Category Archives: Computers

Science Code Manifesto

Posted on December 29, 2012 by sflammia

Recently, one of the students here at U. Sydney and I had the frustrating experience of trying to reproduce a numerical result from a paper, but it just wasn’t working. The code used by the authors was regrettably not made … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Programming, Scientific Publishing | 3 Comments

strike!

Posted on January 17, 2012 by aram

In a move that will undoubtedly bring the US Senate to its knees, the Quantum Pontiff is going dark from 8am to 8pm EST on Jan 18 to protest SOPA, PIPA, the Research Works Act and other proposed acts of … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, General, Open Science, Scientific Publishing, Society | Leave a comment

Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?

Posted on January 1, 2012 by aram

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Computers, Economics, Open Science, Politics, Scientific Publishing | 9 Comments

Hippy Software Licenses

Posted on March 7, 2011 by dabacon

One of my favorite software licenses is the Beerware license, here in a version due to Poul-Henning Kamp: /* * ————————————————————– * “THE BEER-WARE LICENSE” (Revision 42): * <> wrote this file. As long as you retain * this notice … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Fragment, Funny Ha Ha | 6 Comments

Watson

Posted on February 14, 2011 by dabacon

Exciting times for machine learning and artificial intelligence fans: IBM’s Watson computer versus two of the flesh bound starting tonight, Feb 14, 2011, on the game show Jeopardy. And not just any humans, I guess, but Ken Jennings and Brad … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Off The Deep End, Television | 2 Comments

Steve Ballmer Talk at UW March 4, 2010

Posted on March 4, 2010 by dabacon

Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Washington in the Microsoft Atrium of the Computer Science & Engineering department’s Paul Allen Center. As you can tell from that first sentence UW and Microsoft have long had very … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Computers, Go Ahead, Waste Your Time, Off The Deep End, Technology | 15 Comments

Help Rod With His Summer Reading

Posted on July 29, 2009 by dabacon

Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading: I’m feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is causing me to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Computers, Quantum Computing | 2 Comments

Original McEliece Cracked

Posted on October 31, 2008 by dabacon

Shor’s algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor’s algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor’s algorithm break a plethora of other public key … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Computers, Quantum Computing, Technology | 8 Comments

Graceful Error Handling?

Posted on June 19, 2008 by dabacon

Running a process to fix the utf-8 support on scirate.com using the unix “screen” command I got the following crash: Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! – You die… Doh! Continue reading →

Posted in Computers | 7 Comments