food store. In a worst-case solar storm, the crew receives about 3 rem. That's not something you'd like to take every day, but it's not going to kill you and it doesn't raise your risk of cancer very much at all.
The cosmic ray dose (which, you're right, can't be shielded against without a ridiculously large craft), is about 50 rem over a two-year mission. Compared to the other risks that a manned Mars mission would face, this isn't really too much of a problem.
As to the risk-aversion of the current American psyche, yes, it's a problem. But I think you're a little pessimistic here. Given our technical capabilities now vs. the 1960's, I can't see why our failure rate for Mars missions is going to be so much higher than the Apollos.
#ifdef RANT
Anyway, manned Mars missions are possible, and they're a hell of a lot better way to spend money than on a BMD system that won't work, is pissing off just about every other country in the world, and even if it works against missiles won't protect against the most likely nuclear attack on the US - a smuggled weapon.
I'm sure some 13-year-old kid is sitting back basking in the glory of how 1337 he is. Sorry, kiddo, but this kind of thing is just like pouring sump oil all over a football field - one built on the donations of lots of hard-working indviduals. It's not clever, it's not even vaguely hard to do, and it makes life tough for people who are just trying to have fun and make life better for the rest of us.
I discovered early in life that you could have fun doing *useful* things with computers. For your sake, my sake, and the greater good, please redirect your talents to something else before you get caught and suffer the appropriate consequences of your actions.
On another note, if the individuals involved in the attacks on K5 get caught, what punishment would other readers suggest? Personally, I would like them to do community service using computers to help people - doing a web site for a senior citizens' group, helping teach the unemployed computer skills (if the perpetrators are old enough to do that) - that kind of thing. What do you think, people?
If this is a troll like I think it is, this has to be one of the cleverest trolls I've seen in a very long time. You've managed to insult just about every geographical group and political ideology present on Slashdot, and thrown in a rather alarmist view of the dire consequences of contacting alien society, all in the one well-written post!
I am unsure what you mean by this, since no actual quantum computer exists to make the comparison. Quantum factorization algorithms are known which have a different computational complexity than classical algorithms.
Cracking good symmetric cyphers does not rely on factorization - the techniques for breaking them are quite different. A friend of mine who works on this stuff mentioned that quantum computers, if developed, would provide an algorithmic improvement for keyspace searches equivalent to halving the key length.
Therefore, if you use a 256-bit key for a good symmetric cypher, you're still pretty likely to be safe, even from a quantum computer.
But the standard public-key encryption mechanism in use today will not survive the potential of quantum computers. So, for instance, digitally signed documents have a lifetime of a few decades before the signatures can be forged.
Quite correct, but as I understand it symmetric-key cyphers aren't really at risk, provided you go to 256 bit key lengths (quantum computing can theoretically search a 256 bit in the same time a conventional computer can do a 128 bit key).
Has anyone heard of any public-key cyphers that aren't easily crackable if a quantum computer is built?
This means that we will eventually see compiled functional langauges which produce faster code then ANY imperative langauge.
Yes, I'm aware of the optimization potential of functional languages, but it's just that - potential. Even the best functional or logic programming language environments aren't there yet. We're talking the now here, rather than the future.
Functional languages are slower, as a rule, than imperative languages. Compilation, rather than interpretation, helps - but few functional languages can approach the speed of a well-written imperative program. Of course, there are many occasions where speed doesn't really matter, and even if it did it's limited by I/O, rather than CPU, but it's still a factor
A lot of functional languages still have the element of research tool rather than real language about them - particularly in the area of their libraries and other associated bits. They don't support things like graphics toolkits, CORBA bindings, parser generators, database interfaces, and the like. Similarly, the toolchains are generally less sophisticated - while some very clever debuggers have been written for functional languages, they haven't been turned into real tools in many cases.
A lot of people just don't get non-imperative languages. I taught Haskell as a first computer language at a university, and people frankly struggle with it - much more than they seem to with imperative languages.
I like functional languages - the project I'm working on uses them extensively, and Scheme is great to work in. It's a shame that they're not more widely used.
And, while we're naming our favourite alternative languages, you could try Mercury, a logic programming language designed for real-world programming. It compiles to C, it's got the best type checking of any language I've ever used, it's fast, and its compiler is good. The fact that it's developed at my former university has nothing to do with it:)
But seriously folks, be glad you don't live here in Salt Lake City, we have to put up with this hipocracy daily. They lie cheat and steal to get the Olympics here, but nowthat they have it, they will be angry if anyone butts in.... I am truely, truely sorry that you all have to watch the 2002 winter olymipics in your own country be so throughly screwed up. I really am.
Hey, it could be worse, you could be in Sydney.
It's so bad over here that one of Australia's top rating shows is The Games, a mockumentary satirising the Sydney Olympics' organisation.
One of the more amusing storylines was the registration of a personal domain by a Mr. Sydney Games . ..
Sure, they are first generation vechicles, but if they aren't shown as profitable then they will probably be deep sixed.
The Toyota Prius, at least, is a loss-making proposition. Toyota freely admits to losing money on every Prius they sell. They're using them to validate the technology in the real world (and figure out mundane things such servicing, reliability, and the like), get in some brownie points with environmentalists, while they work on the next version of the car, which is reputedly a huge improvement.
Toyota, Honda etc. don't throw this kind of money around if they don't think these cars have a real future.
Of course, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US and Australia by a similar amount to these hybrids, you could just put a punitive tax on SUV's . . .
OK, that's a shame, but check the name. Linuxmall - that hardly sounds independent, does it? Would you expect forddealer.com to post a review saying "the new Taurus is even uglier than the present jelly blob . .."?
What if a doctor raped patients when they were under anesthetic? Would it be right to deny him his medical practice when he got out of jail? well, yes. I don't really find the restriction that bizzare.
Banning the use of a computer is a heck of a lot more restrictive than banning the use of anaesthetics. The hypothetical doctor (who has committed a far more serious offence) could still make a living (admittedly not in their chosen profession) once they got out of gaol, but it's getting to the point where you can't hold any job if you can't use a computer.
When I have enough spam, I'll try to find some really interesting pieces and post 'em somewhere!
Some of the funniest spam I've seen is from some PRC-based manufacturers. They spammed debian-devel with advertisements for bulk quantities of steel pipe, amongst other things . . .
In Australia, and (presumably) the US and the UK, having a mobile phone ring while in the cinema is considered *extremely* rude. However, when I was in Hong Kong last year, it seemed like this was perfectly acceptable behaviour. What differences in acceptable mobile phone etiquette have other Slashdot readers noticed from place to place?
but my machine does not provide any public services, so nobody has any business connecting to it. If it did, I wouldn't mind this crowd connecting to it to use those public services, but attempting to connect to anything else is an abuse. Frankly, I hope more sysadmins install portsentry or its equivalent and stop these people cold.
For instance, there's work being done on modelling user interfaces, so that they can be quantitatively evaluated before they have been built. There's also quite a lot of work to do to make use of the research that has been done, both for computers and other electronic devices. Anybody that compares, say, an Ericsson with a Nokia mobile phone will know that adoption of good user-interface technology isn't universal yet:)
ok, you're wrong. Mac OS X Server has been out for well over a year, and it does a handy job of serving up web pages with Apache. also Web Objects, from the NeXT world is a nice piece of software for delivering web-based applications.
I agree with you - MAC OS X seems, from what I've read, to be a decent server OS. I thought I'd acknowledged that already.
also, how do you figure that Macs are any less "desinged for this" than x86 boxes?
I also agree that Macintoshes tend to be well-built machines. However, all the ones I've seen are desktop machines, not servers. There are x86 boxes out there expressly designed and built as servers. While not everyone uses them, if I was doing important webserving they are the sort of thing I'd certainly want over *any* desktop box. I agree that while an average desktop PC from a typical x86 vendor is no more suited to webserving than an arbitrary Mac, you can buy ones that are.
I find it interesting that there's no Macintoshes or Suns in the test, although there are at least one Alpha and two RS/6000s.
Suns, sure, but Macintoshes? I don't think I'm aware of anybody using Macs for even semi-serious webserving. Neither the OS (OSX is a different ballgame, granted) nor the hardware is designed for this kind of thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, please:)
As regards to the number of HTTP servers, maybe they just ran out of time and money to benchmark ten squillion different configuration, and chose the ones that they believed were in most common usage. Testing more of them would certainly be a good thing, though.
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The argument that "nobody needs a faster computer, anyway" was rubbish 20 years ago and it's rubbish now. As a programmer, every time I compile something I feel the need for more CPU speed, and if compilation starts to become I/O bound there's always more optimizations that can be done to soak up that time.
Want something considerably more mainstream? Digital video editing, which is going to take off like crazy over the next few years, as people realise that you can use it to produce watchable movies instead of the unbearable tripe that is an unedited amateur video. It's going to be a hardware manufacturer's dream, because it places huge loads on CPU (compression), memory, and I/O.
Of course, edit capabilities just bring us back to what you could do with Super 8 movies decades ago, but anyway . . .)
They are still useful in indicating to your users/fellow developers how stable a release (by which I mean a numbered tarball/package) is likely to be. Calling a development release a beta release seems to drag a bunch of users out of the woodwork and throws up a pile of bugs. This is a pain, but it's a heck of a lot better than finding the bugs *after* the release is declared "stable" . . .
Faster hardware is essentially irrelevant to this argument. Any of the algorithms that run on a modern PC would have run on a VAX or the facilities that universities and corporations had available through the 70's and 80's. They may have taken minutes rather than seconds to run, but for research that's generally not considered a problem. What hasn't changed all that much is the algorithms used to do natural language processing, and their limitations are still pretty much the same as ever - difficulties with ambiguity, and extremely limited vocabulary and contextual knowledge (the last difficulty being the fundamental problem with all AI-related research). Oh, and by the way, mainframes of the 70's and 80's, and probably high-end departmental servers, had I/O architectures that were considerably more advanced in many respects than the PCI bus.
At one of the best universities in the Asia-Pacific. While I wasn't involved in NLP research, colleagues were, and if there was some fundamental improvement I would have heard about it.
What about that huge chunk of interpreter, written in C or C++? Have you audited that, too?
In a higher-level language, the simplest code can have side effects that might provide a security hole, so to reassure yourself you're going to effectively have to audit the behaviour of the interpretation of your program, not just the program itself. In C, at least, you know when you're making a function call, and you can be reasonably confident everything your program does is done explicitly rather than being hidden.
I went to a rather informative lecture by a person whose business is selling security services and also works on OpenBSD. His view was that C programs, calling a minimal set of libraries (excluding GUI libraries, amongst others), are the only things that should ever be suid root.
People tried natural-language interfaces in the 70's and 80's, and they failed miserably to scale up. I don't believe anything has changed.
Got any references here to back up your claim that statistical techniques will lead us to more useful NLP systems?
Isn't it fair enough? If you want *very* easy installation, you use packages. If you want to compile stuff yourself, you live with the difficulty of that process. That sounds like a reasonable choice to me.
Or, why don't you try *BSD? Don't they have a "make world" that can automatically update *everything* from source in one go?
According to The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin's excellent book on manned Mars exploration, solar flares are relatively low-energy and can be shielded against without too much trouble. Essentially, you put the food store in the centre of the ship, and when a flare comes (the dangerous charged particles arrive well after the storm is detected) everybody hops in the food store. In a worst-case solar storm, the crew receives about 3 rem. That's not something you'd like to take every day, but it's not going to kill you and it doesn't raise your risk of cancer very much at all.
The cosmic ray dose (which, you're right, can't be shielded against without a ridiculously large craft), is about 50 rem over a two-year mission. Compared to the other risks that a manned Mars mission would face, this isn't really too much of a problem.
As to the risk-aversion of the current American psyche, yes, it's a problem. But I think you're a little pessimistic here. Given our technical capabilities now vs. the 1960's, I can't see why our failure rate for Mars missions is going to be so much higher than the Apollos.
#ifdef RANTAnyway, manned Mars missions are possible, and they're a hell of a lot better way to spend money than on a BMD system that won't work, is pissing off just about every other country in the world, and even if it works against missiles won't protect against the most likely nuclear attack on the US - a smuggled weapon.
#endifI discovered early in life that you could have fun doing *useful* things with computers. For your sake, my sake, and the greater good, please redirect your talents to something else before you get caught and suffer the appropriate consequences of your actions.
On another note, if the individuals involved in the attacks on K5 get caught, what punishment would other readers suggest? Personally, I would like them to do community service using computers to help people - doing a web site for a senior citizens' group, helping teach the unemployed computer skills (if the perpetrators are old enough to do that) - that kind of thing. What do you think, people?
I congratulate you, Sir!
Cracking good symmetric cyphers does not rely on factorization - the techniques for breaking them are quite different. A friend of mine who works on this stuff mentioned that quantum computers, if developed, would provide an algorithmic improvement for keyspace searches equivalent to halving the key length.
Therefore, if you use a 256-bit key for a good symmetric cypher, you're still pretty likely to be safe, even from a quantum computer.
Quite correct, but as I understand it symmetric-key cyphers aren't really at risk, provided you go to 256 bit key lengths (quantum computing can theoretically search a 256 bit in the same time a conventional computer can do a 128 bit key).
Has anyone heard of any public-key cyphers that aren't easily crackable if a quantum computer is built?
Yes, I'm aware of the optimization potential of functional languages, but it's just that - potential. Even the best functional or logic programming language environments aren't there yet. We're talking the now here, rather than the future.
Mercury also does destructive updates. You are quite right, they are *very* important for making functional languages run fast in the real world.
Thanks for the pointer.
I like functional languages - the project I'm working on uses them extensively, and Scheme is great to work in. It's a shame that they're not more widely used.
And, while we're naming our favourite alternative languages, you could try Mercury, a logic programming language designed for real-world programming. It compiles to C, it's got the best type checking of any language I've ever used, it's fast, and its compiler is good. The fact that it's developed at my former university has nothing to do with it :)
Hey, it could be worse, you could be in Sydney.
It's so bad over here that one of Australia's top rating shows is The Games, a mockumentary satirising the Sydney Olympics' organisation.One of the more amusing storylines was the registration of a personal domain by a Mr. Sydney Games . . .
The Toyota Prius, at least, is a loss-making proposition. Toyota freely admits to losing money on every Prius they sell. They're using them to validate the technology in the real world (and figure out mundane things such servicing, reliability, and the like), get in some brownie points with environmentalists, while they work on the next version of the car, which is reputedly a huge improvement.
Toyota, Honda etc. don't throw this kind of money around if they don't think these cars have a real future.
Of course, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US and Australia by a similar amount to these hybrids, you could just put a punitive tax on SUV's . . .
OK, that's a shame, but check the name. Linuxmall - that hardly sounds independent, does it? Would you expect forddealer.com to post a review saying "the new Taurus is even uglier than the present jelly blob . . ."?
Banning the use of a computer is a heck of a lot more restrictive than banning the use of anaesthetics. The hypothetical doctor (who has committed a far more serious offence) could still make a living (admittedly not in their chosen profession) once they got out of gaol, but it's getting to the point where you can't hold any job if you can't use a computer.
Some of the funniest spam I've seen is from some PRC-based manufacturers. They spammed debian-devel with advertisements for bulk quantities of steel pipe, amongst other things . . .
In Australia, and (presumably) the US and the UK, having a mobile phone ring while in the cinema is considered *extremely* rude. However, when I was in Hong Kong last year, it seemed like this was perfectly acceptable behaviour. What differences in acceptable mobile phone etiquette have other Slashdot readers noticed from place to place?
but my machine does not provide any public services, so nobody has any business connecting to it. If it did, I wouldn't mind this crowd connecting to it to use those public services, but attempting to connect to anything else is an abuse. Frankly, I hope more sysadmins install portsentry or its equivalent and stop these people cold.
For instance, there's work being done on modelling user interfaces, so that they can be quantitatively evaluated before they have been built. There's also quite a lot of work to do to make use of the research that has been done, both for computers and other electronic devices. Anybody that compares, say, an Ericsson with a Nokia mobile phone will know that adoption of good user-interface technology isn't universal yet :)
I agree with you - MAC OS X seems, from what I've read, to be a decent server OS. I thought I'd acknowledged that already.
I also agree that Macintoshes tend to be well-built machines. However, all the ones I've seen are desktop machines, not servers. There are x86 boxes out there expressly designed and built as servers. While not everyone uses them, if I was doing important webserving they are the sort of thing I'd certainly want over *any* desktop box. I agree that while an average desktop PC from a typical x86 vendor is no more suited to webserving than an arbitrary Mac, you can buy ones that are.
Suns, sure, but Macintoshes? I don't think I'm aware of anybody using Macs for even semi-serious webserving. Neither the OS (OSX is a different ballgame, granted) nor the hardware is designed for this kind of thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, please :)
As regards to the number of HTTP servers, maybe they just ran out of time and money to benchmark ten squillion different configuration, and chose the ones that they believed were in most common usage. Testing more of them would certainly be a good thing, though.