GTA3 has never crashed my PS2 no matter how many FBI cars, army tanks, etc. are on the screen. But I just finished Ico, and that made the PS2 totally freeze up probably at least 8 times or so. Very annoying, since a couple of times it froze quite a while after the last save point. It's the only game I've had such problems with, though.
Sometime within the last couple of years, there was a similar article asking about the best demo presentations people had given. Basically, a similar question, but from the opposite perspective. Some people had some pretty good stories to tell. I went searching for it a month or so ago, but didn't find it. Anyone remember some specific words from the title of the article so it would be easier to find?
I remember reading in various Cornell newsletters/newspapers that some people here are doing research on foods for space, mainly vegetable-based stuff.
Among other things, they're trying to develop taco-like things, carrot drumsticks, and some kind of chocolate substitute. Oh well, I don't think astronauts are expecting gourmet meals...
I know a good fraction of my students care about my views, and I care about theirs. A few are there just because they need the credit to graduate, which is unfortunate, since their hearts aren't in it, and I don't get to interact with them as much.
I know my students respect me, perhaps largely because I respect them. (That works well in a lot of places, not just the classroom.) A group of my students from a previous semester even got together and wrote a letter to the chair of my dept. on my behalf about my teaching skills and about how much I care about them, which was nice. This is only my second year teaching, and as one student wrote on the course evaluation form last year, I'm not bitter and angry yet like the other faculty.:-)
As for questions about my sexual activities, I think the students would feel more embarassed asking such a question than I would answering it. If they had the guts to ask it, I'm pretty sure I'd answer it.
We all knew this, because it's the very first thing Knuth said in his lecture.
Some people were having trouble accessing the interview. Plus this is slashdot, what percentage of people don't even read the first paragraph of a linked story?
It just seems when you say "we can discuss everything except this and this," it makes people think about those topics even more. Try not to think of a white elephant right now.
After the 9/11 attacks, there was some pressure from various places at Cornell for faculty to say something about it in class. (I wasn't going to, other than checking in with my students who I know had friends/family in NYC, since I generally didn't talk about other disasters in class). Anyway, when I finally did discuss 9/11 in class, religion came up a bit, but it wasn't a problem. We knew we had different beliefs, and there was no point in arguing about it. Then again, maybe everyone was still in too much shock to argue about anything at that point.
I honestly don't believe that Feynman was ever worried about offending anybody.
Heh, very good point. Although it wasn't 100% clear if Feynman excluded religion and politics, or if that was a condition Knuth added. (I don't know if Knuth is the kind of guy who would want to avoid pissing people off.)
I really regret that I never got a chance to meet Feynman. Although I've crossed his old trail a few times. I worked at Los Alamos for a bit (and even had a big old safe in the corner of the office I used, ripe for cracking), then at Thinking Machines (and met his son while working there). Now here I am at Cornell. I don't have any plans to go to Caltech, though, so I guess I won't quite finish the Feynman Tour.
Apparently Richard Feynman, on the last day of classes each semester, made the class an optional thing where students could come and ask questions on any topic except religion, politics, and the final exam. And Knuth followed his example.
Now that I'm teaching, I'm thinking of trying that. I can't decide if I really want to exclude religion and politics, though. I wonder if they excluded those topics to avoid offending people, or because they thought those topics are too subjective/personal, or if it was for some other reason?
I also wonder if anyone would come on that day; the last day of classes in the spring at Cornell is "Slope Day", where all the undergrads hang out on the hill by the main library and get drunk (the police basically look the other way, as long as people aren't getting hurt). It's truly a sight to behold.
The guy is smart, but his choice of format is more suitable for old, soon to be obsolette printable media not for the Internet.
Well, presumably it was the AMS who chose to put it in PDF, not Knuth himself. Although yeah, it does seem kinda silly that they made that choice. Especially given their interest in TeX (I use the amsmath LaTeX package all the time).
One trick for having many different passwords is to make them related. E.g. set aside one character in the password (3rd character, or whatever). Make that character "o" on your office computer (or "0", since I usually mix letters and numbers like "L" and "1" to make the passwords harder to guess). Then use the same password on your laptop, but make that character the letter "l". On your firewall, make it "f". And so on.
Sure, it's not as secure as a bunch of completely different passwords. But if you've come up with a really good password that's hard to crack, then all those permutations should be equally hard to crack, and if by some miracle someone does get one of them, they probably won't know which character to permute and what one-character abbreviations you've used for the various systems you use that password on. Of course, if everyone starts using this trick, then it won't be as secure.:-)
It's worked for me. I can remember a couple of very good passwords, and the various permutations. There's probably no way I'd remember 8 different good passwords.
The web is not meant to mindlessly entertain you for 30 minutes at a time with ads snuck in, it's meant to exchange information.
Like most things that are evolving, at this point I don't think you can say the web is "meant" for anything; it is what it is, and nobody planned for it to be this way.
(Although I also personally prefer using the web for exchanging information, rather than as a TV-like thing.)
I agree. I am squirming in my seat waiting for Laputa (a decent fan's page here) to get wide release in the US. Apparently, Disney was going to release it in 1999, then in 2000, now I have no idea if/when they will do it.
They do also have to deal with the small problem that "laputa" is a very obscene word in Spanish, hence them just calling it "Castle in the Sky".
I also read that they re-did the music for the American version, because the original Japanese version only had about 1 hour of music in the 2-hour movie, but they feel American audiences can't go more than a few minutes without hearing music in a movie. They were saying how e.g. when an army appears, you have to hear army music, etc. Yeah, makes Americans sound like real idiots. (Ok, you know you wanna respond to that last bit.) The music in the original version is great; it's one of only two anime soundtracks that I just had to buy (the other was Windaria).
The cold weather ensures that you will stay inside and get the most out of the afore-mentioned bandwidth.
I've gotta say, I've been living in a pretty rural area (Cornell) for the past 7 years, and it's great having a 5-minute commute past fields and greenhouses on the way in to campus. Plus Roadrunner internet/cable works great and practically never goes down (it's gone out maybe 1 or 2 hours per year at most, during the past few years). I'm really gonna hate to leave.
Wonder what sounds their server will make when being slashdotted? At least it has plenty of sounds on hand to sample from (pac-man wilting sound, various explosions and game-over sounds...)
This article should be under "Science", not "Television". After all, wasn't Chuck Jones the discoverer of the cartoon laws of physics? ("Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation," etc.) These laws of nature are now common knowledge, probably even more so than laws from more stuffy, traditional branches of physics.
but i'm just SO glad they haven't contaminated Australia with [mac & cheese].... yet
Yeah, but when the Australians start making mac & cheese, I bet they're gonna put egg & pineapple on it. When I visited Australia (Canberra, about 10 years ago), it seemed like they put egg & pineapple on everything (sandwiches, pizza, burgers, etc.)
The article mentions they'd be useful on airplanes. First, have fun explaining that one when going through the security checkpoint. Second, everyone sitting around you on the plane would be just thrilled about it; they'd probably ask the flight attendants if there are any empty seats available near a screaming baby or a jumping 4-year-old.
I had one company whose web page wouldn't let me register an e-mail address with their company's name as part of my address. I usually register addresses like "jm-ZZZ@mydomain.com" where the "ZZZ" is that company's name, e.g. "jm-amazon@mydomain.com" (the "jm" stands for "junk mail").
Anyway, when I was filling in the registration info on one company's page that I was buying something on (wish I could remember which one), it came back saying invalid e-mail address. I was thinking "huh, what is invalid about that e-mail address?!" I tried a few variations, and sure enough, as soon as I put in one which didn't have the company's name as part of the address, it stopped complaining and accepted it. Bastards. And too bad for anyone who actually has that word in their e-mail address...
That's a good point. I recently did some scanning for web servers, as part of a research project I'm doing about spatial correlations in IP address space. I wrote a little C program to do the scanning, which opens 900 simultaneous socket connections, with a 2-minute timeout period, and a 30-second timeout when reading from supposedly active web servers. I found that I was able to scan roughly 27,000 addresses per hour.
But even at that rate, it would take me about 18 years to scan the entire internet.
However, if there were 1,000 people all scanning at that rate, they could do it in under a week.
Now, how many people do you think are out there looking for web servers to harvest e-mail from? I dunno, but it's probably a lot closer to 1,000 than it is to 1. So it's not surprising to get hit by a random scan pretty often.
I think Stargate is great, if usually somewhat light, entertainment. They hit many of the standard SF stories, but put good twists on them. E.g. in the typical episode where some of the characters are caught in a time loop, eventually they just get tired of living the same day over and over, and start having some fun -- hitting golf balls through the stargate, punching people, kissing people, etc. Or when about halfway through the episode they finally revealed that at the beginning of each time loop, Teal'c was getting hit in the face by a door, and was getting seriously sick of that. Ok, getting hit in the face by a door isn't the funniest thing in the world, but they stuck it into an episode that "should have" been very serious, but which started turning quite silly.
That's also what I like about Farscape. Often when I'm watching it, I think I know where the episode is going (having seen it on Star Trek, or Outer Limits, etc.), but then they end up turning in a direction I didn't expect. Sometimes funny, sometimes not.
The UK patent has already expired so ISPs in the UK would escape having to pay anything. But in the US, the patent does not expire until 2006.
Just another example of why patents shouldn't have such long expiration times in the US.
... and it's reputation across the pond could be equally damaged by this court claim.
Damn, I pretty much accept that no one knows the difference between "its" and "it's" on slashdot. But even the BBC is screwing it up now? Aren't the Brits supposed to be good with the language?:-) (Or was that BBC article written by an American?) I swear, I'm getting worn down; if I see this mistake another 50,000 times or so, I'm going to start getting them mixed up myself.
One interesting exhibit which I believe used to be in the Computer Museum in Boston was the Tinkertoy Computer, built by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines Corp.). It was a computer made of tinkertoys, capable of playing tic tac toe. I suppose some slashdot folks will say he should have used Lego blocks...
I couldn't find any photos of it; just a tiny little blurb here. I think A.K. Dewdney's Scientific American column in October 1989 also talked about it. Dewdney also used it as the title of one of his books collecting his columns.
Any predictions for how long it will be until spammers have a valid (if temporary) reply-to address in their header, and a program that parses automatic replies from TMDA and jumps through the necessary hoop to be added to people's whitelists?
Plus they'd have the added bonus of knowing it's a valid address. Although the disadvantage of knowing it's someone who hates spam enough to set up TMDA to avoid it... Actually, to answer my own question, I don't think spammers will bother unless a lot of people start running TMDA. But still, this is an evolutionary arms race, and TMDA is not the Weapon To End The War. It's a pretty good weapon, but as others have pointed out, some people just don't get it. I can just imagine my mom trying to understand the TMDA auto-response. And sure, I could add her to my whitelist ahead of time, but I've got some old friends I haven't heard from in a long time who occasionally track me down, and I think some of them would be just as confused.
Are there any statistics about corresponding increases in car wrecks? I bought a PS2 just for Grand Theft Auto 3 (and also bought a bunch of other games); so I definitely spent way more on games in 2001 than I have in years.
But now when I'm driving around (I'm in a somewhat rural area), when I see a good pile of dirt by the side of the road, I feel a little tempted to floor it and see if I can complete a Unique Jump, preferably without landing upside down, so my car doesn't burst into flames and explode. Thank god there aren't any rocket launchers lying around on the side of the road.
Slashdot Mirror
GTA3 has never crashed my PS2 no matter how many FBI cars, army tanks, etc. are on the screen. But I just finished Ico, and that made the PS2 totally freeze up probably at least 8 times or so. Very annoying, since a couple of times it froze quite a while after the last save point. It's the only game I've had such problems with, though.
Sometime within the last couple of years, there was a similar article asking about the best demo presentations people had given. Basically, a similar question, but from the opposite perspective. Some people had some pretty good stories to tell. I went searching for it a month or so ago, but didn't find it. Anyone remember some specific words from the title of the article so it would be easier to find?
I remember reading in various Cornell newsletters/newspapers that some people here are doing research on foods for space, mainly vegetable-based stuff.
A quick search turned up two articles: the first one, with photos, and a more recent follow-up.
Among other things, they're trying to develop taco-like things, carrot drumsticks, and some kind of chocolate substitute. Oh well, I don't think astronauts are expecting gourmet meals...
I know a good fraction of my students care about my views, and I care about theirs. A few are there just because they need the credit to graduate, which is unfortunate, since their hearts aren't in it, and I don't get to interact with them as much.
:-)
I know my students respect me, perhaps largely because I respect them. (That works well in a lot of places, not just the classroom.) A group of my students from a previous semester even got together and wrote a letter to the chair of my dept. on my behalf about my teaching skills and about how much I care about them, which was nice. This is only my second year teaching, and as one student wrote on the course evaluation form last year, I'm not bitter and angry yet like the other faculty.
As for questions about my sexual activities, I think the students would feel more embarassed asking such a question than I would answering it. If they had the guts to ask it, I'm pretty sure I'd answer it.
One of the games with SuSE is Open Universe. Boy, those open-source zealots are really thinking big these days... what's next after the universe?
We all knew this, because it's the very first thing Knuth said in his lecture.
Some people were having trouble accessing the interview. Plus this is slashdot, what percentage of people don't even read the first paragraph of a linked story?
It just seems when you say "we can discuss everything except this and this," it makes people think about those topics even more. Try not to think of a white elephant right now.
After the 9/11 attacks, there was some pressure from various places at Cornell for faculty to say something about it in class. (I wasn't going to, other than checking in with my students who I know had friends/family in NYC, since I generally didn't talk about other disasters in class). Anyway, when I finally did discuss 9/11 in class, religion came up a bit, but it wasn't a problem. We knew we had different beliefs, and there was no point in arguing about it. Then again, maybe everyone was still in too much shock to argue about anything at that point.
I honestly don't believe that Feynman was ever worried about offending anybody.
Heh, very good point. Although it wasn't 100% clear if Feynman excluded religion and politics, or if that was a condition Knuth added. (I don't know if Knuth is the kind of guy who would want to avoid pissing people off.)
I really regret that I never got a chance to meet Feynman. Although I've crossed his old trail a few times. I worked at Los Alamos for a bit (and even had a big old safe in the corner of the office I used, ripe for cracking), then at Thinking Machines (and met his son while working there). Now here I am at Cornell. I don't have any plans to go to Caltech, though, so I guess I won't quite finish the Feynman Tour.
Apparently Richard Feynman, on the last day of classes each semester, made the class an optional thing where students could come and ask questions on any topic except religion, politics, and the final exam. And Knuth followed his example.
Now that I'm teaching, I'm thinking of trying that. I can't decide if I really want to exclude religion and politics, though. I wonder if they excluded those topics to avoid offending people, or because they thought those topics are too subjective/personal, or if it was for some other reason?
I also wonder if anyone would come on that day; the last day of classes in the spring at Cornell is "Slope Day", where all the undergrads hang out on the hill by the main library and get drunk (the police basically look the other way, as long as people aren't getting hurt). It's truly a sight to behold.
The guy is smart, but his choice of format is more suitable for old, soon to be obsolette printable media not for the Internet.
Well, presumably it was the AMS who chose to put it in PDF, not Knuth himself. Although yeah, it does seem kinda silly that they made that choice. Especially given their interest in TeX (I use the amsmath LaTeX package all the time).
One trick for having many different passwords is to make them related. E.g. set aside one character in the password (3rd character, or whatever). Make that character "o" on your office computer (or "0", since I usually mix letters and numbers like "L" and "1" to make the passwords harder to guess). Then use the same password on your laptop, but make that character the letter "l". On your firewall, make it "f". And so on.
:-)
Sure, it's not as secure as a bunch of completely different passwords. But if you've come up with a really good password that's hard to crack, then all those permutations should be equally hard to crack, and if by some miracle someone does get one of them, they probably won't know which character to permute and what one-character abbreviations you've used for the various systems you use that password on. Of course, if everyone starts using this trick, then it won't be as secure.
It's worked for me. I can remember a couple of very good passwords, and the various permutations. There's probably no way I'd remember 8 different good passwords.
The web is not meant to mindlessly entertain you for 30 minutes at a time with ads snuck in, it's meant to exchange information.
Like most things that are evolving, at this point I don't think you can say the web is "meant" for anything; it is what it is, and nobody planned for it to be this way.
(Although I also personally prefer using the web for exchanging information, rather than as a TV-like thing.)
I agree. I am squirming in my seat waiting for Laputa (a decent fan's page here) to get wide release in the US. Apparently, Disney was going to release it in 1999, then in 2000, now I have no idea if/when they will do it.
They do also have to deal with the small problem that "laputa" is a very obscene word in Spanish, hence them just calling it "Castle in the Sky".
I also read that they re-did the music for the American version, because the original Japanese version only had about 1 hour of music in the 2-hour movie, but they feel American audiences can't go more than a few minutes without hearing music in a movie. They were saying how e.g. when an army appears, you have to hear army music, etc. Yeah, makes Americans sound like real idiots. (Ok, you know you wanna respond to that last bit.) The music in the original version is great; it's one of only two anime soundtracks that I just had to buy (the other was Windaria).
The cold weather ensures that you will stay inside and get the most out of the afore-mentioned bandwidth.
I've gotta say, I've been living in a pretty rural area (Cornell) for the past 7 years, and it's great having a 5-minute commute past fields and greenhouses on the way in to campus. Plus Roadrunner internet/cable works great and practically never goes down (it's gone out maybe 1 or 2 hours per year at most, during the past few years). I'm really gonna hate to leave.
Wonder what sounds their server will make when being slashdotted? At least it has plenty of sounds on hand to sample from (pac-man wilting sound, various explosions and game-over sounds...)
This article should be under "Science", not "Television". After all, wasn't Chuck Jones the discoverer of the cartoon laws of physics? ("Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation," etc.) These laws of nature are now common knowledge, probably even more so than laws from more stuffy, traditional branches of physics.
but i'm just SO glad they haven't contaminated Australia with [mac & cheese].... yet
Yeah, but when the Australians start making mac & cheese, I bet they're gonna put egg & pineapple on it. When I visited Australia (Canberra, about 10 years ago), it seemed like they put egg & pineapple on everything (sandwiches, pizza, burgers, etc.)
The article mentions they'd be useful on airplanes. First, have fun explaining that one when going through the security checkpoint. Second, everyone sitting around you on the plane would be just thrilled about it; they'd probably ask the flight attendants if there are any empty seats available near a screaming baby or a jumping 4-year-old.
I had one company whose web page wouldn't let me register an e-mail address with their company's name as part of my address. I usually register addresses like "jm-ZZZ@mydomain.com" where the "ZZZ" is that company's name, e.g. "jm-amazon@mydomain.com" (the "jm" stands for "junk mail").
Anyway, when I was filling in the registration info on one company's page that I was buying something on (wish I could remember which one), it came back saying invalid e-mail address. I was thinking "huh, what is invalid about that e-mail address?!" I tried a few variations, and sure enough, as soon as I put in one which didn't have the company's name as part of the address, it stopped complaining and accepted it. Bastards. And too bad for anyone who actually has that word in their e-mail address...
That's a good point. I recently did some scanning for web servers, as part of a research project I'm doing about spatial correlations in IP address space. I wrote a little C program to do the scanning, which opens 900 simultaneous socket connections, with a 2-minute timeout period, and a 30-second timeout when reading from supposedly active web servers. I found that I was able to scan roughly 27,000 addresses per hour.
But even at that rate, it would take me about 18 years to scan the entire internet.
However, if there were 1,000 people all scanning at that rate, they could do it in under a week.
Now, how many people do you think are out there looking for web servers to harvest e-mail from? I dunno, but it's probably a lot closer to 1,000 than it is to 1. So it's not surprising to get hit by a random scan pretty often.
I think Stargate is great, if usually somewhat light, entertainment. They hit many of the standard SF stories, but put good twists on them. E.g. in the typical episode where some of the characters are caught in a time loop, eventually they just get tired of living the same day over and over, and start having some fun -- hitting golf balls through the stargate, punching people, kissing people, etc. Or when about halfway through the episode they finally revealed that at the beginning of each time loop, Teal'c was getting hit in the face by a door, and was getting seriously sick of that. Ok, getting hit in the face by a door isn't the funniest thing in the world, but they stuck it into an episode that "should have" been very serious, but which started turning quite silly.
That's also what I like about Farscape. Often when I'm watching it, I think I know where the episode is going (having seen it on Star Trek, or Outer Limits, etc.), but then they end up turning in a direction I didn't expect. Sometimes funny, sometimes not.
The UK patent has already expired so ISPs in the UK would escape having to pay anything. But in the US, the patent does not expire until 2006.
... and it's reputation across the pond could be equally damaged by this court claim.
:-) (Or was that BBC article written by an American?) I swear, I'm getting worn down; if I see this mistake another 50,000 times or so, I'm going to start getting them mixed up myself.
Just another example of why patents shouldn't have such long expiration times in the US.
Damn, I pretty much accept that no one knows the difference between "its" and "it's" on slashdot. But even the BBC is screwing it up now? Aren't the Brits supposed to be good with the language?
One interesting exhibit which I believe used to be in the Computer Museum in Boston was the Tinkertoy Computer, built by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines Corp.). It was a computer made of tinkertoys, capable of playing tic tac toe. I suppose some slashdot folks will say he should have used Lego blocks...
I couldn't find any photos of it; just a tiny little blurb here. I think A.K. Dewdney's Scientific American column in October 1989 also talked about it. Dewdney also used it as the title of one of his books collecting his columns.
Any predictions for how long it will be until spammers have a valid (if temporary) reply-to address in their header, and a program that parses automatic replies from TMDA and jumps through the necessary hoop to be added to people's whitelists?
Plus they'd have the added bonus of knowing it's a valid address. Although the disadvantage of knowing it's someone who hates spam enough to set up TMDA to avoid it... Actually, to answer my own question, I don't think spammers will bother unless a lot of people start running TMDA. But still, this is an evolutionary arms race, and TMDA is not the Weapon To End The War. It's a pretty good weapon, but as others have pointed out, some people just don't get it. I can just imagine my mom trying to understand the TMDA auto-response. And sure, I could add her to my whitelist ahead of time, but I've got some old friends I haven't heard from in a long time who occasionally track me down, and I think some of them would be just as confused.
...a slice of pizza in his Palm charging/sync cradle, and his roommate hoping he wouldn't notice anything wrong?
Are there any statistics about corresponding increases in car wrecks? I bought a PS2 just for Grand Theft Auto 3 (and also bought a bunch of other games); so I definitely spent way more on games in 2001 than I have in years.
But now when I'm driving around (I'm in a somewhat rural area), when I see a good pile of dirt by the side of the road, I feel a little tempted to floor it and see if I can complete a Unique Jump, preferably without landing upside down, so my car doesn't burst into flames and explode. Thank god there aren't any rocket launchers lying around on the side of the road.