Impromptus

No, not distributed system like “beowulf cluster” or “seti@home”, I’m talking a distributed system for each and every person on the web. I’m trying my best to get there myself. By distributed, I mean both “worlwide accessible” and “no single point of failure that’s not being taken care of by a professional”. Note that if [...]

Standards are very weird. On way of talking about their weirdness might be to construct some sort of hierarchy of standards types. But really it’s more like a feature matrix. Your standards can be any and all of: de facto, de jure, intellectual property encumbered, easily implemented, impossible to implement, underspecified, overspecified, internally inconsistent, useless, [...]

Security is a very interesting problem. It has both applied and blah blah blah. What I mean to say is that it has cool math and some interesting social implications. The whole network security “problem” arises from the fact that we want to keep things private, and that the networking systems were designed inside an [...]

Syntax matters. People have been writing new programming languages to do this and that, but the one thing that the programming languages community has yet to address is syntax. Semantics are very important, but writing code in a language with a crappy syntax is its own special hell. This problem needs solving. We can argue [...]

Is Dijkstra’s algorithm really the best we can do? We have a nice lower-bound proof for sorting methods – it’s so cool and classic that it gets taught in every algorithms course and excites the students. Later they find out that it’s the only high-quality lower bound proof out there. We should be able to [...]

In the “What do you believe but cannot prove” series of questions, one computer scientist gave a good explanation for why he believed there was a better way of programming. He pointed out that the way we program is essentially to take our desired solution, encode it in terms of instructions, and then hope that [...]

From a conversation with Ouroboros: Peter: Text remains an unsolved problem in a lot of ways. All our interfaces for computers have descended from the idea of typewriters, which were themselves optimized for secretaries taking dictation and not thinking themselves. We still don’t know how to make text entry and editing systems that support creativity [...]

What are the big problems facing computer science? What are its reasons d’etre? We are drowning in data and computer scientists are the ones best equipped to deal with this problem. Programs in informatics are starting up, but their techniques seem valuable for libraries, but not so much for personal data management or efficiently manipulating [...]