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🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Computational Biology

In electrical engineering, statistical computing and bioinformatics, the Baum–Welch algorithm is a special case of the expectation–maximization algorithm used to find the unknown parameters of a hidden Markov model (HMM). It makes use of the forward-backward algorithm to compute the statistics for the expectation step.

🔗 Computing

The law of conservation of complexity, also known as Tesler's Law, or Waterbed Theory, is an adage in human–computer interaction stating that every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed or hidden. Instead, it must be dealt with, either in product development or in user interaction.

This poses the question of who should be exposed to the complexity. For example, should a software developer add complexity to the software code to make the interaction simpler for the user or should the user deal with a complex interface so that the software code can be simple?

🔗 California 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in Cupertino, California that used virtual call packet-switched technology and X.25, SNA/SDLC, BSC and Async interfaces to connect host computers (servers) at thousands of large companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. Users typically connected via dial-up connections or dedicated asynchronous connections.

The business consisted of a large public network that supported dial-up users and a private network that allowed government agencies and large companies (mostly banks and airlines) to build their own dedicated networks. The private networks were often connected via gateways to the public network to reach locations not on the private network. Tymnet was also connected to dozens of other public networks in the United States and internationally via X.25/X.75 gateways.

As the Internet grew and became almost universally accessible in the late 1990s, the need for services such as Tymnet migrated to the Internet style connections, but still had some value in the Third World and for specific legacy roles. However the value of these links continued to decrease, and Tymnet shut down in 2004.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing

The FM Towns (Japanese: エフエムタウンズ, Hepburn: Efu Emu Taunzu) is a Japanese personal computer built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and PC games, but later became more compatible with IBM PC compatibles. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a game console compatible with existing FM Towns games.

The "FM" part of the name means "Fujitsu Micro" like their earlier products, while the "Towns" part is derived from the code name the system was assigned while in development, "Townes". This refers to Charles Townes, one of the winners of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, following a custom of Fujitsu at the time to code name PC products after Nobel Prize winners. The e in "Townes" was dropped when the system went into production to make it clearer that the term was to be pronounced like the word "towns" rather than the potential "tow-nes".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Business/Accounting

Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market.

The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. With IBM's entry into the market, VisiCalc was slow to respond, and when they did, they launched what was essentially a straight port of their existing system despite the greatly expanded hardware capabilities. Lotus's solution was marketed as a three-in-one integrated solution: it handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts, hence the name "1-2-3", though how much database capability the product actually had was debatable, given the sparse memory left over after launching 1-2-3. It quickly overtook VisiCalc, as well as Multiplan and SuperCalc, the two VisiCalc competitors.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the state-of-the-art spreadsheet and the standard throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, part of an unofficial set of three stand-alone office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform. Lotus Software had their own word processor named Lotus Manuscript, which was to some extent acclaimed in academia, but did not catch the interest of the business, nor the consumer market. With the acceptance of Windows 3.0 in 1990, the market for desktop software grew even more. None of the major spreadsheet developers had seriously considered the graphical user interface (GUI) to supplement their DOS offerings, and so they responded slowly to Microsoft's own GUI-based products Excel and Word. Lotus was surpassed by Microsoft in the early 1990s, and never recovered. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995, and continued to sell Lotus offerings, only officially ending sales in 2013.

🔗 Computing

DBOS is a Database-Oriented Operating System designed to simplify and improve the scalability, security and resilience of large-scale distributed applications. It started in 2020 as a joint open source project with MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University, after a brainstorm between Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia on how to scale and improve scheduling and performance of millions of Apache Spark tasks.

The basic idea is to run a multi-node multi-core, transactional, highly-available distributed database, such as VoltDB, as the only application for a microkernel, and then to implement scheduling, messaging, file systems and other operating system services on top of the database.

The architectural philosophy is described by this quote from the abstract of their initial preprint:

All operating system state should be represented uniformly as database tables, and operations on this state should be made via queries from otherwise stateless tasks. This design makes it easy to scale and evolve the OS without whole-system refactoring, inspect and debug system state, upgrade components without downtime, manage decisions using machine learning, and implement sophisticated security features.

Stonebraker claims a variety of security benefits, from a "smaller, less porous attack surface", to the ability to log and analyze how the system state changes in real-time due to the transactional nature of the OS. Recovery from a severe bug or an attack can be as simple as rolling back the database to a previous state. And since the database is already distributed, the complexity of orchestration systems like Kubernetes can be avoided.

A prototype was built with competitive performance to existing systems.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

Shape grammars in computation are a specific class of production systems that generate geometric shapes. Typically, shapes are 2- or 3-dimensional, thus shape grammars are a way to study 2- and 3-dimensional languages. Shape grammars were first introduced in a seminal article by George Stiny and James Gips in 1971. The mathematical and algorithmic foundations of shape grammars (in particular, for linear elements in two-dimensions) were developed in "Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shapes and Shape Grammars" (Birkhäuser Basel, 1975) by George Stiny. Applications of shape grammars were first considered in "Shape Grammars and their Uses" (Birkhäuser Basel, 1975) by James Gips. These publications also contain two independent, though equivalent, constructions showing that shape grammars can simulate Turing machines.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

dvdisaster is a computer program aimed to enhance data survivability on optical discs by creating error detection and correction data, which is used for data recovery. dvdisaster works exclusively at the image level. This program can be used either to generate Error-Correcting Code (ECC) data from an existing media or to augment an ISO image with ECC data prior to being written onto a medium. dvdisaster is free software available under the GNU General Public License.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Computer science

The replay system is a little-known subsystem within the Intel Pentium 4 processor. Its primary function is to catch operations that have been mistakenly sent for execution by the processor's scheduler. Operations caught by the replay system are then re-executed in a loop until the conditions necessary for their proper execution have been fulfilled.

🔗 Computing 🔗 BBC 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Retailing

"Computer says no" is a catchphrase first used in the British sketch comedy television programme Little Britain in 2004. In British culture, the phrase is used to criticise public-facing organisations and customer service staff who rely on information stored on or generated by a computer to make decisions and respond to customers' requests, often in a manner which goes against common sense. It may also refer to a deliberately unhelpful attitude towards customers and service-users commonly experienced within British society, whereby more could be done to reach a mutually satisfactory outcome, but is not.