At that rate, would-be serial killers who defy the software would have to be experts in Mathematics, Physics, or Computer Science (to know about how to make things truly random) - narrowing down the pool of available candidates for serial-killer-hood. Once again, a sufficient application of information theory saves the day - or makes math/physics/cs people likely targets for no reason, again.
Remember the old text adventure emulators? Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls . . . a JVM for games, before its time. It inspired competition (heh heh . . . competition in America?) and made the games (and their emulators) better.
This is strictly my opinion, but flashy game performance ([frankenstein] Emulation SLOW, BAD for FPS! [/frankenstein]) needs to take a back seat for awhile - then gaming will become an art and a science as opposed to art and hacked-together-maybe-it-will-work science (Apologies to Carmack, Molyneux, and Abrash). Game companies that latch on to latest/greatest technologies before they're proven are asking for a one-time, guaranteed to become a legacy game. Remember Glide? Yeah, neither do I . ..
To Sum Up: Emulation Good for Business, Game Performance at the expense of portability Bad.
I don't know for sure, but I think it has to do with the latent conductivity of mercury, which is cheaper than gold or silver by a long shot, and was used frequently before the copper refining process was, itself, refined. I think that's it, but who knows anything about latent conductivity at 3:20 in the morning?
At Macalester, anyways, three people read your paper (I don't know if this is standard) - your advisor, another faculty member, and a reader from outside the department. In this case, the third reader for his physics defense (which had something to do with patterns in particle behavior with lasers (I'm not a Physicist, I'm a Math/CS major, and won't pretend to understand))
was not able to appear until the last possible moment, and would not be available again for some time. The general consensus between everybody (and I do mean everybody) involved in either of my friend's theses was that this was as good a time as any, better to get it over with now, yadda yadda yadda. In other words, they would let the little things slide (like non-math / strictly presentation issues). Problem being that the professor constantly correcting him a) knew nothing about what he was doing (since he had never read the honors thesis), and b) would never let "the little things go" under any circumstances, even to this day. His readers are also some very understanding/forgiving people, to say nothing of their math, which, if I was in any position to understand, I would assure you that it was equally great. His second reader became my advisor for the way she handled the much ruder professor's actions.
Incidentally, my friend passed both of his defenses with flying colors, and is in Northwestern's grad program right now. Take it for what you will - it's a story I tell a lot to the younger students, now that I'm older, wiser, and have learned to stay as far away from that man as possible. Anything else I could say at this point would be pointless prof-bashing. Good night.
My friend was on about slide 5, when the first it's versus its appeared. The top half of the slide was the infinite product over the members of a finite sum over the finite product of the elements of a group G over a generating function for the Gaussian integers, the bottom half was the result of his first identity (a triple summation), and in the middle was the phrase "we can see its the case that". Considering that every summation, product, graph, and subscript was absolutely perfect, and that my friend had edited his slides for this honors defense during the two hours between his mathematics honors defense and his physics honors defense, and that everybody in the room knew that, it was more than a little tactless. And I know that I just started this sentence with a preposition, and the last sentence was so run-on that it would have given Victor Hugo pause, but I don't care. In the long run, it was the fact that all of his math was painstakingly correct and he screwed up on the its/it's thing less than or equal to three times in the whole presentation. (Brain little fuzzy now)
Also, this is the same man who taught my first-year class, and, after knowing me for two weeks, told me that I would be better off in Computer Science, without the double major, because they're more tolerant of people with my mathematical ability. So, axe to grind + grammar nazis = leave out important details.
Also, trying to argue about grammar and usage with you (Inoshiro) carries all the mental baggage of fighting a land war in Asia.;)
You are exactly right- I have a short story from college to illustrate. There's a prof at my college that has a reputation for being "that guy you don't want at any of your presentations." One of my friends my first year was the first person ever to do two honors theses- one for mathematics, and one for physics. Friend told me flat out, right before his defense started, "If that bitch even tries to correct my grammar, you can beat him with this newspaper." Ten minutes into friend's honors project, prof had already pointed out two incorrect uses of it's/its, and three spelling mistakes (which were actually British/American usage differences). So the person sitting next to me (an older friend of mine) grabbed the newspaper out of my hands and smacked the prof on the back with it. The prof looked like he was going to cry. He walked out of the room immediately, and the rest of the presentation went off without a hitch.
The next year, the annoying prof (who has a degree in Mathematics) gave a talk about the motion of a "hopping hoop" as this complicated system of parametric equations. About fifteen minutes into his presentation (which was scheduled for 45 minutes), the second reader for my friend's presentation called him out. "Isn't this just rotational mechanics? I mean, you only need one equation for the motion, and you capture all of the effects of friction and momentum in one equation. Who do you think you are - do you think you're going to do better than Newton." Within five minutes, three Math profs had also joined in on the tongue-lashing. He left the talk about twenty minutes before it was supposed to end.
I never actually hit the prof - I was just a first-year, and I didn't want to ruin my relationship with the To this day, my not beating the shit out him with the newspaper remains the only thing I regret about my college experience. So I think there are two morals here: 1) If you can ever get away with beating an idiot with a newspaper, do it; otherwise, you may regret it for the rest of your life; and, 2) If you ever go to a presentation and try to turn it into a witchhunt (gramatical, mathematical, or otherwise), don't be surprised when they're lashing you to the stake and dousing you with gasoline. Or "love thy neighbor in his infinite capacity to mangle language". Or something.
I was doing an independent study with two other guys from my digital electronics class, on programming microcontrollers. Our teacher for DigElec did mostly thin-film and semiconductor physics, and encouraged us to find out- and I quote- "how hard it would be to teach physics students how write a program for all those PIC 16c55x's I have lying around." I was a sophomore math/cs student, John was English/Geography , and Will was Physics/Math. It was one of the coolest classes I ever had.
If nothing else, there's something magical about programming in assembly for a chip, with nothing more than the giant language reference manuals and whatever we could scrounge on the web. That, and you have to put the PIC under UV light for a few hours if you make a mistake. I love the microcontrollers- I just wish we'd gotten our idiot tic-tac-toe playing system to work!
Public school teachers in my part of Wisconsin haven't had a raise to reflect cost of living in roughly 6-8 years, and for a while, there was a state-mandated limit to how much they could be paid. The WI Teachers' Union was actually sanctioned by the governor (T. THompson) for striking for these reasons - and now, Tommy Thompson (who has done exactly jack shit for social welfare and education in WI) is the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States. How's that for irony?
At Macalester, anyway, LaTeX is becoming the standard for students who don't have (or can't afford) a Japanese keyboard, or Microsoft's Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji software for Word. Last year, some of my friends found a FreeBSD application that intuits the correct Japanese characters from the Romanji (which is basically an ad-hoc spelling of Japanese sounds in Roman letters). The FreeBSD app is fairly portable, and a friend of mine is trying to get it to work 100% under Windows. (works fine on Linux and Mac's) Right now, it's only gaining acceptance with the 3rd and 4th-year students, who can appreciate that the Kanji printing is vastly superior ro Microsoft Word (that's what you get when Donald Knuth decides to crazy with Japanese). Myself, I don't know Japanese, I just watch this from the sidelines - but it's become one of the stories about open- vs. closed-source typesetting closest to my heart.
The patch for this was available for a month before the exploits started rolling in.
If it was a car, they would have ordered a recall- because their lawyers would have forced them to do it. The lawsuit for recovering the damages caused by Nimda, Code Red, or Iloveyou would have driven Microsoft at least half-way into the ground, but as of right now, there has been no lawsuit.
What would OSS do if such laws existed?
It would thank its lucky stars that IBM's consultants are embracing it like the son they never had.
Software liability, in the same sense as liability for a "standard" engineering product (electrical appliances, cars, buildings, etc.) is, like you say, ludicrous. That's because companies can employ underwriting laboratories to do testing that would exceed the cost of an in-house testing matrix. Engineering is governed by the laws of physics, which generally can tell you a lot about how resistant a building is to heat, wind, rain, etc. In general, software is just plain not tested enough. This is the biggest problem to the formulation of software engineering as a respectable discipline on par with civil or mechanical engineering.
1. Businesses can crumble because of security assured to them by their software vendor that doesn't exist. People lose houses, jobs, and families because of this kind of thing. Security is dependent on more than just each component of a solution being appropriately secure - it needs the combination of each individual piece to be secure. This task is, in general, too difficult for the average tech lead at a small business, college, or school, who will have enough problems with basic functionality. To some extent, the burden needs to be shifted to software providers- I don't think this is a point of contention.
2. It is easy to purchase the software you need, with a guarantee of security and reliability, and at a reasonable price, only if you are involved with the government of a large country, and even then you don't always get it right.
3. IIS on its own may be secure enough for a company intranet, but if the intranet's firewall and proxy servers are compromised, then it has become not secure enough. Schneier wants insurance companies to take the brunt of deciding how effective security solutions are - not the US government.
4. Schneier's main goal in instituting software liability is the management of security risk by lowering insurance premiums for people with more secure software. People who want to develop software without liability protection can count on an according security check level - if a system was in place that made security important for everybody, and not just these guys, the world might be a better place.
5. There are enough larger players within the software world that I don't think this would happen - specifically, IBM wants to protect AIX, Apple wants to protect OS X, and Sun wants to protect Solaris. And if IBM and the NSA want to continue to promote Linux, they WILL make it secure
6. OpenBSD has had four years without a remote hole in the default install configuration - it has also had several local holes, and this is entirely discounting the problem of people who configure the software the wrong way. People are choosing to do this, and the market is sorting it out, but not to the extent that's necessary to prevent another Nimda, Code Red, or Iloveyou virus - the cost in lost productivity alone is earth-shattering. And people don't need to get hacked for terrible things to happen to them- in fact, if they never figure it out, all the better for the attacker. No, for the most part, people don't care- and they should. Most people don't want to get vaccinated, but we make them- because the cost to not get vaccinated for society as a whole is that much greater.
My TiBook loves everything about Linux fine, except for XWindows. I'm using the 2.2 (Rome) YellowDawg, and I haven't been able to get Xwindows out of 8-bit graphics since the install. I hear about lots of people who have had success with Debian or LinuxPPC (which I thought was just doing kernel things now), but most of their stories are in Japanese or Dutch. For now, all I need is a working XF86Config file, and some insight on how to disable the Dawg's XConfigurator from trashing my previous config file every time I boot. I'm used to BSD-style bootscripts, so I still haven't quite gotten the hang of tweaking things on these new-fangled "RedHat" scripts on the Dawg. But - the lack of X-windows has kept me working at the console on my senior capstone papers, (God bless emacs and ssh) so it's not all bad. Also, the battery lasts a LONG time without using X-windows (But capstones are almost over).
Seriously, if you can tell me how your got it working, you've found yourself a new best friend. And a beer or two if you're ever in St. Paul.
PS- most of the comments I could read talked about how the modem was mostly done in software, and it could take a while for PPC developers to get it working correctly without help from Apple.
One of my friends wanted to see a movie on his birthday not too long ago- and the best one he could think of was (and I'm not kidding) "Dungeons and Dragons". All nine of us asked him "wha if it sucked? It's opening night - nobody has said anything about it." He said, "Just wait."
See, my friend knew something we didn't - we were going to see it at the Mall of America on opening night - he was going to pay our way in, for some reason. We saw it, it sucked, but that's not the end of the story. On the way out, we were given an "exit survey" by some studio monkeys about what we thought of the movie. All my friend asked was that we write down what we felt - which was basically, "I want to see more movies in this genre, but this one sucked, and given the opportunity, I would never pay money to see it again." That (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) was actually an option on the survey. When we'd all finished filling out the surveys, my friend said, "Thanks guys, for being nine votes against shitty fantasy movies." Huh.
An Idea - Programming is a creative process. You can fight me on this one if you want, but the programmer(s) have to come up with the heuristics/algorithms for dealing with a problem/situation before they can write the code that accomplishes their goal.
Source Code - A syntactically-structured organization of text that carries semantic meaning based on the grammar of the language it was written in. The syntax and semantics of any programming language can change over time (K&R vs. Traditional vs. ANSI C, for example), and old programs won't necessarily work without a compiler designed for the syntax/semantics of the time the program was originally written in.
Object code - A sequence of zero's and one's that describe a manipulation of electron flows through the CPU of a specific computer architecture.
IANAL, but with the way the American legal system is in place now, this is what seems to be the digs. Source code is copyrighted - algorithms can be patented. Object code can be neither.
Source code is a personal interpretation of an algorithm - a description in a particular language of a method for manipulatig anabstract quantification of a problem. That it happens to be realized on a computer is irrelevant - if a group of children understand the syntactic structure and semantic content of C++, you can write a parallel quicksort algorithm on a chalkboard, give them each cards with numbers on them, and have them quicksort the numbers. Source code is not a method - it is a description of a method. For all intents and purposes, it is a
literary work, at least according to the U.S. Copyright office.
Algorithms are methods - the RSA cryptographic protocol and the Lempel-Ziv compression/decompression algorithm are methods. They were patented, and the patent for RSA expired (Lempel-Ziv compression is still patented, AFAIK).
If I take some source code, change all the while loops to for loops, change all the variable names to arbitrarily-assigned integers, and add an instruction to "do nothing for 5 minutes" between each basic block of actions, have I fundamentally altered your method? No. Your source code? Yes. Your resulting time/space complexity? Probably. This is why a "clean-room" implementation of existing code doesn't violate copyright. Person A didn't see Person B's code - if neither of their code looks the same, and each accomplishes the same result, how can you prove that A copied B's, or vice-versa? A similar argument follows for object code.
Thank you for being honest. For a lot of people, Windows is the solution that will carry them over for a long time, and a lot of my people (that being the BSD/GNU/Linux guys I hang with) need to realize that as well. Personally, I don't think the issue should be about the browser - it should be about the anti-trust issues (multi-OS booting OEM rigging, locking Mac people into Word and refusing to ever update it unless Internet Explorer was the default browser, etc.).
The only thing I really take issue with in your post is file defragmentation as a feature. On virtually every other filesystem I'm aware of, setting even decent heuristics for file allocation/deallocation (not necessarily great/excellent) is enough. File fragmentation for Windows is a design problem, and selling a time/resource-wasting method to combat poorly-designed tertiary memory storage as a feature has always irked me. Every filesystem gets fragmented over time, but the issue should not be "how many days" versus "how many months."
Amen! Here at school, we start people out on Scheme, so they can concentrate on high-level design and not worry about low-level stuff. Their next language is usually Java, for a look at the object-oriented paradigm (and most everybody has some issue to raise with that, but meh). Then, in Programming Languages, everyone has to learn at least some Prolog (declarative/constructive programming), C (low-level procedural programming) and SML (high-level functional programming with monster type safety).
I find it odd that more people don't realize that ANY programming language can be interpreted (like Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, SML, Scheme, etc.) or (machine) compiled (C/++, Python, SML again, Fortran, Scheme again, etc.) if it's designed correctly. If people want speed, why don't they bootstrap high-level languages from an interpreter to native code? Not that Scheme is the best example of a high-level langauge, but the difference between Scheme code from ChezScheme and normal C++ is not night and day.
In short, it's the paradigm of programming that should fit your problem. Once people learn (if they ever learn) that you should not try to write self-modifying C code (use Scheme for that), predicate evaluations in C++ (use Prolog, SML, or Mercury for that) or operating systems in Scheme (for crying out loud, use C), then the software engineering landscape will continue to be a bleak landscape of hammering with screwdrivers.
I have several friends in the mechanical, electrical, and aeronautic engineering programs up there. Being from Northern Wisconsin, not a whole lot of culture shock- but the accent does become more pronounced after a 4, 5-year stint.
The thing that always surprises people about the "up north" culture is the completely up-front nature people have with each other. It's a lot like Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress- people with bad manners and completely introverted tendencies tend to be shunned. For most people, learning how to say "hello" to total strangers is their first big step into cultural assimilation. Is it the same with you?
The problem isn't the "average user." The problem is the end-user who doesn't want software installed automatically, for stability/interoperability reasons. Our XP lab at school used to auto-update new patches and fixes, until most of the functionality for accessing the Linux/Solaris servers was completely shot, and several UI problems came up. Things that used to work (like the Zip drives) suddenly didn't. Just because Microsoft updated the software doesn't mean it got any better.
The other big issue is the DRM software Microsoft, or its partners/subsidiaries, will install. Even with prompting, if you don't upgrade, then you have no access to a content provider's new media. All in all, this sounds like a giant headache for everyone that isn't Microsoft.
ST PAUL,MN - Like the belief in cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, or the idea that quantum computers will make all cryptography useless, a student of the classics today at Macalester College has finally proven that compression of random data can be accomplished to an arbitrary degree. Her secret to success:
"She's really terrible at math," said a member of the Mathematics/Computer Science Department at Macalester, who wishes to remain nameless. "Her belief that she shattered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by stating that `Um, humans don't think like machines, so like, it can't be right,' once again completely brings the mathematics community down to its foundations. Or rather, it doesn't , because she doesn't have clue one about what she's talking about." Other voices dissent:
"It's important to think outside of the box," said the chair of the Classics department. "Her complete lack of mathematical knowledge only makes her a better candidate for seeing the inherent flaws in centuries of mathematical reasoning."
"So like, some scary guys were arguing about this thing on some website they saw, saying it was impossible, that you could compress some arbitrarily random something-or-other, and I said, `Look, like, in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, they could make anything smaller because there was space in-between particles, or Barbi dolls, or something, so like, we just have to find the space in-between your data.' That shut them up really quick."
Hastily scrawling her new idea on a cafeteria napkin, the "idiot prodigy," as dubbed by the "scary guys" (the local chapter of the ACM), she has come to the conclusion that the only way to reach this kind of compression is to use rational numbers. "Like, 1/2 is smaller than one- why don't they just use that? I mean, I've found the space in-between their `data,' like, why don't they believe me? A whole `nother department at this college does!"
In posthumous response, Huffman, of Huffman-encoding fame, is now spinning in his grave- along with Turing, Godel, and Church.
Other than changing a few titles and names, this event actually happened in a class I was taking- Godel's Incompleteness Theorem was summarily "disproved", along with the Church-Turing thesis, and the entire idea of P(!)=NP, by a classics major in my Advanced Symbolic Logic class.
I suppose that, in whatever context, the lesson for today is that it's easy for any one person to disprove an untenable law of mathematics or computer science, simply by being really bad at math.
SGI is exactly that way . . .
on
IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 1
They know IRIX has seen its day as (primarily) an imaging OS, and they've stepped-up production to get Linux on MIPS, a top-notch IRIX virtual OS layer, and general community support for development tools. At their facility in Eagan, MN (right around St Paul), layoffs were upwards of 800 people (who saturated the local IT pool horribly, but we won't go into that). Through all of it, they never let up in looking for anyone with Linux kernel development experience, and they're willing to train people who are only familiar with other kernels. If this isn't a last-ditch signal for Linux salvation, I don't know what is.
Comrades! This is your captain- It is an honor to speak to you today! And I'm honored to be sailing with you on the maiden voyage of our Motherland's most recent achievement. And once more, we play our dangerous game. A game of chess....against our old adversary...the IBM hard drive engineer. For 40 years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game...and played it well. But today, the game is different. WE have the advantage! It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our transfer speeds - and they will tremble again - at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive!
Knuth has often (no cites here, just been muddling through his Lectures On . . . series) pointed to the decline of the mainframe as the beginning of code-muffliness. When you longer had to find the EXACT best solution to the problem, and good-enough was actually good enough, simplicity and elegance were quickly forgotten by the world that moved on, having better things to do.
It takes a rare soul to write beautiful code off the bat (Like Nick Weininger or Paul Cantrell- if you know `em), let alone beautify the crufty/spaghetti variety. For some people, (a little more artsy) like my roommate, they can't start a project to save his life, but they elegantize more code (and save more sleepless nights/asses/grades) than I think even they know.
Besides- Knuth cornered the mathematical/beautiful typography market 2 decades ago- and nobody's tried to go up against him since. It serves as a credit to his vision, and his art.
throw them in the air, and ask your user to turn off all the ones they don't need- and then they can cut some firewood. That seems to be the problem with most of the other distributions I've seen lately- there's no room for a security error, because you'll either screw yourself trying to turn it off, or someone will walk through the backdoor when you're not looking. IMHO, the only reason I go for Slackware (for a personal box, not a network [yet]) is the difference between having to patch 50 problems and 8 problems.
This was ALSO the same reason I turned to Debian before Redhat, SUSE, etc., as well. Neither distribution forces you to be bleeding-edge unless you PUSH THE BLADE . ..
But, everyone has their own values, and makes their own choices. On our campus, there have been huge problems with security lately- hence, my values and my choices.
Okay, how's about this one. After the last 7 years, I have studied psychology, philosophy, and basic neuroscience and pharmacology in order to come to the conclusion that: a) I have a physiological depressive disorder that will follow me the rest of my days B) has no mental or "counsellable" aspect, and c) the only way I can live an even somewhat normal life is through 150mg of Effexor every day. I missed my medication today- and I felt the effects immediately. I had several bouts of suicidial tendencies, and wanted very much to die throughout the day, as well as being extremely fatigued (out of nowhere). Before I was medicated for depression, I could barely live- in Ancient Greece, I would be deemed "possessed," and left out on a hillside to die; or, the chirurgeons of the time might opena hole in my head to let the evil spirits out. For some of us, medication is the ONLY way- there is no other route. In ancient times, people like myself did not just "get by" - they just died.
What the HELL does accuracy have to do with wanting to kill? If somebody can't shoot for crap, but wants to kill, how is that demonstrated in accuracy? If someone can shoot with the accuracy of an Old-West gunman, and doesn't, I can see why this might be related to an inborn tendency to kill, but let me extrapolate.
His point should not be on the inborn tendency of humans to not kill their own kind. Every human has that inborn tendency to not kill- but it only needs to be eroded once, and it will never come back. For many people where I grew up, hurting other people became easier to do after they were exposed to hunting animals. People didn't do it more often, but when they had to, they did it without hesitation. In my life, I have never actually gone hunting, and yet, when I was in fights in high school, I couldn't bring myself to hit the other person. With all of my "death training" in Doom and Quake, I was still able to differentiate between real people and mutated zombie Shotgun Sergeants. OTOH, someone who has shot and killed a deer with their own riflery, as well as gutted it with their bare hands and a knife, shows no such compulsion. So, from my own experience, I find it difficult to see how Grossman can draw this analogy from his data.
And as far as an inborn tendenct to not kill being present in animals, I can speak from experience. I come from the backwoods of Northern Wisconsin, and I have never experienced an inborn aversion among animals to kill other animals of their own kind. Carnivorous animals (like coyotes and dogs) are well-known for their ability to slaughter other packs of such animals in the wild. Wild herbivores (like deer, elk, ducks, geese, etc.) have no problems with killing each other over mates and territory.
Throughout history, civilized and uncivilized peoples have killed each other with and without reason an uncountable number of times. What more does a person need to know about the capacity of living things to kill other things?
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At that rate, would-be serial killers who defy the software would have to be experts in Mathematics, Physics, or Computer Science (to know about how to make things truly random) - narrowing down the pool of available candidates for serial-killer-hood. Once again, a sufficient application of information theory saves the day - or makes math/physics/cs people likely targets for no reason, again.
Remember the old text adventure emulators? Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls . . . a JVM for games, before its time. It inspired competition (heh heh . . . competition in America?) and made the games (and their emulators) better.
This is strictly my opinion, but flashy game performance ([frankenstein] Emulation SLOW, BAD for FPS! [/frankenstein]) needs to take a back seat for awhile - then gaming will become an art and a science as opposed to art and hacked-together-maybe-it-will-work science (Apologies to Carmack, Molyneux, and Abrash). Game companies that latch on to latest/greatest technologies before they're proven are asking for a one-time, guaranteed to become a legacy game. Remember Glide? Yeah, neither do I . . .
To Sum Up: Emulation Good for Business, Game Performance at the expense of portability Bad.
I don't know for sure, but I think it has to do with the latent conductivity of mercury, which is cheaper than gold or silver by a long shot, and was used frequently before the copper refining process was, itself, refined. I think that's it, but who knows anything about latent conductivity at 3:20 in the morning?
At Macalester, anyways, three people read your paper (I don't know if this is standard) - your advisor, another faculty member, and a reader from outside the department. In this case, the third reader for his physics defense (which had something to do with patterns in particle behavior with lasers (I'm not a Physicist, I'm a Math/CS major, and won't pretend to understand)) was not able to appear until the last possible moment, and would not be available again for some time. The general consensus between everybody (and I do mean everybody) involved in either of my friend's theses was that this was as good a time as any, better to get it over with now, yadda yadda yadda. In other words, they would let the little things slide (like non-math / strictly presentation issues). Problem being that the professor constantly correcting him a) knew nothing about what he was doing (since he had never read the honors thesis), and b) would never let "the little things go" under any circumstances, even to this day. His readers are also some very understanding/forgiving people, to say nothing of their math, which, if I was in any position to understand, I would assure you that it was equally great. His second reader became my advisor for the way she handled the much ruder professor's actions.
Incidentally, my friend passed both of his defenses with flying colors, and is in Northwestern's grad program right now. Take it for what you will - it's a story I tell a lot to the younger students, now that I'm older, wiser, and have learned to stay as far away from that man as possible. Anything else I could say at this point would be pointless prof-bashing. Good night.
My friend was on about slide 5, when the first it's versus its appeared. The top half of the slide was the infinite product over the members of a finite sum over the finite product of the elements of a group G over a generating function for the Gaussian integers, the bottom half was the result of his first identity (a triple summation), and in the middle was the phrase "we can see its the case that". Considering that every summation, product, graph, and subscript was absolutely perfect, and that my friend had edited his slides for this honors defense during the two hours between his mathematics honors defense and his physics honors defense, and that everybody in the room knew that, it was more than a little tactless. And I know that I just started this sentence with a preposition, and the last sentence was so run-on that it would have given Victor Hugo pause, but I don't care. In the long run, it was the fact that all of his math was painstakingly correct and he screwed up on the its/it's thing less than or equal to three times in the whole presentation. (Brain little fuzzy now)
Also, this is the same man who taught my first-year class, and, after knowing me for two weeks, told me that I would be better off in Computer Science, without the double major, because they're more tolerant of people with my mathematical ability. So, axe to grind + grammar nazis = leave out important details.
Also, trying to argue about grammar and usage with you (Inoshiro) carries all the mental baggage of fighting a land war in Asia. ;)
You are exactly right- I have a short story from college to illustrate. There's a prof at my college that has a reputation for being "that guy you don't want at any of your presentations." One of my friends my first year was the first person ever to do two honors theses- one for mathematics, and one for physics. Friend told me flat out, right before his defense started, "If that bitch even tries to correct my grammar, you can beat him with this newspaper." Ten minutes into friend's honors project, prof had already pointed out two incorrect uses of it's/its, and three spelling mistakes (which were actually British/American usage differences). So the person sitting next to me (an older friend of mine) grabbed the newspaper out of my hands and smacked the prof on the back with it. The prof looked like he was going to cry. He walked out of the room immediately, and the rest of the presentation went off without a hitch.
The next year, the annoying prof (who has a degree in Mathematics) gave a talk about the motion of a "hopping hoop" as this complicated system of parametric equations. About fifteen minutes into his presentation (which was scheduled for 45 minutes), the second reader for my friend's presentation called him out. "Isn't this just rotational mechanics? I mean, you only need one equation for the motion, and you capture all of the effects of friction and momentum in one equation. Who do you think you are - do you think you're going to do better than Newton." Within five minutes, three Math profs had also joined in on the tongue-lashing. He left the talk about twenty minutes before it was supposed to end.
I never actually hit the prof - I was just a first-year, and I didn't want to ruin my relationship with the To this day, my not beating the shit out him with the newspaper remains the only thing I regret about my college experience. So I think there are two morals here: 1) If you can ever get away with beating an idiot with a newspaper, do it; otherwise, you may regret it for the rest of your life; and, 2) If you ever go to a presentation and try to turn it into a witchhunt (gramatical, mathematical, or otherwise), don't be surprised when they're lashing you to the stake and dousing you with gasoline. Or "love thy neighbor in his infinite capacity to mangle language". Or something.
I was doing an independent study with two other guys from my digital electronics class, on programming microcontrollers. Our teacher for DigElec did mostly thin-film and semiconductor physics, and encouraged us to find out- and I quote- "how hard it would be to teach physics students how write a program for all those PIC 16c55x's I have lying around." I was a sophomore math/cs student, John was English/Geography , and Will was Physics/Math. It was one of the coolest classes I ever had.
If nothing else, there's something magical about programming in assembly for a chip, with nothing more than the giant language reference manuals and whatever we could scrounge on the web. That, and you have to put the PIC under UV light for a few hours if you make a mistake. I love the microcontrollers- I just wish we'd gotten our idiot tic-tac-toe playing system to work!
Public school teachers in my part of Wisconsin haven't had a raise to reflect cost of living in roughly 6-8 years, and for a while, there was a state-mandated limit to how much they could be paid. The WI Teachers' Union was actually sanctioned by the governor (T. THompson) for striking for these reasons - and now, Tommy Thompson (who has done exactly jack shit for social welfare and education in WI) is the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States. How's that for irony?
At Macalester, anyway, LaTeX is becoming the standard for students who don't have (or can't afford) a Japanese keyboard, or Microsoft's Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji software for Word. Last year, some of my friends found a FreeBSD application that intuits the correct Japanese characters from the Romanji (which is basically an ad-hoc spelling of Japanese sounds in Roman letters). The FreeBSD app is fairly portable, and a friend of mine is trying to get it to work 100% under Windows. (works fine on Linux and Mac's) Right now, it's only gaining acceptance with the 3rd and 4th-year students, who can appreciate that the Kanji printing is vastly superior ro Microsoft Word (that's what you get when Donald Knuth decides to crazy with Japanese). Myself, I don't know Japanese, I just watch this from the sidelines - but it's become one of the stories about open- vs. closed-source typesetting closest to my heart.
The patch for this was available for a month before the exploits started rolling in.
If it was a car, they would have ordered a recall- because their lawyers would have forced them to do it. The lawsuit for recovering the damages caused by Nimda, Code Red, or Iloveyou would have driven Microsoft at least half-way into the ground, but as of right now, there has been no lawsuit.
What would OSS do if such laws existed?
It would thank its lucky stars that IBM's consultants are embracing it like the son they never had.
Software liability, in the same sense as liability for a "standard" engineering product (electrical appliances, cars, buildings, etc.) is, like you say, ludicrous. That's because companies can employ underwriting laboratories to do testing that would exceed the cost of an in-house testing matrix. Engineering is governed by the laws of physics, which generally can tell you a lot about how resistant a building is to heat, wind, rain, etc. In general, software is just plain not tested enough. This is the biggest problem to the formulation of software engineering as a respectable discipline on par with civil or mechanical engineering.
1. Businesses can crumble because of security assured to them by their software vendor that doesn't exist. People lose houses, jobs, and families because of this kind of thing. Security is dependent on more than just each component of a solution being appropriately secure - it needs the combination of each individual piece to be secure. This task is, in general, too difficult for the average tech lead at a small business, college, or school, who will have enough problems with basic functionality. To some extent, the burden needs to be shifted to software providers- I don't think this is a point of contention.
2. It is easy to purchase the software you need, with a guarantee of security and reliability, and at a reasonable price, only if you are involved with the government of a large country, and even then you don't always get it right.
3. IIS on its own may be secure enough for a company intranet, but if the intranet's firewall and proxy servers are compromised, then it has become not secure enough. Schneier wants insurance companies to take the brunt of deciding how effective security solutions are - not the US government.
4. Schneier's main goal in instituting software liability is the management of security risk by lowering insurance premiums for people with more secure software. People who want to develop software without liability protection can count on an according security check level - if a system was in place that made security important for everybody, and not just these guys, the world might be a better place.
5. There are enough larger players within the software world that I don't think this would happen - specifically, IBM wants to protect AIX, Apple wants to protect OS X, and Sun wants to protect Solaris. And if IBM and the NSA want to continue to promote Linux, they WILL make it secure
6. OpenBSD has had four years without a remote hole in the default install configuration - it has also had several local holes, and this is entirely discounting the problem of people who configure the software the wrong way. People are choosing to do this, and the market is sorting it out, but not to the extent that's necessary to prevent another Nimda, Code Red, or Iloveyou virus - the cost in lost productivity alone is earth-shattering. And people don't need to get hacked for terrible things to happen to them- in fact, if they never figure it out, all the better for the attacker. No, for the most part, people don't care- and they should. Most people don't want to get vaccinated, but we make them- because the cost to not get vaccinated for society as a whole is that much greater.
My TiBook loves everything about Linux fine, except for XWindows. I'm using the 2.2 (Rome) YellowDawg, and I haven't been able to get Xwindows out of 8-bit graphics since the install. I hear about lots of people who have had success with Debian or LinuxPPC (which I thought was just doing kernel things now), but most of their stories are in Japanese or Dutch. For now, all I need is a working XF86Config file, and some insight on how to disable the Dawg's XConfigurator from trashing my previous config file every time I boot. I'm used to BSD-style bootscripts, so I still haven't quite gotten the hang of tweaking things on these new-fangled "RedHat" scripts on the Dawg. But - the lack of X-windows has kept me working at the console on my senior capstone papers, (God bless emacs and ssh) so it's not all bad. Also, the battery lasts a LONG time without using X-windows (But capstones are almost over).
Seriously, if you can tell me how your got it working, you've found yourself a new best friend. And a beer or two if you're ever in St. Paul.
PS- most of the comments I could read talked about how the modem was mostly done in software, and it could take a while for PPC developers to get it working correctly without help from Apple.
One of my friends wanted to see a movie on his birthday not too long ago- and the best one he could think of was (and I'm not kidding) "Dungeons and Dragons". All nine of us asked him "wha if it sucked? It's opening night - nobody has said anything about it." He said, "Just wait."
See, my friend knew something we didn't - we were going to see it at the Mall of America on opening night - he was going to pay our way in, for some reason. We saw it, it sucked, but that's not the end of the story. On the way out, we were given an "exit survey" by some studio monkeys about what we thought of the movie. All my friend asked was that we write down what we felt - which was basically, "I want to see more movies in this genre, but this one sucked, and given the opportunity, I would never pay money to see it again." That (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) was actually an option on the survey. When we'd all finished filling out the surveys, my friend said, "Thanks guys, for being nine votes against shitty fantasy movies." Huh.
IANAL, but with the way the American legal system is in place now, this is what seems to be the digs. Source code is copyrighted - algorithms can be patented. Object code can be neither.
Source code is a personal interpretation of an algorithm - a description in a particular language of a method for manipulatig anabstract quantification of a problem. That it happens to be realized on a computer is irrelevant - if a group of children understand the syntactic structure and semantic content of C++, you can write a parallel quicksort algorithm on a chalkboard, give them each cards with numbers on them, and have them quicksort the numbers. Source code is not a method - it is a description of a method. For all intents and purposes, it is a literary work, at least according to the U.S. Copyright office.
Algorithms are methods - the RSA cryptographic protocol and the Lempel-Ziv compression/decompression algorithm are methods. They were patented, and the patent for RSA expired (Lempel-Ziv compression is still patented, AFAIK).
If I take some source code, change all the while loops to for loops, change all the variable names to arbitrarily-assigned integers, and add an instruction to "do nothing for 5 minutes" between each basic block of actions, have I fundamentally altered your method? No. Your source code? Yes. Your resulting time/space complexity? Probably. This is why a "clean-room" implementation of existing code doesn't violate copyright. Person A didn't see Person B's code - if neither of their code looks the same, and each accomplishes the same result, how can you prove that A copied B's, or vice-versa? A similar argument follows for object code.
Thank you for being honest. For a lot of people, Windows is the solution that will carry them over for a long time, and a lot of my people (that being the BSD/GNU/Linux guys I hang with) need to realize that as well. Personally, I don't think the issue should be about the browser - it should be about the anti-trust issues (multi-OS booting OEM rigging, locking Mac people into Word and refusing to ever update it unless Internet Explorer was the default browser, etc.).
The only thing I really take issue with in your post is file defragmentation as a feature. On virtually every other filesystem I'm aware of, setting even decent heuristics for file allocation/deallocation (not necessarily great/excellent) is enough. File fragmentation for Windows is a design problem, and selling a time/resource-wasting method to combat poorly-designed tertiary memory storage as a feature has always irked me. Every filesystem gets fragmented over time, but the issue should not be "how many days" versus "how many months."
Amen! Here at school, we start people out on Scheme, so they can concentrate on high-level design and not worry about low-level stuff. Their next language is usually Java, for a look at the object-oriented paradigm (and most everybody has some issue to raise with that, but meh). Then, in Programming Languages, everyone has to learn at least some Prolog (declarative/constructive programming), C (low-level procedural programming) and SML (high-level functional programming with monster type safety).
I find it odd that more people don't realize that ANY programming language can be interpreted (like Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, SML, Scheme, etc.) or (machine) compiled (C/++, Python, SML again, Fortran, Scheme again, etc.) if it's designed correctly. If people want speed, why don't they bootstrap high-level languages from an interpreter to native code? Not that Scheme is the best example of a high-level langauge, but the difference between Scheme code from ChezScheme and normal C++ is not night and day.
In short, it's the paradigm of programming that should fit your problem. Once people learn (if they ever learn) that you should not try to write self-modifying C code (use Scheme for that), predicate evaluations in C++ (use Prolog, SML, or Mercury for that) or operating systems in Scheme (for crying out loud, use C), then the software engineering landscape will continue to be a bleak landscape of hammering with screwdrivers.
I have several friends in the mechanical, electrical, and aeronautic engineering programs up there. Being from Northern Wisconsin, not a whole lot of culture shock- but the accent does become more pronounced after a 4, 5-year stint.
The thing that always surprises people about the "up north" culture is the completely up-front nature people have with each other. It's a lot like Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress- people with bad manners and completely introverted tendencies tend to be shunned. For most people, learning how to say "hello" to total strangers is their first big step into cultural assimilation. Is it the same with you?
The problem isn't the "average user." The problem is the end-user who doesn't want software installed automatically, for stability/interoperability reasons. Our XP lab at school used to auto-update new patches and fixes, until most of the functionality for accessing the Linux/Solaris servers was completely shot, and several UI problems came up. Things that used to work (like the Zip drives) suddenly didn't. Just because Microsoft updated the software doesn't mean it got any better.
The other big issue is the DRM software Microsoft, or its partners/subsidiaries, will install. Even with prompting, if you don't upgrade, then you have no access to a content provider's new media. All in all, this sounds like a giant headache for everyone that isn't Microsoft.
"She's really terrible at math," said a member of the Mathematics/Computer Science Department at Macalester, who wishes to remain nameless. "Her belief that she shattered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by stating that `Um, humans don't think like machines, so like, it can't be right,' once again completely brings the mathematics community down to its foundations. Or rather, it doesn't , because she doesn't have clue one about what she's talking about." Other voices dissent:
"It's important to think outside of the box," said the chair of the Classics department. "Her complete lack of mathematical knowledge only makes her a better candidate for seeing the inherent flaws in centuries of mathematical reasoning."
"So like, some scary guys were arguing about this thing on some website they saw, saying it was impossible, that you could compress some arbitrarily random something-or-other, and I said, `Look, like, in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, they could make anything smaller because there was space in-between particles, or Barbi dolls, or something, so like, we just have to find the space in-between your data.' That shut them up really quick."
Hastily scrawling her new idea on a cafeteria napkin, the "idiot prodigy," as dubbed by the "scary guys" (the local chapter of the ACM), she has come to the conclusion that the only way to reach this kind of compression is to use rational numbers. "Like, 1/2 is smaller than one- why don't they just use that? I mean, I've found the space in-between their `data,' like, why don't they believe me? A whole `nother department at this college does!"
In posthumous response, Huffman, of Huffman-encoding fame, is now spinning in his grave- along with Turing, Godel, and Church.
Other than changing a few titles and names, this event actually happened in a class I was taking- Godel's Incompleteness Theorem was summarily "disproved", along with the Church-Turing thesis, and the entire idea of P(!)=NP, by a classics major in my Advanced Symbolic Logic class.
I suppose that, in whatever context, the lesson for today is that it's easy for any one person to disprove an untenable law of mathematics or computer science, simply by being really bad at math.
They know IRIX has seen its day as (primarily) an imaging OS, and they've stepped-up production to get Linux on MIPS, a top-notch IRIX virtual OS layer, and general community support for development tools. At their facility in Eagan, MN (right around St Paul), layoffs were upwards of 800 people (who saturated the local IT pool horribly, but we won't go into that). Through all of it, they never let up in looking for anyone with Linux kernel development experience, and they're willing to train people who are only familiar with other kernels. If this isn't a last-ditch signal for Linux salvation, I don't know what is.
The more I watch, the more I learn-
It takes a rare soul to write beautiful code off the bat (Like Nick Weininger or Paul Cantrell- if you know `em), let alone beautify the crufty/spaghetti variety. For some people, (a little more artsy) like my roommate, they can't start a project to save his life, but they elegantize more code (and save more sleepless nights/asses/grades) than I think even they know.
Besides- Knuth cornered the mathematical/beautiful typography market 2 decades ago- and nobody's tried to go up against him since. It serves as a credit to his vision, and his art.
throw them in the air, and ask your user to turn off all the ones they don't need- and then they can cut some firewood. That seems to be the problem with most of the other distributions I've seen lately- there's no room for a security error, because you'll either screw yourself trying to turn it off, or someone will walk through the backdoor when you're not looking. IMHO, the only reason I go for Slackware (for a personal box, not a network [yet]) is the difference between having to patch 50 problems and 8 problems.
This was ALSO the same reason I turned to Debian before Redhat, SUSE, etc., as well. Neither distribution forces you to be bleeding-edge unless you PUSH THE BLADE . . .
But, everyone has their own values, and makes their own choices. On our campus, there have been huge problems with security lately- hence, my values and my choices.
Okay, how's about this one. After the last 7 years, I have studied psychology, philosophy, and basic neuroscience and pharmacology in order to come to the conclusion that:
a) I have a physiological depressive disorder that will follow me the rest of my days
B) has no mental or "counsellable" aspect, and
c) the only way I can live an even somewhat normal life is through 150mg of Effexor every day.
I missed my medication today- and I felt the effects immediately. I had several bouts of suicidial tendencies, and wanted very much to die throughout the day, as well as being extremely fatigued (out of nowhere). Before I was medicated for depression, I could barely live- in Ancient Greece, I would be deemed "possessed," and left out on a hillside to die; or, the chirurgeons of the time might opena hole in my head to let the evil spirits out.
For some of us, medication is the ONLY way- there is no other route. In ancient times, people like myself did not just "get by" - they just died.
His point should not be on the inborn tendency of humans to not kill their own kind. Every human has that inborn tendency to not kill- but it only needs to be eroded once, and it will never come back. For many people where I grew up, hurting other people became easier to do after they were exposed to hunting animals. People didn't do it more often, but when they had to, they did it without hesitation. In my life, I have never actually gone hunting, and yet, when I was in fights in high school, I couldn't bring myself to hit the other person. With all of my "death training" in Doom and Quake, I was still able to differentiate between real people and mutated zombie Shotgun Sergeants. OTOH, someone who has shot and killed a deer with their own riflery, as well as gutted it with their bare hands and a knife, shows no such compulsion. So, from my own experience, I find it difficult to see how Grossman can draw this analogy from his data.
And as far as an inborn tendenct to not kill being present in animals, I can speak from experience. I come from the backwoods of Northern Wisconsin, and I have never experienced an inborn aversion among animals to kill other animals of their own kind. Carnivorous animals (like coyotes and dogs) are well-known for their ability to slaughter other packs of such animals in the wild. Wild herbivores (like deer, elk, ducks, geese, etc.) have no problems with killing each other over mates and territory.
Throughout history, civilized and uncivilized peoples have killed each other with and without reason an uncountable number of times. What more does a person need to know about the capacity of living things to kill other things?