Crowd Source Patents
By Jeremy | March 4, 2010
Disclaimer: I know quite a bit about patents. However, I don’t know everything. If there is already an easy way for people to comment on patents, regard this article as a highlight of my ignorance.
People file for crazy patents all the time. Even a simple patent search turns up patents for things like linked lists or other very common, everyday items that have been around longer than the life of a patent. What is even crazier is that the patent office grants them, despite the angry mobs of bloggers who fill their blogs with enraged posts about the shortcomings of said patents. Crowd sourcing patents is a capable solution to this patent problem. Give this mad mob of bloggers and all people an easy to use web site where they can gather evidence for or against a patent. Crowd sourcing patents would solve the problem of the patent office having to employ experts in every field. The power, and responsibility, would be back in the hands of that wrathful mob who could invalidate the crazy patents before they are even granted.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
A New Dinosaur
By Jeremy | March 2, 2010
Brigham Young University recently found a new long-necked dinosaur in a quarry in Utah. There is a large problem with new dinosaur discoveries: no one really knows if they are correct or not. Scientists have supposedly found “120 known species of sauropods [but], there have been only eight instances in which scientists have been able to recover intact skulls.” How do the scientists even know if there are 120 different sauropods if they have only ever found 8 skulls? Maybe every sauropod had a different shaped head because they used them to bash coconuts open so they could enjoy sweet coconut milk. The real point is, these dinosaur scientists don’t really know anything about the dinosaurs because they didn’t live during the Age of the Dinosaurs. The amount of fossil evidence that has been found is tiny, as evidenced by the quote above. This leads me to wonder why we keep inventing new types of dinosaurs when we find a new leg bone here or a new skull there. For all we know, they could be from the very same dinosaur.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
75 cents – Would it be enough today?
By Jeremy | February 24, 2010
In The Cuckoo’s Egg, a novice computer administrator enters into a ten month battle with a foreign hacker because of a 75 cent accounting error. The administrator had to verify that the 75 cent discrepancy wasn’t from a software error, but was caused because of the activities of the hacker. The state of software during this ten month battle was very simple in comparison with the state of software today. The simple nature of the software made tracking down the real source of the error easy. Because of the simplicity of the software and the ease of confirming the error, the administrator was positive that there was an outside problem and that the missing 75 cents was not a result of his buggy software.
Proving that the small discrepancy was not an internal problem would be much more difficult today because software has become too complicated. The software of today is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude more complicated than the software that was used in The Cuckoo’s Egg. Windows now has over 100 million lines of code and Linux has over 12 million lines of code. On top of the operating system’s millions of lines of code, today we add all the web servers, dns servers, firewalls, virus scanners and every other program that is run on a computer of today. When you have so many different programs that are each much more complicated than all of software combined in The Cuckoo’s Egg, assuring yourself that a 75 cent error was not because of some other program on your computer becomes impossible. How can we ever know that somone has been inside our computers if we can’t even track down a 75 cent error?
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
New Random Number Generator! – Who cares?
By Jeremy | February 23, 2010
An exciting new development has taken place in the computer world: a new random number generator was created. Most people will never notice or even realize that a new kind of random number generator was conceived of and implemented, yet this random number generator could have a great impact on their lives. If this new random number generator proves to be more random than the current random number generators, every single person who uses the Internet will be affected. Take, for example, buying something on Amazon.com. A random number generator actually plays a key role in keeping your credit card number secure. Without good random numbers, a malicious individual can easily access your credit card number and all of the personal information you send when you buy something online. That is why a new random number generator should actually matter to everyone who uses the Internet.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
Collaboration vs Confidentiality
By Jeremy | February 3, 2010
In the new age of social networking, we, the users, must closely watch the balance we strike between collaboration and confidentiality. Genealogy has progressed wildly since people have started to place their pedigrees on their personal websites. Collaboration has made the increase in genealogical research possible. Yet, many people fail to realize that being able to find your mother’s maiden name on your personal family history website is a problem. This doesn’t seem like a big problem until we think about the last time we registered for a site like Facebook. The seemingly innocuous question about your mother’s maiden name now becomes much more important; that name can be used to reset your password and gain control of your Facebook account. We need to always be on guard and check our desires for collaboration with our need for confidentiality.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
Apple: The One Man Company
By Jeremy | January 28, 2010
Taken from http://live.gizmodo.com/page/14/
Today, Steve Jobs and Apple announced Apple’s newest piece of hardware: the iPad. But this announcement confirmed yet again that Apple is a one man company. This is clearly illustrated through the history of Apple Computer. When Mr. Jobs was ousted from the company, Apple began to stagnate. In fact, from the time that Jobs left the company until his return in 1998, Apple Computer was not a profitable company. They had many new inventions and cool toys, none of which were received well by the public. The company again become profitable — after Jobs returned. However, since Jobs’ return to Apple, he has micromanaged each new product release Apple has completed. Apple’s pattern of success and failure is completely correlated with the presence of the mastermind: Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs leaves Apple for the second, and probably final, time, will Apple Computer again stagnate or is there someone who can fill the shoes of Steve Jobs: The One Man Company?
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
Equality(=) Does Not Imply Equality
By Jeremy | January 26, 2010
A common argument has arisen with respect to equality today: if there are equal numbers of men and women doing a job, then the societal problem of discrimination based on sex has been solved. In light of this argument, the government has put into place many measures which try to ensure numerical equality. Numerical equality is an incorrect way to measure the existence of discrimination based on sex. For example, many lawmakers are worried that there are not equal numbers of men and women in the hard sciences. While this numerical inequality is an interesting data point, there is a plethora of other reasons that could explain the inequality. Perhaps women’s brains are biologically different enough from men’s that they find the hard sciences stupid, boring, or drab. No matter what the reason, one can not assume that if numerical equality exists, sexism is finished. All numerical equality can demonstrate is that there are the same number of men and women doing the same thing.
Topics: cs404, school | 1 Comment »
Education Might Help
By Jeremy | January 21, 2010
With the government constantly spending on everything from health care for everyone to bridges, they should spend some of that money on education for government workers. Take this recent slashdot story, which tells a woeful tale of a “junior staff member” who used peer-to-peer software on his home computer and unknowingly lost a confidential House Ethics Committee report. This accidental loss of the report seems like a simple mistake made by a junior staff member, except for the fact that making a file available over a peer-to-peer network is completely preventable if the user knows how to correctly use peer-to-peer programs. The government would be well served by educating their workers in technological matters. The loss of the confidential government document, along with a host of other problems, could have been completely avoided.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
Knowledge Is Useless
By Jeremy | January 13, 2010
There are many men who work their whole lives to gain knowledge and become an expert in a field and then waste it away because they never apply their knowledge. For example, consider a man who spent his whole life in the world’s best cooking schools: every day he pored over books, inhaled lectures and devoured all the culinary knowledge that was put before him; he learned everything there is to know about food. Yet, despite being the World’s Czar of Culinary Knowledge, if he never applied his knowledge and actually cooked a meal, then all this gastronomic knowledge would be useless to that man. Just as with cooking, the same thing happens in computer science: learning software patterns and standard practices for software enginineering is great! However, if we never try to put that knowledge into practice and actually use some of the great strategies we have learned, then all of our knowledge is useless.
Topics: cs404, school | No Comments »
Sandberg’s Slant on Software Engineering
By Jeremy | August 8, 2009
In the next few weeks and possibly months, I am going to do a series of posts about a topic I am very interested in: Software Engineering. These posts will specifically be about design patterns: what they are, and how they can be used to make software better. Please check back often so we can take our journey into Design Pattern land together!
Topics: design patterns, series announcement, software engineering | No Comments »
« Previous Entries