Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

All companies end up in the Open Source Internet Beam Of Hate at some point or another, not always for good reason. I've felt that heat myself a few times in the last few years, I know all too well what it's like to be hated by the people you're trying to help.

— Jean-Baptiste Quéru

One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal, which is to say that its digits are all distributed evenly, with the implication that it is a disjunctive sequence, meaning that all possible finite sequences of digits will be present somewhere in it. If we consider π in base 16 (hexadecimal) , it is trivial to see that if this conjecture is true, then all possible finite files must exist within π. The first record of this observation dates back to 2001.

From here, it is a small leap to see that if π contains all possible files, why are we wasting exabytes of space storing those files, when we could just look them up in π!

— The π filesystem

We seem to have reached the point in kernel development where "security" is the magic word to escape from any kind of due process (it is, in fact, starting to be used in much the same way the phrase "war on terror" is used to abrogate due process usually required by the US constitution).

— James Bottomley

It's disturbing to me that there are almost as many addresses from people like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Missile, various govt agencies from various countries with access to the coverity db as there are people who actually have contributed something to the kernel in the past. (The mix is even more skewed when you factor in other non-contrib companies like anti-virus vendors).

There's a whole industry of buying/selling vulnerabilities, and our response is basically "oh well, we'll figure it out when an exploit goes public".

— Dave Jones

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Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 16, 2013 7:18 UTC (Fri) by dune73 (subscriber, #17225) [Link]

The same here.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 16, 2013 8:25 UTC (Fri) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

We started to work on a compression format based on π some time in the late 90's. The problem with it is that for many things, the DISTANCE into π, measured as amount of digits you need to store to save the location of a slice of data, is _bigger_ than the slice of data being stored.

So, Storing an arbitary (small) slice of data X may well be that sizeof(decimal(π)) >= sizeof(X).

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 16, 2013 13:46 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> The problem with it is that for many things, the DISTANCE into π, measured as amount of digits you need to store to save the location of a slice of data, is _bigger_ than the slice of data being stored.

That is an unavoidable property of any lossless compression algorithm, caused by the pigeonhole principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle).

What matters instead is that, for most of the things you care about in the problem domain, the compressed length is smaller than the uncompressed length, so that most of the things you care about get smaller. I believe that, for most problem domains, "location within the digits of pi" is not a good choice.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 22, 2013 7:01 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

We started to work on a compression format based on π some time in the late 90's.

Did you get venture capital funding for it?

(I used to work at ArsDigita, where the VC-driven plan to write a new web framework in Java based on adapting desktop GUI programming into a 'Swing for the web' was no less daft, but we never took advantage of cofounder Eve Andersson's ability to recite digits of pi. That was probably where the company went wrong.)