Month: February 2011
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The slashdot experience
Last night I submitted a story on this blog – about P=NP – to Slashdot and today the submission was accepted and in a few hours I have had perhaps five times more visitors than in the previous two and a half months. But, thanks to WordPress.com there was no “slashdotting” – instead the site […]
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Gödel, Turing and decidability
I am still wandering around in the world opened to me by The Annotated Turing – perhaps a little lost, but I have been reading some guide books. The most recent of these has been Gödel’s Proof which gives a gentle(ish) introduction to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. This is a short, but fascinating book that I repeatedly […]
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No proof of P=NP after all (yet?)
Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his published “proof” of P=NP is flawed and requires further work. So, it seems internet commerce is safe for now. But Romanov is not throwing in the towel: Thank you for your attention to my work. You’d better suspend your investigations. A shortcoming possibly exists in the filtration procedure which […]
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Time to ditch Firefox?
Just about every internet user, even if they have never used Firefox, owes the Mozilla Foundation an enormous amount for the creation of Firefox. It’s injection of competition back into the mass browser market stimulated a new drive towards standards and speed that has made a huge difference to all users: Internet Explorer 6 came […]
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Changes at Foyles
I remember Foyles bookshop in London when, perhaps twenty years ago, it was a warren of books seemingly piled one on top of another and with little order beyond the basic categorisation by subject (that is how it felt anyway). Buying a book was a rigmarole – you got a chit for the book at […]
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LaTeX frustration…
Anyone who works on software development and in the FOSS world generally is used to seeing books and documentation in English. It is certainly a great advantage to be a fluent speaker and reader. But it is not always the case – as I have just found out. Right now I have returned to writing […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 