Half Life 2 Demo

Nothing to do all Christmas and a powerful computer to do it on?

http://www.atitech.com/gitg/promotions/halflife2demo/

Biased news reporting

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft sets sights on spyware

Why is the implicit assumption of techno-journalists that Microsoft are out to rip everyone off? The media is already under the (mistaken) impression that Windows is inherently less secure than other platforms, so when positive steps are taken to tighten security they must find something else negative to say.

In this article they criticise Microsoft for reserving the right to charge for a currently free product at some point in the future. I assume that if Microsoft commited to making it free forever then they would be accused of abusing their dominant market position.

Culture of innovation

I’m rarely impressed by the “expert” opinion you get on the BBC News website, but here is an exception that really spoke to me: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4067183.stm.

Whether there is something particularly British about innovation (I am naturally wary about cultural generalisations) or not, this article shows you that good ideas (and good thinkers) must be nurtured.

Bill Walster

Here is an interesting interview with the Imam of Intervals, Bill Walster: http://www.sun.com/presents/minds/2004-0527/

I heard Bill talk at Cardiff University about 5 years ago and was an instant convert to interval arithmetic. I agreed then, as I do now, that intervals will play an increasingly important part in numerical computing. This will not be a niche area of computing that you can afford to ignore. Older readers will remember the days when floating point units were optional and programmers lived in a world of integers; single-point arithmetic will experience the same paradigm shift.

One minor comment: Bill points out that parallelization can break the order of floating point operations, and, hence, will change the answer. In my experience the result is very sensitive to the order you perform the operations; if you doubt this, why not call stl::reverse and stl::accumulate on an stl::vector of a few thousand reals and compare the answers? A couple of similar problem areas I can see are:

1. 3rd party libraries, where the accuracy of the answer might actually exceed the quoted error bounds (assuming the library is sophisticate enough to offer error bounds). Intervals would always deliver this better-than-expected accuracy.
   
   
2. Synthetic programs (as advocated by John Koza), where the inner workings of the algorithm are not well suited to analytical tolerance-analysis. Through the “evolutionary” process, these programs could exploit rounding and underflow inherent in single-point arithmetic to give the false impression of finding the correct answer.
   

There is much more to say on interval arithmetic, but that will have to wait for another posting.

I haven’t read any of the other Contrarian Minds interviews, but they all look interesting.

Ask the Imam...

At the risk of inviting a fatwa on myself, I humbly submit the following site for your enlightenment: Ask the Imam.

If you haven’t got a specific question (such as My mother has a colostomy bag would it be permissible for her to do hajj?), but are looking for some spiritually uplifting advice, try the Random Fatwa.