There were three copies of the Eames exhibits- they were in various places, notably Boston and LA for many years, and are now in the New York Hall of Science (complete), Boston and Atlanta (incomplete.) My understanding is that the Eames had a lot of stipulations about how the exhibits could be displayed and they cannot be altered or updated. The NY Hall of Science guys spent a lot of time sorting out some of the broken parts of their exhibit, and are rightly proud of some of the finagling they had to do to get a few of the exhibits working again. They are the only ones who were able to get the light bulb cube for multiplication operational again as far as I know.
Felix Salmon dug deeper into the story and it's even worse than originally described, with significant deliberate obfuscation on the part of Silver Light, the financiers, mostly, as well as Skype. Wow. Supposedly, to "retain the best and the brightest," they buried a clause in a subclause in a contract which allows them to repurchase options at the original price, completely antithetical to the whole idea of vesting options. If this becomes a precedent, people are going to have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers multiple times per year to comb through stuff looking for things like this. From Felix:
All of this makes any Skype investor saying “it’s not us, it’s the CEO” sound naive at best and, more likely, downright disingenuous. Unless and until such an investor wants to go on the record defending Silver Lake here, I’m going to believe Lee, and assume that it’s Silver Lake who’s largely to blame for the utter breakdown of employer-employee relations at Skype. I don’t know where they got these techniques from, but they’re very alien to Silicon Valley and indeed the rest of the business world. And they do no good at all for the reputation of private equity companies more generally.
Felix Salmon has some analysis here. He's got a fair amount of experience from the finance side and here is his take on it:
This does seem pretty evil. I’m sure it makes financial sense for Silver Lake, which will be less diluted by the immediate vesting of lots of options. But when you’ve just scored one of the biggest home runs in the history of private-equity investing, it’s generally considered polite to share the spoils with the people who actually run the company. Rather than summarily firing them for no obvious reason but sheer greed.
This stands as a contrast to the Zappos/Amazon deal where at least the proceeds were shared with the people who developed things. Presumably this makes people more resistant to bring in private capital or at least try to spend some energy writing yet more complicated contracts and conditions, where it will take volumes of boilerplate to express what a normal person could say in three words: "Don't be jerks."
That would have been as part of various copy-protection schemes, not under general purpose computing. The general OS (the monitor, Integer Basic, and later the Disk Operating System) were pretty understandable to disassemble and were quite well-constructed. The source code (from Woz) for the Sweet 16 interpreter was part of the original Apple ][ manuals and also quite good to read and document, although I don't know how many people made much use of it.
Indeed there were some pretty nasty obfuscation efforts as part of copy protection- code that ran in the stack, code that relied on processor quirks/bugs, tricky self-modifying code. It was a good way to really learn assembly.
If you are interested in university-centered research in science or engineering as a career, finding someone who is currently there and relatively recently trained is a reasonable plan. Generally people in that position are either swamped with work or they have developed good skills for minimizing distractions from their own work and may not be so interested in helping random strangers, though.
Be careful, a lot of faculty are pompous blowhards whose information and career advice is long out of date if not totally obsolete. A good way to find a successful active researcher in most science and many engineering fields is to look for those with active National Science Foundation grants via http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/tab.do?dispatch=4 the NSF award search page.
My own personal experience isn't really relevant and is essentially obsolete, since finances of US higher education have changed a great deal since my experience. I had several generous scholarships and awards, so my undergrad didn't involve debt.
It is good to realize that doctoral programs in science and engineering generally give good support to strong students and generally are at least slight positive cash flow for sensible students.
What is relevant from my experience is that I likely would have still gotten into a strong grad program had I gone to Notable State Flagship University instead of Elite Research University for undergraduate work, and it wouldn't nominally have cost nearly as much. Once in a strong doctoral program, people don't really care too much about where you did you undergraduate as long as you have good preparation and progress well.
There are many factors at work here. The various studies all have flaws as there are many interrelated variables and they are difficult to separate out. There is a complex choice here, and it is never as simple as these studies or stories make it out to be. Some things that are typically omitted:
1) If your undergraduate degree is the last degree you are going to get, the importance of that institution is elevated somewhat. 2) If you plan to get an advanced degree, one main goal of undergraduate education is to increase the likeliehood that you will get into a top graduate program and do well there. 2b) Top graduate programs in science and engineering are much more likely to take strong students from research universities, particularly those undergraduates who already took some graduate-level courses or had specific productive experience with undergraduate research.
Expounding a bit:
1) For careers in finance or management, many strong firms only consider students from very strong universities. If that is your career path, that could be an important criterion. Similarly, if your only degree will be undergraduate in some other field where generally the expectation is just an undergraduate degree, that choice of institution of course matters more. In terms of studies that look at average salary, this effect can dominate others as these are often high-paying fields with great variance in salary.
2) In general, I recommend that good students go to the "best" place that they get into. That is, the most academically rigorous usually works well. Overdoing it can be a problem, if they go to a place where the expectations are simply to high and they struggle and fail. But most commonly, the advantage of going to a strong place is that the other students are also strong, and the professors can then teach at a reasonable level for their audience. That is, often the other students are the limiting factor to the depth of a course's coverage and so you want to be at the best place you can be and still succeed. That is a good route to the preparation needed for doctoral-level courses.
2b) I've had to serve on various doctoral admissions committees, and students from big research universities are much more known quantities. Professors at these institutions have more experience with students continuing on to graduate school (and seeing their own students and other graduate students in their departments) and the students have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into. There have been too many students from small liberal arts colleges, whose letters of recommendation said "this is the best student I've seen in years" who took all the available courses there and excelled grade-wise, but who struggled and turned out to be poorly prepared or just overwhelmed by doctoral level work, or simply didn't really realize what they were getting into. So occassionally there are students from such backgrounds who do OK, but it isn't common and I can't recommend it as a good route to a strong graduate program. It may be the case that their smaller college instructors there are more involved in their teaching, classes are smaller, facilities are better, and they may in fact actually learn more at their institution and be happier there, but that doesn't really carry much weight for eventual graduate study.
FWIW, I went to an elite US research university for my undergraduate, and went to a top US research university for my PhD. I have taught or held research appointments post-Ph.D. in a wide range of institutions, from one of the weaker Ivy League institutions to top tier public research universities to mid-tier public research universities and I have a strong record of research funding as a professor judged primarily on research. People from many backgrounds ask for my advice about university choices in science and engineering as there is a culture of excessive obsession about "the right institution" for their choice.
Another tangentially-related episode, again involving everyone's favorite publishing villains at Elsevier, was the fake medical journal with no credible peer review which Elsevier was happy to publish.
The quickest way to accomplish good, low-cost journals is by mass resignations of editorial boards from top (expensive) journals and then starting a low-cost alternative. It has happened, under the leadership of giants like Knuth and I am hopeful this becoming more widespread shortly. The current system is not sustainable.
Actually, for "(1) who wrote it" it should be judged on what is actually in the article, not who wrote it. Though there have been some interesting studies that show that who wrote it is often an overwhelming consideration, particularly for review processes with strong time pressure, like computer science conferences.
And as far as "(2) who reviewed it": most academic journal and conference refereeing is anonymous and unpaid. Referees are asked to comment on the correctness, originality and importance of the work. A less selective journal generally has lower standards and will ask just about anyone who is willing to referee an article, and the level of scrutiny is not as high. Whereas a strong journal is very selective and to get published there, the article needs to be correct, quite novel and important as well. So there can be quite a difference with the existing system from journal to journal.
I'm not saying that it is an optimal system (editorial boards of journals essentially serving as filters and arbiters of quality/significance) but that is the way things typically work in the research areas I publish in regularly.
Many other researchers adopt a similar policy themselves- post their work on the arxiv preprint server immediately before submitting to a journal. That way at least one version of the paper is available forever for free. I've never heard of a journal (math or CS) that has had any difficulty with that, or even with putting the current version (post-refereeing and revising) on your own web page. But other disciplines, particularly medicine, control things much more tightly and I don't know as much about the standard things there.
As far as mathematics research goes, there is a huge range in journal prices depending upon the publisher. Many for-profit publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc.) charge very high prices for journals, or have comprehensive pricing packages which make it hard to figure out how much a particular journal costs. Many journals are published by non-profit professional societies or universities, and those tend to be much more reasonably priced.
There is an effort to only submit to journals which are reasonably priced- see, for example, the Banff Protocol where prominent researchers state their commitment to only contribute to, serve on editorial boards and referee for reasonable journals. Many of the most prestigious journals are still for-profit and there is of course pressure on untenured people to publish in the best journals they can, but there is a healthy set of more senior people who choose where to submit things incorporating journal expense as a consideration.
Absolutely- the soap film computers are comparable to effective heuristic algorithms for the Steiner tree problem, but they come with no proof that their solution is optimal. And there are examples where they are demonstrably incorrect (suboptimal in total length) some fraction of the time. There are plenty of quick algorithms for problems if you drop the requirement to be correct all of the time!
Nevertheless, playing with soapfilms and pegs can be interesting and a good illustration of some of the subtleties of algorithms. I've seen decent examples in some museum exhibits although usually their explanations are a little off, and I have a pair of plastic plates with some pegs that a student built for me for demonstrating, years ago, which has been a nice thing to have from time to time.
Here is their grant and proposal abstract from the NSF. It sounds like they did exactly what they'd proposed to do- not every grant meets that metric! Theirs is a 3-year grant for a total of $386927.
There was a cute line in their FAQs:
Q. Were the tests IRB approved?
Yes, they were approved. No SSNs were harmed during the writing of this paper.
Exactly- this is the "statistical fallacy of unenumerated failures." There was a great deal of music produced in the 70s, a broad range of quality, but there is a bias in what is played now toward the better side. It's parallel to the "they don't build cars like they used to" attitude that can be influenced by inadvertently selecting data biased toward that. A 1960s Dodge Dart that is going strong in 2008 will probably carry on for another 20 years or so, but a 1960s poorly-engineered car is long dead by 2008. Just because most of the cars you see now from the 60s are pretty reasonable cars doesn't mean that they were all like that.
There was a recent post on the physics group blog Cosmic Variance about potential job applicants having webpages and getting Googled during the course of hiring for academic positions- postdocs and faculty. So it's not just the students, it's faculty as well.
There are lots of questions you can't have on a job application (sexual orientation, religion, etc.) but if an applicant volunteers that information, that is permitted. And the attitude seems to be that if information is on a webpage, it is "volunteered" to the world.
I've wondered what the battery life of an old Powerbook Duo would be with a modern design battery. Those machines got great battery life (6+hours) if you did some tricks, like using a RAM disk to avoid HD usage. The oldest ones had passive LCD monochrome displays. A modern battery design, with the expectation of driving Wifi, a bright screen, optical drive etc. for hours would probably be pretty remarkable in either an old Duo or a machine designed to maximize battery life, like this one. So it sounds promising but of course not for everyone.
This is a pretty inane study- there is a huge difference between occasionally looking for an open wireless when away from home to browse and using a neighbor's open wireless as your main pipe. And the comments about identity theft are ridiculous, as most sensible people adjust their browsing/net use when using unknown networks to reflect their uncertainty in its security.
I've had several prolonged trips comparable to the one described here. No high-altitude mountaineering, but several RTWs with a couple of long kayak trips, some lengthy treks, and some good stretches away from power. These were long trips with some periods when I had to be presentable and give lectures and some periods when I was away from the crowds.
My experiences:
1) I took a simple G3 iBook on the most recent/ most rugged trip and it worked great. Small, simple and it wouldn't have a disaster if it got badly damaged or stolen. It was silly to have an optical drive but that didn't bother me. Those G3/G4 iBooks are quite sturdy in my experience. I've given 30+ of them to research students who do not treat them gently and though there have been some problems, overall they've held up better than anything else I've tried.
2) You can find internet cafes everywhere and burn CDs there, upload photos, backup documents, etc. Carrying an optical drive is totally unneeded.
3) Power supplies are a weak link. On an earlier trip, I was happy to have an easily-replaceable (thanks AppleCare!) power supply instead of something exotic.
4) I was generally never away from power for more than a week, so carrying extra batteries wasn't worth it for me. That may be important to you. When I was away for power for longer stretches, I just didn't bring or use the machine.
5) I met some travelling geeks with odd solutions to the document-their-trip-electronically or get-some-work-done-away-from-the-world problems. Nothing stands out as a universal great solution, though I met someone memorable who was using an old Newton a long way off the beaten path with some well-cobbled-together stuff including solar power rechargers.
The summary is somewhat misleading- the only accounts that can be identified are those that belong to people who also rate on IMBD and who have thus chosen to make at least some of their ratings public. If person X rates 1000 movies on Netflix and has made 20 or so ratings on IMDB publically available, then it is possible to infer with some small uncertainty which of the anonymized individuals in the NetFlix database they are. Thus you have possibly figured out their ratings of the other 980 movies they rated for Netflix but did not post on IMBD. Interesting, but not earth-shattering or a serious breach of privacy, I would say.
Nitpick: baud rates were pretty discrete, 110, 150 and 300 from that era. 1200 baud was great but it took a while for early adopters to have anyplace to call that could communicate at 1200 baud...
Slashdot Mirror
There were three copies of the Eames exhibits- they were in various places, notably Boston and LA for many years, and are now in the New York Hall of Science (complete), Boston and Atlanta (incomplete.) My understanding is that the Eames had a lot of stipulations about how the exhibits could be displayed and they cannot be altered or updated. The NY Hall of Science guys spent a lot of time sorting out some of the broken parts of their exhibit, and are rightly proud of some of the finagling they had to do to get a few of the exhibits working again. They are the only ones who were able to get the light bulb cube for multiplication operational again as far as I know.
Felix Salmon dug deeper into the story and it's even worse than originally described, with significant deliberate obfuscation on the part of Silver Light, the financiers, mostly, as well as Skype. Wow. Supposedly, to "retain the best and the brightest," they buried a clause in a subclause in a contract which allows them to repurchase options at the original price, completely antithetical to the whole idea of vesting options. If this becomes a precedent, people are going to have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers multiple times per year to comb through stuff looking for things like this. From Felix:
Felix Salmon has some analysis here. He's got a fair amount of experience from the finance side and here is his take on it:
This stands as a contrast to the Zappos/Amazon deal where at least the proceeds were shared with the people who developed things. Presumably this makes people more resistant to bring in private capital or at least try to spend some energy writing yet more complicated contracts and conditions, where it will take volumes of boilerplate to express what a normal person could say in three words: "Don't be jerks."
That would have been as part of various copy-protection schemes, not under general purpose computing. The general OS (the monitor, Integer Basic, and later the Disk Operating System) were pretty understandable to disassemble and were quite well-constructed. The source code (from Woz) for the Sweet 16 interpreter was part of the original Apple ][ manuals and also quite good to read and document, although I don't know how many people made much use of it.
Indeed there were some pretty nasty obfuscation efforts as part of copy protection- code that ran in the stack, code that relied on processor quirks/bugs, tricky self-modifying code. It was a good way to really learn assembly.
If you are interested in university-centered research in science or engineering as a career, finding someone who is currently there and relatively recently trained is a reasonable plan. Generally people in that position are either swamped with work or they have developed good skills for minimizing distractions from their own work and may not be so interested in helping random strangers, though.
Be careful, a lot of faculty are pompous blowhards whose information and career advice is long out of date if not totally obsolete. A good way to find a successful active researcher in most science and many engineering fields is to look for those with active National Science Foundation grants via http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/tab.do?dispatch=4 the NSF award search page.
My own personal experience isn't really relevant and is essentially obsolete, since finances of US higher education have changed a great deal since my experience. I had several generous scholarships and awards, so my undergrad didn't involve debt.
It is good to realize that doctoral programs in science and engineering generally give good support to strong students and generally are at least slight positive cash flow for sensible students.
What is relevant from my experience is that I likely would have still gotten into a strong grad program had I gone to Notable State Flagship University instead of Elite Research University for undergraduate work, and it wouldn't nominally have cost nearly as much. Once in a strong doctoral program, people don't really care too much about where you did you undergraduate as long as you have good preparation and progress well.
There are many factors at work here. The various studies all have flaws as there are many interrelated variables and they are difficult to separate out. There is a complex choice here, and it is never as simple as these studies or stories make it out to be. Some things that are typically omitted:
1) If your undergraduate degree is the last degree you are going to get, the importance of that institution is elevated somewhat.
2) If you plan to get an advanced degree, one main goal of undergraduate education is to increase the likeliehood that you will get into a top graduate program and do well there.
2b) Top graduate programs in science and engineering are much more likely to take strong students from research universities, particularly those undergraduates who already took some graduate-level courses or had specific productive experience with undergraduate research.
Expounding a bit:
1) For careers in finance or management, many strong firms only consider students from very strong universities. If that is your career path, that could be an important criterion. Similarly, if your only degree will be undergraduate in some other field where generally the expectation is just an undergraduate degree, that choice of institution of course matters more. In terms of studies that look at average salary, this effect can dominate others as these are often high-paying fields with great variance in salary.
2) In general, I recommend that good students go to the "best" place that they get into. That is, the most academically rigorous usually works well. Overdoing it can be a problem, if they go to a place where the expectations are simply to high and they struggle and fail. But most commonly, the advantage of going to a strong place is that the other students are also strong, and the professors can then teach at a reasonable level for their audience. That is, often the other students are the limiting factor to the depth of a course's coverage and so you want to be at the best place you can be and still succeed. That is a good route to the preparation needed for doctoral-level courses.
2b) I've had to serve on various doctoral admissions committees, and students from big research universities are much more known quantities. Professors at these institutions have more experience with students continuing on to graduate school (and seeing their own students and other graduate students in their departments) and the students have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into. There have been too many students from small liberal arts colleges, whose letters of recommendation said "this is the best student I've seen in years" who took all the available courses there and excelled grade-wise, but who struggled and turned out to be poorly prepared or just overwhelmed by doctoral level work, or simply didn't really realize what they were getting into. So occassionally there are students from such backgrounds who do OK, but it isn't common and I can't recommend it as a good route to a strong graduate program. It may be the case that their smaller college instructors there are more involved in their teaching, classes are smaller, facilities are better, and they may in fact actually learn more at their institution and be happier there, but that doesn't really carry much weight for eventual graduate study.
FWIW, I went to an elite US research university for my undergraduate, and went to a top US research university for my PhD. I have taught or held research appointments post-Ph.D. in a wide range of institutions, from one of the weaker Ivy League institutions to top tier public research universities to mid-tier public research universities and I have a strong record of research funding as a professor judged primarily on research. People from many backgrounds ask for my advice about university choices in science and engineering as there is a culture of excessive obsession about "the right institution" for their choice.
Another tangentially-related episode, again involving everyone's favorite publishing villains at Elsevier, was the fake medical journal with no credible peer review which Elsevier was happy to publish.
Two others come immediately to mind:
Mass resignation of Topology
K-Theory board resigns, with some odd weirdness described here
The Eureka journal watch page has more info, but it needs some updating.
The quickest way to accomplish good, low-cost journals is by mass resignations of editorial boards from top (expensive) journals and then starting a low-cost alternative. It has happened, under the leadership of giants like Knuth and I am hopeful this becoming more widespread shortly. The current system is not sustainable.
Actually, for "(1) who wrote it" it should be judged on what is actually in the article, not who wrote it. Though there have been some interesting studies that show that who wrote it is often an overwhelming consideration, particularly for review processes with strong time pressure, like computer science conferences.
And as far as "(2) who reviewed it": most academic journal and conference refereeing is anonymous and unpaid. Referees are asked to comment on the correctness, originality and importance of the work. A less selective journal generally has lower standards and will ask just about anyone who is willing to referee an article, and the level of scrutiny is not as high. Whereas a strong journal is very selective and to get published there, the article needs to be correct, quite novel and important as well. So there can be quite a difference with the existing system from journal to journal.
I'm not saying that it is an optimal system (editorial boards of journals essentially serving as filters and arbiters of quality/significance) but that is the way things typically work in the research areas I publish in regularly.
Many other researchers adopt a similar policy themselves- post their work on the arxiv preprint server immediately before submitting to a journal. That way at least one version of the paper is available forever for free. I've never heard of a journal (math or CS) that has had any difficulty with that, or even with putting the current version (post-refereeing and revising) on your own web page. But other disciplines, particularly medicine, control things much more tightly and I don't know as much about the standard things there.
As far as mathematics research goes, there is a huge range in journal prices depending upon the publisher. Many for-profit publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc.) charge very high prices for journals, or have comprehensive pricing packages which make it hard to figure out how much a particular journal costs. Many journals are published by non-profit professional societies or universities, and those tend to be much more reasonably priced.
There is an effort to only submit to journals which are reasonably priced- see, for example, the Banff Protocol where prominent researchers state their commitment to only contribute to, serve on editorial boards and referee for reasonable journals. Many of the most prestigious journals are still for-profit and there is of course pressure on untenured people to publish in the best journals they can, but there is a healthy set of more senior people who choose where to submit things incorporating journal expense as a consideration.
Absolutely- the soap film computers are comparable to effective heuristic algorithms for the Steiner tree problem, but they come with no proof that their solution is optimal. And there are examples where they are demonstrably incorrect (suboptimal in total length) some fraction of the time. There are plenty of quick algorithms for problems if you drop the requirement to be correct all of the time!
Nevertheless, playing with soapfilms and pegs can be interesting and a good illustration of some of the subtleties of algorithms. I've seen decent examples in some museum exhibits although usually their explanations are a little off, and I have a pair of plastic plates with some pegs that a student built for me for demonstrating, years ago, which has been a nice thing to have from time to time.
Here is their grant and proposal abstract from the NSF. It sounds like they did exactly what they'd proposed to do- not every grant meets that metric! Theirs is a 3-year grant for a total of $386927.
There was a cute line in their FAQs:
Exactly- this is the "statistical fallacy of unenumerated failures." There was a great deal of music produced in the 70s, a broad range of quality, but there is a bias in what is played now toward the better side. It's parallel to the "they don't build cars like they used to" attitude that can be influenced by inadvertently selecting data biased toward that. A 1960s Dodge Dart that is going strong in 2008 will probably carry on for another 20 years or so, but a 1960s poorly-engineered car is long dead by 2008. Just because most of the cars you see now from the 60s are pretty reasonable cars doesn't mean that they were all like that.
There was a recent post on the physics group blog Cosmic Variance about potential job applicants having webpages and getting Googled during the course of hiring for academic positions- postdocs and faculty. So it's not just the students, it's faculty as well.
There are lots of questions you can't have on a job application (sexual orientation, religion, etc.) but if an applicant volunteers that information, that is permitted. And the attitude seems to be that if information is on a webpage, it is "volunteered" to the world.
I've wondered what the battery life of an old Powerbook Duo would be with a modern design battery. Those machines got great battery life (6+hours) if you did some tricks, like using a RAM disk to avoid HD usage. The oldest ones had passive LCD monochrome displays. A modern battery design, with the expectation of driving Wifi, a bright screen, optical drive etc. for hours would probably be pretty remarkable in either an old Duo or a machine designed to maximize battery life, like this one. So it sounds promising but of course not for everyone.
This is a pretty inane study- there is a huge difference between occasionally looking for an open wireless when away from home to browse and using a neighbor's open wireless as your main pipe. And the comments about identity theft are ridiculous, as most sensible people adjust their browsing/net use when using unknown networks to reflect their uncertainty in its security.
There is a nice rememberance of Wheeler from one of his former students at the cosmic variance blog.
I've had several prolonged trips comparable to the one described here. No high-altitude mountaineering, but several RTWs with a couple of long kayak trips, some lengthy treks, and some good stretches away from power. These were long trips with some periods when I had to be presentable and give lectures and some periods when I was away from the crowds.
My experiences:
1) I took a simple G3 iBook on the most recent/ most rugged trip and it worked great. Small, simple and it wouldn't have a disaster if it got badly damaged or stolen. It was silly to have an optical drive but that didn't bother me. Those G3/G4 iBooks are quite sturdy in my experience. I've given 30+ of them to research students who do not treat them gently and though there have been some problems, overall they've held up better than anything else I've tried.
2) You can find internet cafes everywhere and burn CDs there, upload photos, backup documents, etc. Carrying an optical drive is totally unneeded.
3) Power supplies are a weak link. On an earlier trip, I was happy to have an easily-replaceable (thanks AppleCare!) power supply instead of something exotic.
4) I was generally never away from power for more than a week, so carrying extra batteries wasn't worth it for me. That may be important to you. When I was away for power for longer stretches, I just didn't bring or use the machine.
5) I met some travelling geeks with odd solutions to the document-their-trip-electronically or get-some-work-done-away-from-the-world problems. Nothing stands out as a universal great solution, though I met someone memorable who was using an old Newton a long way off the beaten path with some well-cobbled-together stuff including solar power rechargers.
They said they were thinking about trying 5th graders next against the chimps. How would 5th graders do against college students?
The summary is somewhat misleading- the only accounts that can be identified are those that belong to people who also rate on IMBD and who have thus chosen to make at least some of their ratings public. If person X rates 1000 movies on Netflix and has made 20 or so ratings on IMDB publically available, then it is possible to infer with some small uncertainty which of the anonymized individuals in the NetFlix database they are. Thus you have possibly figured out their ratings of the other 980 movies they rated for Netflix but did not post on IMBD. Interesting, but not earth-shattering or a serious breach of privacy, I would say.
200 baud connection
Nitpick: baud rates were pretty discrete, 110, 150 and 300 from that era. 1200 baud was great but it took a while for early adopters to have anyplace to call that could communicate at 1200 baud...