Older blog entries for badvogato (starting at number 75)

the dilemma i have had is that if i work, my thoughts would have left me. If i keep thinking only original thoughts, i don't really care about putting out documentations of my work as measured by functions of consumptions of energy, mass and time. So what should I do, honestly? Meanwhile, thank God, the locamotive of my fingers are still working like a charm. So here we go:

Conclusion : i believe, when and only when, 1) from the top down, commerce doesn't need to rely on military and political power, doesn't need to answer to any pressure from those powers, 2) from the bottom up, small but substancial exchanges of any kind of fiscal transactions need not care about true identities of parties involved, will there be a true free market of commerce.

Reality of commerce : e-commerce has turned human society more and more relying on the insurance of political and military power, by the fact that all new electronic gadgets only enforced our old habits and perceptions about signatory power with armed guards, bullet-proof state wagons so on and so forth.

how to evenly distribute power? First, we must develop a commerce interchange and exchange system that taking out of personal identity but putting in human intelligence higher than signing a paper before a witness or being a CFO of one company recognizing the face of CFO of another company.

But do you have a plan or an algorithm other than factoring prime numbers faster than anybody else or generating prime numbers bigger than everybody else in a given time? Yes, I DO! Send your inquiries to stupid@cyberspace.org

I hear ya , the difference is "A men" and "All ah."

Re-write mglazer's differential equation:
A rats sacrifice themselves to fill ratkillers.
A cans sacrifice themselves to save rat meat from rotting away in the desert.
So All we want is to ship oil tanks to Arabians to take oil out of that region without killing anybody.

badvogato sacrifice my rantings to be hidden by Kuro5hin!

Prof. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Austin, 28 November 2000 :
Answers to questions from students of software engineering.

gadgets are not necessarily an improvement ride the succession:
blackboard -> overhead projector -> powerpoint.

And I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because i am a computer scientist. [Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.]

It is NOT the business of computing science to promote "computerization", say by developing demanding applications so as to create a market for the next generation of hardware. [Medical researchers are not required to develop new diseases so as to create a market for more pharmaceutical products.]

It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs. [ The things society asks for are generally understood, and you don't need a University for that; the University has to offer what no one else can provide.]

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible. [ Many years ago, If I could use a new assistant, one prerequisite would be "No prior exposure to FORTRAN", and at high schools in Sberia, the teaching of BASIC was not allowed.]

A programmer has to be able to demonstrate that hsi program has the required properties. If this comes as an afterthought, it is all but certain that he won't be able to meet this obligation: only if he allows this obligation to influence his design, there is hope he can meet it. Pure a posteriori verification denies you that wholesome influence and is therefore putting the cart before the horse, but that is exactly what happens in the software houses where "programming" and "quality assurance" are done by different groups. [Needless to say, those houses deliver without warranty.]

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of software engineering gurus.

Some of you doubt that aforementioned "techniques of effective reasoning," nice as they are for small programs, will scale up, I quote "given the daunting size and sheer complexity of most programs." Well, they will be powerless if you try to use them to disentangle the horrendous mess produced by a group of incompetent, unorganized programmers. Their power manifests itself in the construction phase ewhere (i) they tend to lead to much shorter texts than would be produced otherwise and (ii) lengths of program derivations tend to grow not much more than linearly with the lengths of the programs derived. Finally the programs thus produced are infinitely better than the usual junk. We should never forget that programmers live in a world of artifacts, a fact that distinguished them from most other scientists. The programmer should not ask how applicable the techniques of sound programming are, he should create a world in which they are applicable: it is his ONLY way of delivering a high-quality design. To which I should add a quotation from EWD898 (1984): "Machine capacities now give us room galore for making a mess of it. Opportunities unlimited for fouling things up! Developing the austere intellectual discipline of keeping things sufficiently simple is in this environment a formidable challenge, both technically and educationally.

In reply to questions why we teach useless things that industry ignores, I refer you to EWD920 (1985). Let me quote here one paragraph "Back to our original question: can computing science save the computer industry? My answer is "If the computer industry can be saved, only computing science can do it." But it may take a long time before the computer industry - in particular the well-established companies - will share this view. It will almost certainly take longer than the limited period over which they plan their futures. In the mean time, the academic world - which traditionally plans much further ahead - has no choice. It has to refine and to teach to the best of its abilities how computing should be done; would it ever yield to the pressure to propagate the malpractice of today, it had better fold up." But to stress how much patience we need, let me give you another old quotation (from 1988) "Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology."

No, I'm afraid that computing science has suffered from the popularity of the internet. It has attracted an increasing - not to say: overwhelming! - number of students with very little scientific inclination and in research it has only strengthened the prevailing (and somewhat vulgar) obsession with speed and capacity.

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well - though a teachable topic - is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmountable political problems.

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

how to marry or how to separate the Four Color Map Conjecture with Fermat's Last Theorem? That's my question of the day.
btw, Ilan, where's the evidence of the capacity for self destruction that you refer to? Is there a difference between self serving and self destruction? If the self doesn't really know what it wants, have no clue what it needs etc....

Superstring theory connects Brian Greene, Shelley Glashow and back to Murray Gell-Mann, according to this copy of the theory .

i sent two 'good till cancel' order. The first order is to buy 100 share of Oracle at the price $8.8. The second order is to sell 100 share of SUNW at the price of $8.8. In my dictionary, 88 stands for "what the hell is going on?"

Here's my book note for the day:
"The first version of Oracle was sold and installed in November of 1979. The first customer was Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the Advanced Technology Division. Who but the Federal Government would buy database technology from four guys in California?" It took us 2 years to write the code. We were profitable from the days we opened our doors. WE never, ever lost money. In fact, the only time we lost money was one quarter. One quarter, unfortunately, i think, in fiscal year 1990, we lost money. But from the day we started the company over the 17 years, we have had only one lost quarter. And, boy, even that was one too many."

I am against anti-cert !!! To divide people into four categories is more than enough. After all, indians have been living with caste systems for centuries. And how many castes are there? Four. Anything more than number 4 can be reduced to 1,2,3,4. Why add complexity when all we have to do is to open people's mind towards 4?

btw, i just heard from NPR that 88 is very bad neo-Nazi number. It symbolize "Hai Hitler!". So be aware. But you can return T-shirt with 88 to "Target" chain store without even having to present a receipt for the merchandise. Some organization is fighting for consumer's right once they realize what 88 stands for. All hail to American Free Market.

j has a confidence of 7.3e-263 about his fondness of my sister's ranting. should i be worried? I know they are both exceptional individuals on their terms.

Waldo, that's a lesson to learn. You must first to train any puppy close to Waldo to spot "where's Waldo's stuff? could you please keep your nose off Waldo's stuff! " before investing any money in things other than dog food. (Unless of course, you think iPod headphone makes good dog food or Dog makes good iPod headphone temp holders.)

DAMN. a six-month old (exact!) kid always speaks truth, especilally on the 4 (but 5th) entry on badvogato.