Re:first: prove the correctness of your software
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
In certain limited situations, it is possible to prove mathematically that a program is "correct". See, for example
Without this precursor proof, I cannot see how a piece of software can therefore be used in a subsequent proof. The methodoilogy is flawed.
Testing is not the answer, because it is never exaustive - i.e. tests all possible inputs and validates all possible outputs. If you could do this, the proof you are trying to obtain would be in the result set of your testing - a circular argument: A proves B, but B proves A.
first: prove the correctness of your software
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
If you are using a software tool/package, then it must have been subject to mathematically rigourous tests to demonstrate it's own correctness. If not, then the foundation of any proofs that use it must be in doubt.
So, if you use a closed product, how can that have been proved corect (independently of the supplier, of course) without recourse to the source code?
I'd also want to know what happens if I lose the device, or when it breaks. Will I have a method of saving my ebooks somewhere else, or do I have to buy everything again.
I'm a household name (at least in the literate households) and I've just written my next best-seller. Where exactly does a publisher feature, if the book only appears as an eBook? They won't need to publish (i.e. print) anything and I can obtain the services of a publicist myself.
What that means is all the royalties go to me - and then to the tax-man, without having a mega-corporation in the middle, skimming most of my pay.
Even for the unknown authors, it will be easier, if somewhat more crowded, to get published. Unlike a musician, you won't need instruments and a (home?) studio - just a copy of vi and an internet connection.
and like the iPod, it will stand or fall on two fundementals:
the user interface
the available content (and its price)
However, unlike an mp3 player, this cannot be just a passive device: plug yourself into it and vegetate. It will need user interaction for every page, so apart from looking pretty, this UI will have to actually be usable.
Now if Amazon want to really make this take off, they'll make it able to read the book to you. Apart from never overestimating the intelligence of the user, this would also make it much more accessible to the young and the visaually impared. It would also make the device usable outdoors in daylight - a failing that every other screen based device has, and shows no signs of being fixed.
every time connection speeds have increased (300 Baud, 1200, 56k,.... 20Mbps) you've needed more disk space to store the cr... you download. At Tbit speeds, where will you put all this?
Similarly, once you spent a few seconds downloading everything off the internet, what will you do next?
(3 seconds to download it, 25 years to read it all)
It looks like Kyocera don't recognise a bluff when they see one.
Maye we should all get in touch with them and say that we might own patents that they may be infringing. Just to be sure, they need to sign this licensing agreement and pay $xxxx for an assurance that we won't sue them in the future.
This seems to be just what MS have done, but being bigger and scarier than we are, they can get a way with it.
Given the past history of Mars probes (and european/UK ones in particular) I think they should choose a location that's featureless and well photographed, so that when the vehicle does go SPLAT! they'll at least be able to see where it's pieces are.
Overpriced? you're kidding, the money being talked about so far is a bargain.
The german mobile auction in 2000 raised over $50Bn (at today's exchange rate). The UK auction in 2001 raised £22.5Bn ($45Bn at todays rate)
These auctions are more profitable than wars - well, for the governments involved. Not for the poor suckers who "win" them and then have to find the cash
To get the best performance out of these things we need to move away from IDE/SATA architectures and have the storage directly on the PCI or PCI-E bus.
Once that happens, PCs will really start to get useful!
There'll be many "rounds" of bidding. The initial bid is just to see who's interested. After that, the stakes will rise with each interested party desperately trying to squeeze more finance out of their partners/banks/owners to raise their bid.
At some point one will either not be able to raise any more ca$h and quit the bidding rounds, while the other go on. Some will realise that at the price they will have to pay, their business model breaks and they won;t make any profit.
Eventually someone will "win", but this will be a phyrric victory as the amount of money they will have to pay for a licence will be so high that they'll either go bankrupt, have to join up with some other bidders (who pulled out earlier) or not have enough monkey left to actually build the systems they wanted to implement.
it was your right to vote. I.e. you as an individual, not as a country.
In that respect, since on single vote has ever made any difference to a result in any democracy (it does in a dictatorship as only 1 person gets to vote) then a single vote has never been excercised and never will. That makes it worthless.
It's the same paradox as blades of grass on a golf course. Your ball has to land on one, but there are so many, the chances of it landing on any particualr one is as close to zero as you can measure.
In the UK there's only been one election result since 1918 that was decided by 2 votes (so if you'd voted for the loser instead of the winner, you might have changed it). That was in 1931. There have been 24 elections, with currently 646 MPs so more than 15,000 results.
Even that single seat change wouldn't have amounted to anything as the parliamentary majority was greater that 1.
In the US the Bosh-Gore election of 2000 was the closest ever and the margin in Florida was 500+.
So one person's vote has never changed anything. I expect everyone knows this in their hearts - the variation in "offer price" only reflects what the individuals would expect to get for it
yes, quite. Any datacentre that relies on utility power and does not have the ability to run everything standalone is at least incompetent - bordering on negligent. Plus, if you buy space in one, without having a backup plan you deserve every bad thing that happens to you.
Over here, there are laws that require certain establishments (i.e. financial ones) to have redundant everything, including locations.
If your data center's cooling system fails, how long do you have before your servers overheat?
The first occasion was over a weekend (no-one present) in a server room full of VAX's. On the monday when it was discovered, we just opened a window and everything carried on as usual.
The next time was when an ECL model Amdahl was replaced by a CMOS IBM. No-one downgraded the cooling and it froze up - solid. This time the who shebang was down for a day while the heat-exchangers thawed out. It was quite interesting watching the temperature monitors, it took a couple of hours until the temperature rose above the "danger" threshold.
So the answer is either, until you arrive at work (2 days or more), or sometimes a bit more heat is a good thing.
Consider a time long ago. Mice (and other small furry creatures)smelt every other animal around them. Some mice had "flee" triggers for pretty much anything - they ran away all the time and died out as they never stayed still long enough to eat/breed. Others had little or no "flee" triggers - they died out as they got eaten. The rest survived as they fled from predators and ignored non-threatening animals.
All these guys have done is wind back the clock and created one of the evolutionary branches that dies out long ago - for very good reasons.
Apart from being a curiosity, does this have any other use - except maybe to create animals that avoid the smell of tyres or tarmac and so don't become roadkill?
In most of these cases the politicians have no clear idea of the problem, nor any solutions (whether practical or not).
Generally they are responding to a perceived level of concern from members of the public. This may come to them directly (unlikely) or through focus-groups/media reports or just hearsay from their staff.
This means they feel they should do something, just to show they're on the case and to stop any possibility that their opponents can make political capital out of it. As a consequence they have no real idea of what can be done - or even have any first-hand experience of the websites they're attacking.
The best things the site owners can do is to nod gravely, agree that there are bad people about. State that they have state-of-the-art protections in place and that they spend $Xmillion per year "protecting" people.
Until there is a reliable way of identifying the baddies just by what they type, they'll always be open to this type of criticism and can not otherwise address it.
Stay safe, act sensibly, watch your kids -they're your responsibility
Apple fans lined up through Yesterday night in Germany and Britain
Glad to see that there are people everywhere who get taken in by glitzy, superficial, overpriced, under-featured gizmos - just because the tech media says they're wonderful.
you can make what seem like authoritative, or insightful statements with absolutely zero information. By the time the gphone comes out (or flops) no-one will remember what this guy, or the hordes like him, have said. Even better, no-one will care except maybe his mother. Until then it's a slightly entertaining way to spend a minute or two - just don't take anything he says seriously, it's just another form of entertainment.
For example, should stem cell research (legal in some countries, illegal in others) be permitted. Could it be done in, say, a european module, but not an american one. How about growing GM crops
Slashdot Mirror
Without this precursor proof, I cannot see how a piece of software can therefore be used in a subsequent proof. The methodoilogy is flawed.
Testing is not the answer, because it is never exaustive - i.e. tests all possible inputs and validates all possible outputs. If you could do this, the proof you are trying to obtain would be in the result set of your testing - a circular argument: A proves B, but B proves A.
So, if you use a closed product, how can that have been proved corect (independently of the supplier, of course) without recourse to the source code?
I'd also want to know what happens if I lose the device, or when it breaks. Will I have a method of saving my ebooks somewhere else, or do I have to buy everything again.
I'm a household name (at least in the literate households) and I've just written my next best-seller. Where exactly does a publisher feature, if the book only appears as an eBook? They won't need to publish (i.e. print) anything and I can obtain the services of a publicist myself.
What that means is all the royalties go to me - and then to the tax-man, without having a mega-corporation in the middle, skimming most of my pay.
Even for the unknown authors, it will be easier, if somewhat more crowded, to get published. Unlike a musician, you won't need instruments and a (home?) studio - just a copy of vi and an internet connection.
However, unlike an mp3 player, this cannot be just a passive device: plug yourself into it and vegetate. It will need user interaction for every page, so apart from looking pretty, this UI will have to actually be usable.
Now if Amazon want to really make this take off, they'll make it able to read the book to you. Apart from never overestimating the intelligence of the user, this would also make it much more accessible to the young and the visaually impared. It would also make the device usable outdoors in daylight - a failing that every other screen based device has, and shows no signs of being fixed.
Similarly, once you spent a few seconds downloading everything off the internet, what will you do next?
(3 seconds to download it, 25 years to read it all)
Maye we should all get in touch with them and say that we might own patents that they may be infringing. Just to be sure, they need to sign this licensing agreement and pay $xxxx for an assurance that we won't sue them in the future.
This seems to be just what MS have done, but being bigger and scarier than we are, they can get a way with it.
Given the past history of Mars probes (and european/UK ones in particular) I think they should choose a location that's featureless and well photographed, so that when the vehicle does go SPLAT! they'll at least be able to see where it's pieces are.
The german mobile auction in 2000 raised over $50Bn (at today's exchange rate). The UK auction in 2001 raised £22.5Bn ($45Bn at todays rate)
These auctions are more profitable than wars - well, for the governments involved. Not for the poor suckers who "win" them and then have to find the cash
references:
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article272264.ece> http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao_reports/01-02/0102233es.pdf
Once that happens, PCs will really start to get useful!
There'll be many "rounds" of bidding. The initial bid is just to see who's interested. After that, the stakes will rise with each interested party desperately trying to squeeze more finance out of their partners/banks/owners to raise their bid.
At some point one will either not be able to raise any more ca$h and quit the bidding rounds, while the other go on. Some will realise that at the price they will have to pay, their business model breaks and they won;t make any profit.
Eventually someone will "win", but this will be a phyrric victory as the amount of money they will have to pay for a licence will be so high that they'll either go bankrupt, have to join up with some other bidders (who pulled out earlier) or not have enough monkey left to actually build the systems they wanted to implement.
In that respect, since on single vote has ever made any difference to a result in any democracy (it does in a dictatorship as only 1 person gets to vote) then a single vote has never been excercised and never will. That makes it worthless.
It's the same paradox as blades of grass on a golf course. Your ball has to land on one, but there are so many, the chances of it landing on any particualr one is as close to zero as you can measure.
Even that single seat change wouldn't have amounted to anything as the parliamentary majority was greater that 1.
In the US the Bosh-Gore election of 2000 was the closest ever and the margin in Florida was 500+.
So one person's vote has never changed anything. I expect everyone knows this in their hearts - the variation in "offer price" only reflects what the individuals would expect to get for it
Democracy? hah!
If this had been an academic study or with no vested interest, it might have had credibility, instead it just comes over as FUD. Ignore.
Over here, there are laws that require certain establishments (i.e. financial ones) to have redundant everything, including locations.
The first occasion was over a weekend (no-one present) in a server room full of VAX's. On the monday when it was discovered, we just opened a window and everything carried on as usual.
The next time was when an ECL model Amdahl was replaced by a CMOS IBM. No-one downgraded the cooling and it froze up - solid. This time the who shebang was down for a day while the heat-exchangers thawed out. It was quite interesting watching the temperature monitors, it took a couple of hours until the temperature rose above the "danger" threshold.
So the answer is either, until you arrive at work (2 days or more), or sometimes a bit more heat is a good thing.
All these guys have done is wind back the clock and created one of the evolutionary branches that dies out long ago - for very good reasons.
Apart from being a curiosity, does this have any other use - except maybe to create animals that avoid the smell of tyres or tarmac and so don't become roadkill?
Generally they are responding to a perceived level of concern from members of the public. This may come to them directly (unlikely) or through focus-groups/media reports or just hearsay from their staff.
This means they feel they should do something, just to show they're on the case and to stop any possibility that their opponents can make political capital out of it. As a consequence they have no real idea of what can be done - or even have any first-hand experience of the websites they're attacking.
The best things the site owners can do is to nod gravely, agree that there are bad people about. State that they have state-of-the-art protections in place and that they spend $Xmillion per year "protecting" people.
Until there is a reliable way of identifying the baddies just by what they type, they'll always be open to this type of criticism and can not otherwise address it.
Stay safe, act sensibly, watch your kids -they're your responsibility
If you slow it down, or play it backwards (or both) is there is hidden message?
The phone itself costs £269, including all taxes.
You have to take out an 18 month contract, which will cost between £35 and £55 per month
The total cost can therefore be £1259, excluding any additional call charges you may rack up (like when you think it's turned off but isn't really http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/10/1216224
For the US equivalent, at todays exchange rate is > $2600
Glad to see that there are people everywhere who get taken in by glitzy, superficial, overpriced, under-featured gizmos - just because the tech media says they're wonderful.
Is there no hope?
When Hewlett-Packard named their version of Unix HP-UX, it's just as well they hadn't called the company Packard-Hewlett.
you can make what seem like authoritative, or insightful statements with absolutely zero information. By the time the gphone comes out (or flops) no-one will remember what this guy, or the hordes like him, have said. Even better, no-one will care except maybe his mother. Until then it's a slightly entertaining way to spend a minute or two - just don't take anything he says seriously, it's just another form of entertainment.
For example, should stem cell research (legal in some countries, illegal in others) be permitted. Could it be done in, say, a european module, but not an american one. How about growing GM crops
Oh great - are you proposing it should be legal to carry a gun on the ISS then?