Great post, but I'd just like to clarify one minor point that the casual reader might confuse slightly:
Incomputable: no algorithm exists that can solve this problem in all cases, even given an indefinitely fast computer and as much time as is required. The halting problem falls into this category. The absolute best you can do for these problems is find an algorithm that, in a reasonable amount of time, returns either the correct answer, or "don't know".
Intractable: an algorithm exists that can find a solution every time, but for large problems (typically large means >50 "things" but for some particularly nasty problems large means >4-5 "things") finding the solution may take an unreasonably long time (a solution won't be found until the universe dies). Faster computers will not help much, either, because making the problem slightly bigger increases the problem difficulty exponentially. If you *prove* a problem intractable (and there are a large class of problems that are strongly believed to be intractable, but we haven't absolutely proved it yet), the best you can do is either find an algorithm that gives you an answer quickly in the kinds of cases you are interested in, or find an algorithm that gives you an approximate, rather than exact, answer.
They probably can't afford Intuit, even with their grossly overinflated stock. Intuit is a multibillion dollar company, I believe.
I'm part of a team working on a decent, GPL'd, accounting package for Linux. We're not quite Quicken yet, but we're working on it! Check out (with CVS preferably) Gnucash.
In HK, some people at the dorm I was staying at had some DVD's (no, they weren't video CD's, they were DVD), which they were watching on a regular player, which were obviously pirated.
By whatever method, some clever Chinese pirates have figured out how to create pirate DVD's that can be played on regular DVD players without the approval of the DVD consortium. This was the case even *before* DeCSS.
I only wish I knew exactly how they had done it (whether they had modified a DVD writer to do bit-for-bit copies, or some other method).
Courses like this are designed to hook people in - for instance, the Mech. Eng. department at my university offers a "high performance vehicle" course in first year. The idea is to make it sound sexy in the handbook, and hope that at least some of the people find the meat of the course interesting.
While The Matrix has some interesting philosophical ideas, there are a whole bunch of other novels and movies that examine the same ideas, and more effectively IMHO. I would suspect that a large number of them are on the reading list for the course.
However, I've got to give the lecturer A for initiative - I hope he gets a good student or two out of it.
I've never doubted BillG's intelligence. Often doubted his concept of business ethics, though. Like most Slashdotters, I'm also extremely sceptical that he retains any programming ability (if indeed, he ever had any).
Therefore, I'd like to challenge Bill to get a (non-documentation) patch accepted into *any* well-known free software project. In fact, I'd personally like to ask Bill to use his newly acquired free time to help out with GnuCash project.
On the theory that people contribute to free software to scratch a personal itch, I reckon Bill might like to add support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic to prevent floating-point overflows . . .
Good point. Bill probably figures Microsoft has reached the high point of its success and has decided to spend the next few years doing some other stuff besides kicking heads - like raising a family and giving away billions of dollars to worthy causes.
I couldn't think of *any* job more enjoyable than giving away billions of dollars to causes *I* considered worthy (provided I still spent an hour or two each day coding free software:) ).
while they had the chance. Because they fiddled while the rest of the world set up SSL-based solutions that invited online merchants to store credit card numbers in databases, they have left the door wide open for damage like this.
Maybe SET was a bad standard, I don't really know. But the idea (transfer the money, not the card number) was highly sound.
the fiendish DLL trap - thousands of different versions just come popping up all over the place!
Super-Reboot power finger (unfortunately, this goes off at the first sign of trouble)
And his partner Microsoft woman with
her inescapable embrace-and-extend death grip
Can they survive the forces of the mighty Penguin, the Daemon, and the avenging DOJ? Tune in again for the next episode of Microsoft Man - Windows 2000, the final battle . . .
I saw VCD on a trip to Hong Kong, and I'm puzzled as to why this format has had any success at all. IMHO, the image quality of VCD is considerably *worse* than VHS, with really bad compression artifacts and even perceived jerkiness. Worse, a lot of movies don't even fit onto one VCD - you have to change over in the middle of the movie.
Aside from the convenience of slightly smaller media and no rewind, why would anybody use such a crappy format?
Perhaps you're right (I don't know, I haven't read the biography but I believe there is some debate on Turing's death), but was it really necessary to be so vitriolic?
Turing is one of this century's true geniuses. I would prefer to remember Alan Turing for his incredible scientific achievements, and regret his tragically early death (by whatever method), rather than dwell on his probable suicide.
The Australian supermarket tabloids, which I borrowed from my mother as a kid when I'd read everything else in the house, had a regular section called Mere Male. This column was made up of anecdotes from readers about men who wanted to know at what temperature to boil water, used mops to clean carpet, etc. etc. etc - essentially making fun of many males' inability to cope with tasks that were trivial to the middle-aged housewives who bought the magazines. A car magazine I read has a monthly column from a mechanic, who usually tells a tale about either a) a particularly clueless customer who has needlessly damaged his car in some spectacular way, or b) other mechanics who, in their ignorance, have missed a blindly obvious and trivial diagnosis of a fault. Finally, I spent time working at a photocopier dealership, at which technicians often did little else but tell stories about the idiocy of their customers. All of these are essentially about mocking the stupidity of the ignorant, and all were/are hilariously funny on occasion.
If comics are prevented from mocking ignorance and stupidity, what will be left?
You might manage a pretty impressive internetwork, but it's pretty hard to do intercontinental links without the resources of governmnents and telcos, the only people with the expertise and cash to lay cables or launch satellites.
I suppose the recent launch of the amateur ham radio satellite gives some hope, but personally I've gotten used to ~300 ms Oz-US ping times and I'm not really keen to give them up:)
As far as the *default* kernel goes, I believe the consensus on the -devel list was something along the lines of "when we're sure that all the different architectures Debian supports currently are solid".
Otherwise, I believe 2.4 drops pretty much straight into woody.
As far as release dates go, Debian does new stable releases *more often* than Linus (if you only count 2.0 to 2.2 and 2.4 coming). However, new stable kernel releases often contain new features in the kernel, while Debian stays fixed modulo bug squashing, for that time. Debian is hopefully going to change it's release management system to allow the stable system to undergo modular upgrades, leading to the possibility of partial upgrades and faster releases.
BTW, "unstable" really isn't all that unstable at the moment - if you're game to try KRASH you might try installing the latest unstable on a spare partition.
They are only legitimate because they are written in law. But they are not justice. No-one has the right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. It's *my* fucking body.
Have you considered that your taking drugs can affect others? A poster on another article suggested that Russia's prisons are currently acting as resistant TB farms. In Australia, there have been quite a few cases of totally-drug-resistant "Golden Staph" after operations in hospitals. Both of these are caused by the uncontrolled use of prescription medicines. I don't really care if *you* want to screw up your health by taking random drugs, but every time you take an antibiotic you potentially contribute to the pool of resistant bacteria. I want you doing so under the advice of a doctor, who is at least qualified to know whether antibiotics are justified and can advise how to take them in a non-resistance-promoting manner.
Voice recognition has been "a year or two away" since the mid eighties, where "faster processors" like the mighty 386 would allow voice recognition to be accurate and speedy enough to be adopted by the masses as preferable to typing.
While I haven't used a voice recognition system, it appears that they're still not accurate enough (95% accuracy means that the system stuffs up one in every 20 words), and that composing anything (be it an email or C code) by dictation is in itself a quite difficult skill to learn. Do you know anyone that uses voice recognition on a daily basis?
Pen input/handwriting recognition are quite dead as input methods for desktop use. Handwriting recognition is far too slow and inaccurate to be of any use, and pen input onto a vertical screen places too much stress on the hands. Pen input's one and only use is for freehand drawing.
I don't mean to take away from your general question (which is a good one), but just make some comment on the specific examples you have chosen.
I happen to believe that those things are good things to spend tax money on. You, however, sound like a red-blooded American Republican, and you presumably regard another Quixotic tilt at a ballistic-missile defence system as a good way for your federal government to spend your tax dollars. It's your country, you can vote in your government to spend your tax however your want.
However, even if you don't accept my views on what taxes should be used for, it doesn't change what I saw as my essential argument. If it's cheaper, fairer, and more convenient to collect taxes on stuff you buy on the Net (instead of stuff you buy in a regular store, stuff you earn, or stuff you own, or stuff you use), then I don't have a problem with Internet taxes. I doubt any current scheme could be fair, cheap, and convenient, so I oppose them - for now.
Why pay any tax? Simple. You pay tax to fund those essential services that governments best provide (education, roads, health - despite what Americans seem to think, etc). All of these things cost money, and taxes are the only sensible way to pay for them.
So, if you agree that some tax must be paid (and sometimes I wonder whether that concept is understood by some Slashdotters), the question is "What is the best way for that tax to be collected?" The answer to this question involves such criteria as:
Cost of collection
Fairness of collection(and what is "fair" is an endless question)
Stability of revenue collected.
Extent to which it encourages good behaviour (the idea behind very heavy cigarette and fuel taxes).
etc. . .
So, in theory, if it's cheaper, fairer and more socially desirable for governments to collect taxes through Internet sales taxes rather than income taxes, import duties, or other levies, I have no complaints. The only problem is that, in practice, Internet sales taxes will have to be organised through international agreement with all the stupidies that usually entails. For that reason, I believe that the cost of collecting Internet taxes (borne by online merchants) make this far too onerous, certainly for the moment.
If you want to complain about the overall level of tax you pay, fine. If you think a tax is too onerous to manage, or impacts you unfairly, fine. But don't expect a sympathetic hearing if you expect to pay no tax at all, or don't like observing the fact that you pay tax.
Not to draw too much attention to the guy, as he really doesn't like publicity much. (I've been in the department with him for 5 years now, and I've met him maybe two or three times.)
But, now that's he's been mentioned on Slashdot, it might be appropriate to blow his trumpet a little bit. He did a whole lot of interesting things for Unix during the 70's, including the first disk quota implementation, and was apparently very important in the early years of AUUG (the Australian UNIX Users Group).
Australia, including Elz, played an important part in the development of the Unix culture. There's a book called Twenty-Five Years of UNIX which discusses some of this.
In between the arts-student verbiage (...film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis...) he does make one interesting point that hasn't really been discussed very much in improving picture quality in Film/TV. The improved analog system he discusses increases the frame rate to 48 fps. I'm interested to see how much this increases perceived picture quality.
We all know that, for games, 50-odd fps is way better than 25-odd fps (and many people are prepared to spend thousands of dollars on fast CPU's and graphics cards to achieve it). In addition, 8-mm film is generally shot at 18 fps and this definitely looks jerky.
Has anyone seen this system, and does the increased frame rate make a real difference in smoothness?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm part of a team working on a decent, GPL'd, accounting package for Linux. We're not quite Quicken yet, but we're working on it! Check out (with CVS preferably) Gnucash.
By whatever method, some clever Chinese pirates have figured out how to create pirate DVD's that can be played on regular DVD players without the approval of the DVD consortium. This was the case even *before* DeCSS.
I only wish I knew exactly how they had done it (whether they had modified a DVD writer to do bit-for-bit copies, or some other method).
While The Matrix has some interesting philosophical ideas, there are a whole bunch of other novels and movies that examine the same ideas, and more effectively IMHO. I would suspect that a large number of them are on the reading list for the course.
However, I've got to give the lecturer A for initiative - I hope he gets a good student or two out of it.
Therefore, I'd like to challenge Bill to get a (non-documentation) patch accepted into *any* well-known free software project. In fact, I'd personally like to ask Bill to use his newly acquired free time to help out with GnuCash project.
On the theory that people contribute to free software to scratch a personal itch, I reckon Bill might like to add support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic to prevent floating-point overflows . . .
I couldn't think of *any* job more enjoyable than giving away billions of dollars to causes *I* considered worthy (provided I still spent an hour or two each day coding free software :) ).
After all, we're the country that figured out how to split the atom trying to put bubbles in beer :)
Maybe SET was a bad standard, I don't really know. But the idea (transfer the money, not the card number) was highly sound.
And his partner Microsoft woman with
Can they survive the forces of the mighty Penguin, the Daemon, and the avenging DOJ? Tune in again for the next episode of Microsoft Man - Windows 2000, the final battle . . .
Whacko Jacko - not to mention Sir Paul. They have the odd bit of spare cash lying around :)
He got a copy of TPM and edited out Jar Jar where possible.
I haven't seen it, but apparently the movie is *MUCH* improved. . .
Aside from the convenience of slightly smaller media and no rewind, why would anybody use such a crappy format?
Turing is one of this century's true geniuses. I would prefer to remember Alan Turing for his incredible scientific achievements, and regret his tragically early death (by whatever method), rather than dwell on his probable suicide.
If comics are prevented from mocking ignorance and stupidity, what will be left?
I suppose the recent launch of the amateur ham radio satellite gives some hope, but personally I've gotten used to ~300 ms Oz-US ping times and I'm not really keen to give them up :)
Just a clarification, I was speaking for me only as an interested observer rather than somebody who actively works on that aspect of Debian.
Otherwise, I believe 2.4 drops pretty much straight into woody.
BTW, "unstable" really isn't all that unstable at the moment - if you're game to try KRASH you might try installing the latest unstable on a spare partition.
They are only legitimate because they are written in law. But they are not justice. No-one has the right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. It's *my* fucking body.
Have you considered that your taking drugs can affect others? A poster on another article suggested that Russia's prisons are currently acting as resistant TB farms. In Australia, there have been quite a few cases of totally-drug-resistant "Golden Staph" after operations in hospitals. Both of these are caused by the uncontrolled use of prescription medicines. I don't really care if *you* want to screw up your health by taking random drugs, but every time you take an antibiotic you potentially contribute to the pool of resistant bacteria. I want you doing so under the advice of a doctor, who is at least qualified to know whether antibiotics are justified and can advise how to take them in a non-resistance-promoting manner.
While I haven't used a voice recognition system, it appears that they're still not accurate enough (95% accuracy means that the system stuffs up one in every 20 words), and that composing anything (be it an email or C code) by dictation is in itself a quite difficult skill to learn. Do you know anyone that uses voice recognition on a daily basis?
Pen input/handwriting recognition are quite dead as input methods for desktop use. Handwriting recognition is far too slow and inaccurate to be of any use, and pen input onto a vertical screen places too much stress on the hands. Pen input's one and only use is for freehand drawing.
I don't mean to take away from your general question (which is a good one), but just make some comment on the specific examples you have chosen.
However, even if you don't accept my views on what taxes should be used for, it doesn't change what I saw as my essential argument. If it's cheaper, fairer, and more convenient to collect taxes on stuff you buy on the Net (instead of stuff you buy in a regular store, stuff you earn, or stuff you own, or stuff you use), then I don't have a problem with Internet taxes. I doubt any current scheme could be fair, cheap, and convenient, so I oppose them - for now.
So, if you agree that some tax must be paid (and sometimes I wonder whether that concept is understood by some Slashdotters), the question is "What is the best way for that tax to be collected?" The answer to this question involves such criteria as:
So, in theory, if it's cheaper, fairer and more socially desirable for governments to collect taxes through Internet sales taxes rather than income taxes, import duties, or other levies, I have no complaints. The only problem is that, in practice, Internet sales taxes will have to be organised through international agreement with all the stupidies that usually entails. For that reason, I believe that the cost of collecting Internet taxes (borne by online merchants) make this far too onerous, certainly for the moment.
If you want to complain about the overall level of tax you pay, fine. If you think a tax is too onerous to manage, or impacts you unfairly, fine. But don't expect a sympathetic hearing if you expect to pay no tax at all, or don't like observing the fact that you pay tax.
IMHO, government agencies should provide this information for no more than the cost of making it available (in this case virtually nothing).
But, now that's he's been mentioned on Slashdot, it might be appropriate to blow his trumpet a little bit. He did a whole lot of interesting things for Unix during the 70's, including the first disk quota implementation, and was apparently very important in the early years of AUUG (the Australian UNIX Users Group).
Australia, including Elz, played an important part in the development of the Unix culture. There's a book called Twenty-Five Years of UNIX which discusses some of this.
We all know that, for games, 50-odd fps is way better than 25-odd fps (and many people are prepared to spend thousands of dollars on fast CPU's and graphics cards to achieve it). In addition, 8-mm film is generally shot at 18 fps and this definitely looks jerky.
Has anyone seen this system, and does the increased frame rate make a real difference in smoothness?