Posted by
Hemos
on from the the-sensei-speaks dept.
Pretender writes, "Donald Knuth is interviewed here, and the questions have more depth than you usually see in his interviews. Gets into a little nitty-gritty about TeX, fonts, and Crusoe's possibilities with MMIX emulation. The cartoon at the bottom is hysterical. "
The site is back up now, but slow. There are two problems; one expected, one not. The expected problem is that Advogato only has a 128kbit/s upload (on an ADSL). Thus, it's gotta be really slow to the outside world.
Second, the network has gone down twice. I have no idea why. The NIC is a Tulip something-or-other. In both cases,/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart brought it back up.
The Advogato server code (mod_virgule) is handling the load fairly nicely. The load average is hovering around 0.65, and memory usage is quite reasonable. This is in spite of the fact that all pages are being rendered dynamically from XML.
It would be interesting to try to host the site on a really high bandwidth line.
Advogato is on the slow end of a DSL. I was hoping that when it got slashdotted, somebody would put up a mirror. Oh well. I'll see what I can do to nurse the machine through the day.
--
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Re:Really nice books and they are probably cool?
by
Chris+Siegler
·
· Score: 3
Incidentally what level of math expertice are they assuming? I have taken up through differential calculus and still hardly know a damn thing contained.
The problem is that Calculus doesn't help you in analysing algorithms, which is what CS is all about. So what to do? The book Concrete Math is an expansion of the first part of volume one, and is a much much easier read. After reading it, you'll be set to tackle all the math in Knuth.
Of course it's not a small book, and it's hard to get motivated to learn something when you don't know WHY you need it. So I'd suggest just skimming the math in Knuth and work on MIX and the programming stuff, then go back later.
In other words, eat your cake and ice cream first, and then tackle the broccoli.
Re:Really nice books and they are probably cool?
by
yellowstone
·
· Score: 3
I took the time and looked at a couple of his books. However I noticed really fast that in fact I could hardly understand a fraction of what was therin contained.
You definitely need to approach these books with the right attitude. They are not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. Each section requires careful thought for complete understanding.
You also have to get used to Knuth's writing style. I was reading a section on floating point representation, and came across a sentence that read
The radix can be interpreted as being on the extreme left (liberally) or on the extreme right (conservatively).
I don't know how long I stared at that sentence trying to figure out what he was talking about. Finially, I realized he was making a joke! (For those who don't get it, in the US, political liberals are described as being "on the left" and conservatives "on the right". Why, I have no idea...)
-y
-- 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Really nice books and they are probably cool?
by
slashdot-terminal
·
· Score: 3
When is The Art of Computer Programming going to be finished?
I took the time and looked at a couple of his books. However I noticed really fast that in fact I could hardly understand a fraction of what was therin contained.
Incidentally what level of math expertice are they assuming? I have taken up through differential calculus and still hardly know a damn thing contained.
I am all for information about computers but the trend I am seeing is that before you ever get a slight chance to learn anything cool you end up spending 20+ years studying the most dry uninteresting stuff imaginable.
-- Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
mirrored at last... (Re:Advogato slashdotted)
by
mko
·
· Score: 3
Since nobody has posted the whole interview yet, I've put the page up here.
Slashdot Mirror
The site is back up now, but slow. There are two problems; one expected, one not. The expected problem is that Advogato only has a 128kbit/s upload (on an ADSL). Thus, it's gotta be really slow to the outside world.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart brought it back up.
Second, the network has gone down twice. I have no idea why. The NIC is a Tulip something-or-other. In both cases,
The Advogato server code (mod_virgule) is handling the load fairly nicely. The load average is hovering around 0.65, and memory usage is quite reasonable. This is in spite of the fact that all pages are being rendered dynamically from XML.
It would be interesting to try to host the site on a really high bandwidth line.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Advogato is on the slow end of a DSL. I was hoping that when it got slashdotted, somebody would put up a mirror. Oh well. I'll see what I can do to nurse the machine through the day.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Of course it's not a small book, and it's hard to get motivated to learn something when you don't know WHY you need it. So I'd suggest just skimming the math in Knuth and work on MIX and the programming stuff, then go back later.
In other words, eat your cake and ice cream first, and then tackle the broccoli.
You definitely need to approach these books with the right attitude. They are not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. Each section requires careful thought for complete understanding.
You also have to get used to Knuth's writing style. I was reading a section on floating point representation, and came across a sentence that read
I don't know how long I stared at that sentence trying to figure out what he was talking about. Finially, I realized he was making a joke! (For those who don't get it, in the US, political liberals are described as being "on the left" and conservatives "on the right". Why, I have no idea...)-y
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
When is The Art of Computer Programming going to be finished?
I took the time and looked at a couple of his books. However I noticed really fast that in fact I could hardly understand a fraction of what was therin contained.
Incidentally what level of math expertice are they assuming? I have taken up through differential calculus and still hardly know a damn thing contained.
I am all for information about computers but the trend I am seeing is that before you ever get a slight chance to learn anything cool you end up spending 20+ years studying the most dry uninteresting stuff imaginable.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Since nobody has posted the whole interview yet, I've put the page up here.
Enjoy.