While you're right to be wary of the correctness of this proof, this guy at least has some credibility. He's got a PhD in math and works at a university (can't seem to figure out if he's actually a professor), and he seems to have published frequently in the past. Hopefully even if it is incorrect it will add something to our understanding of the problem.
After laying the groundwork in the first few years of digital computers, the theory of computing has not progressed very much! You make it sound like research in computer science is at a standstill or something, which it is most definitely not. True, some of the fundamental problems in computability theory are relatively stagnant, but this is not the only branch of computer science research with a focus on mathematics. Formal methods, programming language development, database and information discovery research, all of these things at their basest level REQUIRE mathematics.
As for TFA, I feel like it is too short to draw any real conclusions from. On the surface though, his fundamental issue seems to be that many of the things in computing today aren't easily expressible in the mathematics we've been using. I think this warrants new mathematics, though the author apparently has something else in mind, and I'll be interested to see exactly what he is proposing.
It didn't prevent the London bombings, but if I recall correctly, they apprehended the individuals responsible within 5 or 6 days of both bombings in large part due to the CCTV system. Perhaps someday advances in monitoring technology will allow the camera network to more actively assess potential threats, but for the time being it at least gives police a good resource for determining who is behind a crime that has already taken place, and minimize the chance of the perpetrator acting again.
All that said, it would be interesting to see a professional analysis of how well the camera systems are or are not used, since we can only really speculate.
From what I know, you are correct, BUT in most cases the patent officers have neither the means nor necessarily the proper background to test that your patent does what it says it does. I think if you look around you can find some pretty outlandish patents that obviously are bogus.
Whatever you use, make sure you adjust the settings to only capture those problems that you think are critical. With 500k lines of code, unless your codebase is *extremely* solid running a Lint tool will result in a LOT of action items. I've used SPLINT (a lint for secure programming - http://www.splint.org/) in a project with a codebase much smaller than 500k and it took weeks to finish addressing all the issues - sometimes these things can be more of a curse than a blessing.
"On the other hand, Lindor cites to case law and to law review articles suggesting that, in a proper case, a court may extend its current due process jurisprudence prohibiting grossly excessive punitive jury awards to prohibit the award of statutory damages mandated under the Copyright Act if they are grossly in excess of the actual damages suffered" (from the linked article, statement by Judge Trager)
This to me implies that they don't neccesarily have to stick to the minimum, if they can show that the minimum is ridiculous.
Also - I think it isn't quite fair to say that if you uploaded 1 song to 50 people, and those 50 people upload it to 50 people, that you are responsible for all of those damages. Who is to say that they don't go after the 50 people you uploaded it to, and the 50 people they uploaded it to? If they did in fact, then they would be getting damages way in excess of the money they actually lost. Realistically, I think the defendant should only be responsible for damages *directly* caused by them - that is, their initial downloading of the song and their uploading it to others, if those others go onto share it yet again, they should pay the price, not the original seeder.
I'm no economist, but the following seems to make sense to me:
1. Many college-bound students went into CS/IT because it was heavily advertised as being lucrative, but not all of these people neccesarily have the skills or drive to become competent CS/IT professionals. The field is very dynamic, in that if you studied everything you know out of a book 5 years ago, most of that is useless now - if you can't keep up you're out. Introduce outsourcing into the equation.. there is a glut of overpaid, underskilled IT workers and they are losing their jobs to a more motivated, cheaper foreign workforce. How is this a surprise? This does not neccesarily mean that the same is happening to smart, driven individuals who make themselves valuable to their company.
2. The number of people going to college is continually growing larger. It is basically expected that most kids will go to college when they graduate high school, and so the prestige of a bachelors degree declines. College is today's high school and graduate school is today's college.
Moral of the story? Do your undergraduate work at a good school, then get a Master's. And don't go into IT just because it pays well and you "like computers".
I think it's legitimate to expect verification tools to make their way into mainstream software development, but not as any sort of "catch all".
Developers will have to analyze the specific tools and decide if it is a good supplement to current verification efforts or if it can replace some steps. I think though once it worms its way into mainstream (if only light) use, the tools will continue to improve and give us more options, and become a more integral part of verification.
I know from work I've done, that the next revision of the FAA's safety standard for software (software for commercial aviation) may include new provisions to allow formal methods tools to replace some steps of the old verification process.
I've got to agree with you. Usually I lump HP's into the "crap" category of laptops, but their business line (I own an nx9420) contains some seriously robust pieces of equipment.
That said, I'd prefer a T60.. but at half the price, almost the same quality, and equivalent specs, I'll take it.
I haven't tried standing while at work (my desk is not at standing height - a slight barrier to an experiment), but during the school year my apartment is a good 10 minute walk from where I go to class. I find that the act of walking back and forth seems to give me more energy when I finally sit down to do something.
I suppose thats more of an endorsement for circling around the office occasionally while at work - but perhaps standing is a similar idea. It would make sense that perhaps while you're at your most physically relaxed isn't the best time to try and do hard thinking.
I have Verizon DSL and get pretty terrible speeds, so much so that I called them up and asked them to send out a technician to see what the problem was. The guy came out and looked through my house and then at the wiring down by the street and told us that in reality, we were too far away from the DSL place (I don't know the technical term, wherever the area I'm in connects to in town) to get decent speeds, and that he wouldn't have offered us DSL service at all if he had been our installation technician. He managed to adjust the wiring so that it was neater and our speeds increased slightly and we stopped disconnecting randomly, but it sure as hell isn't the 768kbps we pay for.
I don't know where the OP lives, but if its like me in a small town, you could have the same issue - call your DSL provider and ask them to send a technician to examine your problem and if neccesary move to another broadband provider.
I was once told that it would be great if software was like building bridges, but that if bridge engineers had to operate in the same environment as software engineers, they'd be asked to build a bridge from point A to point B, only to find out halfway through the project that what was really desired was a bridge going from point A to some other point C.
Point being that if software requirements were as set in stone as bridge building, we'd have much better software, but thats just not reality.
It seems like a better system would be to make it less difficult to get in, and much more difficult not to fail out. I've heard (don't hold me to this, maybe someone can interject here?) that many Canadian universities operate this way, maybe we should be heading up there?
Another thing to consider is that you cannot neccesarily write off a whole university based solely on one persons impression. Even schools with great notoriety can have a mediocre department of something-or-other.
I keep seeing those "Depression Hurts" commercials on tv. They have a website, http://www.depressionhurts.com/ and it does list the back under aches & pains.
That said I'm pretty sure that ad campaign is paid for by pharmaceutical companies that have a vested interest in making people believe they need the medication they sell. So take it for whatever you think its worth.
I admittedly made a mistake in replying to a comment that was BOUND to attract legions of "stick it to the man" types. But next time if you disagree with a comment save/. some bandwidth and don't post something useless.
Maybe IBM is full of shit and I can't disagree that its ludicrous to make any statement nearing "outsourcing more jobs = making new jobs here". Nonetheless the fact that I don't know any CS seniors having trouble finding good jobs is a pretty good indicator to me that a good education coupled with internship experience will get you a satsifying job out of college.
And THAT is really the point of IBM's article, regardless of their poor economics and corporate propaganda.
I'm in my first year of a BS in CS, and personally I don't need IBM to tell me not to worry about outsourcing.
The bottom line is that code monkeys over in India are never going be able to handle projects of any great complexity. I'd speculate that the majority of software houses in India and other places mentioned are filled with developers that only have a very loose handle on what they are doing. They probably received a couple years of technical training that wasn't prefaced by any particularly great secondary education, and wasn't received in parallel with any helpful general education. They can crank out application X at low costs, but I predict you won't see them working on any significant portions of software that goes in medical devices, automobiles, airplanes, autmoted machinery, or other commercial applications anytime soon.
The fact is that the US and Europe has a monopoly on software architects trained to SOLVE problems, not just implement solutions.
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While you're right to be wary of the correctness of this proof, this guy at least has some credibility. He's got a PhD in math and works at a university (can't seem to figure out if he's actually a professor), and he seems to have published frequently in the past. Hopefully even if it is incorrect it will add something to our understanding of the problem.
As for TFA, I feel like it is too short to draw any real conclusions from. On the surface though, his fundamental issue seems to be that many of the things in computing today aren't easily expressible in the mathematics we've been using. I think this warrants new mathematics, though the author apparently has something else in mind, and I'll be interested to see exactly what he is proposing.
It didn't prevent the London bombings, but if I recall correctly, they apprehended the individuals responsible within 5 or 6 days of both bombings in large part due to the CCTV system. Perhaps someday advances in monitoring technology will allow the camera network to more actively assess potential threats, but for the time being it at least gives police a good resource for determining who is behind a crime that has already taken place, and minimize the chance of the perpetrator acting again.
All that said, it would be interesting to see a professional analysis of how well the camera systems are or are not used, since we can only really speculate.
From what I know, you are correct, BUT in most cases the patent officers have neither the means nor necessarily the proper background to test that your patent does what it says it does. I think if you look around you can find some pretty outlandish patents that obviously are bogus.
Whatever you use, make sure you adjust the settings to only capture those problems that you think are critical. With 500k lines of code, unless your codebase is *extremely* solid running a Lint tool will result in a LOT of action items. I've used SPLINT (a lint for secure programming - http://www.splint.org/) in a project with a codebase much smaller than 500k and it took weeks to finish addressing all the issues - sometimes these things can be more of a curse than a blessing.
"On the other hand, Lindor cites to case law and to law review articles suggesting that, in a proper case, a court may extend its current due process jurisprudence prohibiting grossly excessive punitive jury awards to prohibit the award of statutory damages mandated under the Copyright Act if they are grossly in excess of the actual damages suffered" (from the linked article, statement by Judge Trager)
This to me implies that they don't neccesarily have to stick to the minimum, if they can show that the minimum is ridiculous.
Also - I think it isn't quite fair to say that if you uploaded 1 song to 50 people, and those 50 people upload it to 50 people, that you are responsible for all of those damages. Who is to say that they don't go after the 50 people you uploaded it to, and the 50 people they uploaded it to? If they did in fact, then they would be getting damages way in excess of the money they actually lost. Realistically, I think the defendant should only be responsible for damages *directly* caused by them - that is, their initial downloading of the song and their uploading it to others, if those others go onto share it yet again, they should pay the price, not the original seeder.
I'm no economist, but the following seems to make sense to me:
.. there is a glut of overpaid, underskilled IT workers and they are losing their jobs to a more motivated, cheaper foreign workforce. How is this a surprise? This does not neccesarily mean that the same is happening to smart, driven individuals who make themselves valuable to their company.
1. Many college-bound students went into CS/IT because it was heavily advertised as being lucrative, but not all of these people neccesarily have the skills or drive to become competent CS/IT professionals. The field is very dynamic, in that if you studied everything you know out of a book 5 years ago, most of that is useless now - if you can't keep up you're out. Introduce outsourcing into the equation
2. The number of people going to college is continually growing larger. It is basically expected that most kids will go to college when they graduate high school, and so the prestige of a bachelors degree declines. College is today's high school and graduate school is today's college.
Moral of the story? Do your undergraduate work at a good school, then get a Master's. And don't go into IT just because it pays well and you "like computers".
I think it's legitimate to expect verification tools to make their way into mainstream software development, but not as any sort of "catch all".
Developers will have to analyze the specific tools and decide if it is a good supplement to current verification efforts or if it can replace some steps. I think though once it worms its way into mainstream (if only light) use, the tools will continue to improve and give us more options, and become a more integral part of verification.
I know from work I've done, that the next revision of the FAA's safety standard for software (software for commercial aviation) may include new provisions to allow formal methods tools to replace some steps of the old verification process.
I've got to agree with you. Usually I lump HP's into the "crap" category of laptops, but their business line (I own an nx9420) contains some seriously robust pieces of equipment.
.. but at half the price, almost the same quality, and equivalent specs, I'll take it.
That said, I'd prefer a T60
I haven't tried standing while at work (my desk is not at standing height - a slight barrier to an experiment), but during the school year my apartment is a good 10 minute walk from where I go to class. I find that the act of walking back and forth seems to give me more energy when I finally sit down to do something.
I suppose thats more of an endorsement for circling around the office occasionally while at work - but perhaps standing is a similar idea.
It would make sense that perhaps while you're at your most physically relaxed isn't the best time to try and do hard thinking.
I have Verizon DSL and get pretty terrible speeds, so much so that I called them up and asked them to send out a technician to see what the problem was. The guy came out and looked through my house and then at the wiring down by the street and told us that in reality, we were too far away from the DSL place (I don't know the technical term, wherever the area I'm in connects to in town) to get decent speeds, and that he wouldn't have offered us DSL service at all if he had been our installation technician. He managed to adjust the wiring so that it was neater and our speeds increased slightly and we stopped disconnecting randomly, but it sure as hell isn't the 768kbps we pay for.
I don't know where the OP lives, but if its like me in a small town, you could have the same issue - call your DSL provider and ask them to send a technician to examine your problem and if neccesary move to another broadband provider.
I was once told that it would be great if software was like building bridges, but that if bridge engineers had to operate in the same environment as software engineers, they'd be asked to build a bridge from point A to point B, only to find out halfway through the project that what was really desired was a bridge going from point A to some other point C.
Point being that if software requirements were as set in stone as bridge building, we'd have much better software, but thats just not reality.
It seems like a better system would be to make it less difficult to get in, and much more difficult not to fail out. I've heard (don't hold me to this, maybe someone can interject here?) that many Canadian universities operate this way, maybe we should be heading up there?
Another thing to consider is that you cannot neccesarily write off a whole university based solely on one persons impression. Even schools with great notoriety can have a mediocre department of something-or-other.
I keep seeing those "Depression Hurts" commercials on tv. They have a website, http://www.depressionhurts.com/ and it does list the back under aches & pains.
That said I'm pretty sure that ad campaign is paid for by pharmaceutical companies that have a vested interest in making people believe they need the medication they sell. So take it for whatever you think its worth.
Nice rebuttal there chief.
/. some bandwidth and don't post something useless.
I admittedly made a mistake in replying to a comment that was BOUND to attract legions of "stick it to the man" types. But next time if you disagree with a comment save
Maybe IBM is full of shit and I can't disagree that its ludicrous to make any statement nearing "outsourcing more jobs = making new jobs here". Nonetheless the fact that I don't know any CS seniors having trouble finding good jobs is a pretty good indicator to me that a good education coupled with internship experience will get you a satsifying job out of college.
And THAT is really the point of IBM's article, regardless of their poor economics and corporate propaganda.
I'm in my first year of a BS in CS, and personally I don't need IBM to tell me not to worry about outsourcing.
The bottom line is that code monkeys over in India are never going be able to handle projects of any great complexity. I'd speculate that the majority of software houses in India and other places mentioned are filled with developers that only have a very loose handle on what they are doing. They probably received a couple years of technical training that wasn't prefaced by any particularly great secondary education, and wasn't received in parallel with any helpful general education. They can crank out application X at low costs, but I predict you won't see them working on any significant portions of software that goes in medical devices, automobiles, airplanes, autmoted machinery, or other commercial applications anytime soon.
The fact is that the US and Europe has a monopoly on software architects trained to SOLVE problems, not just implement solutions.