Some links from my article that slashdot rejected some hours ago: the University of Texas announcement has a list of his awards and discoveries. (He taught at UT.) A brief paper (in PDF, it's scanned from a handwritten paper for CACM if I recall) shows his brilliant, clear, and concise methods of thought and writing.
If you ever used an application that made use of shortest-path searching -- say, any real-time strategy game -- then you owe this man a debt of gratitude.
drink an 80 oz coke everyday and see how long it takes before you are shooting up insulin twice a day.
Those of us who have to shoot up insulin twice a day already due to broken genes (thanks mom and dad for the useless pancreas) have nothing to lose! My fridge is stocked with nothing but colas -- both diet and regular -- and water for the morning coffee. I don't remember the last time I drank juice. Milk? Don't waste my time; come back when it's carbonated and can give me brain damage.
Hardly obscure. Larry Niven's "Known Space" future history is one of the most well-known story universes in SF -- and assuming you've at least heard of it is an understandable assumption for a geek site to make.
Ringworld won Nebula and Hugo awards when it was published. Ten years later the massive continuing flow of fan letters and mathematical papers forced Niven to write a sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, also very good. He followed it up some 12-16 years later by publishing The Ringworld Throne which was mostly crap.
The "Ringworld" is a gigantic artifical ring of solid matter constructed around a star, one million miles wide, six hundred million miles long, and several hundred feet thick. The inner surface is habitable (and, of course, fucking gigantic in surface area).
PC Weasel -- open source product
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Cheap KVM Over IP?
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· Score: 1, Redundant
You want www.realweasel.com, and the PC Weasel 2000.
It's open source, it's got a picture of a weasel with an axe standing next to headless (bleeding) Linux Tux and BSD Beastie, and it's from a company called Middle Digital Incorporated. You have to support that if you're a true geek.
Well, strictly speaking...
on
Hacker Survey
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· Score: 2
...the Earth's rotation is slowing, so you actually have MORE time per day than was given to da Vinci.
Not a lot more, but that's where multitasking comes in.
[...]similar to the case with Felten, because the presentation will occur at a conference that is charging attendees, both Perens and the show organizers could be subject to criminal charges in addition to a fine.
[...]
Perens said he is making a habit out of testing the limits of the DMCA, mainly to show just how trivial most DRM technologies are. Last year at the O'Reilly conference, he delivered a presentation during which he showed attendees the slides that got Sklyarov arrested.
...is to not install X -- or anything else -- until after you've upgraded to testing or unstable.
It's simple. Say you're starting with a set of stable CDs. So:
Install stable (assuming potato).
Do not install anything but the base system. No X, no devel tools, nothing.
Edit yer sources.list to point to unstable.
update and upgrade. Don't add anything new, just upgrade what's in place.
Now that you have a working "unstable" dist, start adding new packages: apt-getinstallx-window-system should do it.
And that's it. I started with a set of potato CDs, and there has never been a trace of XFree86 3.x on my system. Version 4.whatever runs fine,
the automatic XF86Config-4 configuration did a fairly decent job, and I'm upgrading with the greatest of ease.:-)
While I have a lot of respect for Feynman, I don't believe he ever designed and built a pipe organ in his own home./That/ is why Knuth kicks ass: he doesn't just solve the problem at hand. He solves all -- and I mean/all/ -- of the underlying theory problems, turning the whole field upside down.
As for the pipe organ, somewhere there's a photo of Knuth sitting at home in front of it. It's not a small instrument.:-)
but a song with a repeated segment would likely have repeated data in it, or else the filesize would be too small to be a valid mp3 (if the data looped, for instance), so could this be detected and flagged as a possible bogus file?
So... the artists can't ever play the same sequence of music more than two or three times before it gets flagged as bogus?
That check would instantly trigger on pretty much every soft-pop-dance track that I currently spend most of my radio-listening time trying to avoid. Cool.:-)
How much would you pay to be able to instantly kill a spammer, anywhere in the world?
How much if you could subject them to torture first?
How much if you could force the other spammers to watch?
A colleague and I agreed that if we were to take money out of our 401(k)'s to hire a contract killer for sapmmers, that the withdrawal should be tax-deductable. Possibly even listed as a charitable donation.
"Collapse stories" in preferences
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Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 3, Informative
There were scenes in FOTR, while at Isengard, where Jackson went out of his way (well, more accurately, the movie plot went out of its way) to show us massive trees getting cut down, with the local foreman saying things like, "These trees have deep roots."
Why do we care about the trees, when they play no obvious part in the growing of Saruman's army? We don't care, yet.
I believe it was Anton Chekov, the famous Russian playwright, who said that if you show a character loading the gun in the first act, you must fire it in the third. If you show a gun firing in the third act, you must show it being loaded in the first. And Peter Jackson knows this.
In a mouse-based file manager, you don't move thousands of files one at a time. You highlight all the thousands, and move the group. Why should handwaving be any different?
Similarly, I would expect to point my finger three times: "Starting with this file *jab*, and ending with that file *jab*, move them all over to there *negligent evil overlord wave*."
One of the "killer B's" (the name given to Bear, Brin, and Benford) has just published an SF novel in which we can make expendable bodies. I plan to drive to the bookstore and purchase it as soon as I get the car fixed.
Gah. What I typed was "I've only got <some short period of time> to live," but I typed the angle characters directly instead of < so they got interpreted as an HTML tag and dropped.
I think at some point, if it isn't already happening, people will start taking larger chances with their bodies and health, because of this insurance policy.
A number of Larry Niven's stories in his future history "Known Space" cycle touch on this point, but arrived at a reverse conclusion in some cases: because people lived longer, they took fewer chances.
Even Hollywood will give you examples of this, although usually they look at it from the other end: "I've only got to live, so I'll go do something heroic which will probably result in my death, but big friggin' deal because I'm about to die."
The extension of that line of thought predicted by many SF authors is, "I've got three centuries of good livin' in front of me if I don't fuck it up, so why risk it all doing something possibly dangerous, like mountain climbing, deep-sea diving, or attempting to cross the street in downtown Chicago."
(The SF-aspect of the stories usually involves activities that we would think of as typical being perceived, in the brave new world, as "something possibly dangerous".)
The class is generally populated by students from a wide range of backgrounds and interests-liberal arts and science types. While we use C++, the language isn't really the issue.
You'd better believe it's the issue. Language determines design is a Bell Labs aphorism. Another way of saying the same thing is that the (human) language in which you think and speak determines what you can think and speak about.
While I happen to be a
big fan of C++, I will go on record as saying that it's not a good language to use for beginner programmers. (Neither is Java.) I'd say either Python, or Pascal (you know, that language whose major design goal was to teach introductory programming).
At least, if you are going to use C++, use a good text like Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo. Otherwise you'll spend too much time teaching "how to use C++" and not enough time teaching "how to write a good program."
Second:
Rather, the goal is to introduce basic programming ideas like loops, logic, modular programming etc. What are some of your favorite programming assignments that would be appropriate for students at this level?
My favorite prof in the intro sequence gave us a module that drew playing cards on the screen. (All ASCII-based with ANSI escape sequences for colors, no annoying graphics programming.) We had to write the logic to play Solitaire.
While there are a lot of problems that CS majors would find cool to solve, those aren't necessarily the same ones that will grab the interest of people "from a wide range of backgrounds," as you say your audience is.
Actually, the first time I typed in the subject line, I accidentally wrote "Battle Ping," which sounds like one of those competition hacking events at network security conferences.
Of the top of my head, and with the help of my bookmarks:
Bell Labs had a "libsafe" that provided versions of malloc et al: http://www.lucent.com/press/0400/000420.bla.html
Unfortunately the link given in that press release no longer works.
A quick scan through sorceforge and other open source project sites yields about 1.87E3 projects to replace Checker and StackGuard with kew1 Linux-only alternatives. (Why? Who knows.)
Most of these projects seem not to have gotten any further than the project web page saying how 'leet they were going to be.
One of the side branches in the GCC repository was the bounded pointers project, which was way cool. It was mostly working, too, until the author had to go work on something else.
I personally had high hopes for the GCC BP project. If you feel like doing something that will earn you the admiration of millions, finish that code up.:-)
Say there's a GPL'd package called Foo. You take it, modify it in-house, and compile it to form a modified binary that we'll call Foo2.
If you only use Foo2 in-house, then you need not release the changes. No problem.
Now, let's say you provide the Foo2 binary to someone else outside your organization. (Free of charge, for money, for chocolate, whatever.) Now you must also provide your modifications. It doesn't need to be public, but whoever gets the Foo2 binary must also be able to get the changes to turn Foo into Foo2.
Slashdot Mirror
Some links from my article that slashdot rejected some hours ago: the University of Texas announcement has a list of his awards and discoveries. (He taught at UT.) A brief paper (in PDF, it's scanned from a handwritten paper for CACM if I recall) shows his brilliant, clear, and concise methods of thought and writing.
If you ever used an application that made use of shortest-path searching -- say, any real-time strategy game -- then you owe this man a debt of gratitude.
Those of us who have to shoot up insulin twice a day already due to broken genes (thanks mom and dad for the useless pancreas) have nothing to lose! My fridge is stocked with nothing but colas -- both diet and regular -- and water for the morning coffee. I don't remember the last time I drank juice. Milk? Don't waste my time; come back when it's carbonated and can give me brain damage.
Hardly obscure. Larry Niven's "Known Space" future history is one of the most well-known story universes in SF -- and assuming you've at least heard of it is an understandable assumption for a geek site to make.
Ringworld won Nebula and Hugo awards when it was published. Ten years later the massive continuing flow of fan letters and mathematical papers forced Niven to write a sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, also very good. He followed it up some 12-16 years later by publishing The Ringworld Throne which was mostly crap.
The "Ringworld" is a gigantic artifical ring of solid matter constructed around a star, one million miles wide, six hundred million miles long, and several hundred feet thick. The inner surface is habitable (and, of course, fucking gigantic in surface area).
You want www.realweasel.com, and the PC Weasel 2000.
It's open source, it's got a picture of a weasel with an axe standing next to headless (bleeding) Linux Tux and BSD Beastie, and it's from a company called Middle Digital Incorporated. You have to support that if you're a true geek.
Not a lot more, but that's where multitasking comes in.
Are you sure? I've had no problems scratching my CDs...
Er, wait, we're talking about two different things. Never mind. :-)
Damn, Bruce, how do you walk with balls that big?
It's simple. Say you're starting with a set of stable CDs. So:
And that's it. I started with a set of potato CDs, and there has never been a trace of XFree86 3.x on my system. Version 4.whatever runs fine, the automatic XF86Config-4 configuration did a fairly decent job, and I'm upgrading with the greatest of ease. :-)
While I have a lot of respect for Feynman, I don't believe he ever designed and built a pipe organ in his own home.
As for the pipe organ, somewhere there's a photo of Knuth sitting at home in front of it. It's not a small instrument. :-)
I posted an answer, titled "Gloria Foster, RIP," almost immediately after you posted your question. It got modded down. Twice. WTF?
Passed away last year, at the age of 64.
She had already filmed her scenes for Matrix II, I believe. Dunno what they're doing for Matrix III.
So... the artists can't ever play the same sequence of music more than two or three times before it gets flagged as bogus?
That check would instantly trigger on pretty much every soft-pop-dance track that I currently spend most of my radio-listening time trying to avoid. Cool. :-)
How much would you pay to be able to instantly kill a spammer, anywhere in the world?
How much if you could subject them to torture first?
How much if you could force the other spammers to watch?
A colleague and I agreed that if we were to take money out of our 401(k)'s to hire a contract killer for sapmmers, that the withdrawal should be tax-deductable. Possibly even listed as a charitable donation.
Will fix that for you.
There were scenes in FOTR, while at Isengard, where Jackson went out of his way (well, more accurately, the movie plot went out of its way) to show us massive trees getting cut down, with the local foreman saying things like, "These trees have deep roots."
Why do we care about the trees, when they play no obvious part in the growing of Saruman's army? We don't care, yet.
I believe it was Anton Chekov, the famous Russian playwright, who said that if you show a character loading the gun in the first act, you must fire it in the third. If you show a gun firing in the third act, you must show it being loaded in the first. And Peter Jackson knows this.
We've seen the loading of the gun. Be patient. :-)
In a mouse-based file manager, you don't move thousands of files one at a time. You highlight all the thousands, and move the group. Why should handwaving be any different?
Similarly, I would expect to point my finger three times: "Starting with this file *jab*, and ending with that file *jab*, move them all over to there *negligent evil overlord wave*."
...l1b3rty, 3qual1ty, and frat3rn1ty!
One of the "killer B's" (the name given to Bear, Brin, and Benford) has just published an SF novel in which we can make expendable bodies. I plan to drive to the bookstore and purchase it as soon as I get the car fixed.
Gah. What I typed was "I've only got <some short period of time> to live," but I typed the angle characters directly instead of < so they got interpreted as an HTML tag and dropped.
A number of Larry Niven's stories in his future history "Known Space" cycle touch on this point, but arrived at a reverse conclusion in some cases: because people lived longer, they took fewer chances.
Even Hollywood will give you examples of this, although usually they look at it from the other end: "I've only got to live, so I'll go do something heroic which will probably result in my death, but big friggin' deal because I'm about to die."
The extension of that line of thought predicted by many SF authors is, "I've got three centuries of good livin' in front of me if I don't fuck it up, so why risk it all doing something possibly dangerous, like mountain climbing, deep-sea diving, or attempting to cross the street in downtown Chicago."
(The SF-aspect of the stories usually involves activities that we would think of as typical being perceived, in the brave new world, as "something possibly dangerous".)
That is the funniest thing I have read all day. :-)
First:
You'd better believe it's the issue. Language determines design is a Bell Labs aphorism. Another way of saying the same thing is that the (human) language in which you think and speak determines what you can think and speak about.
While I happen to be a big fan of C++, I will go on record as saying that it's not a good language to use for beginner programmers. (Neither is Java.) I'd say either Python, or Pascal (you know, that language whose major design goal was to teach introductory programming).
At least, if you are going to use C++, use a good text like Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo. Otherwise you'll spend too much time teaching "how to use C++" and not enough time teaching "how to write a good program."
Second:
My favorite prof in the intro sequence gave us a module that drew playing cards on the screen. (All ASCII-based with ANSI escape sequences for colors, no annoying graphics programming.) We had to write the logic to play Solitaire.
While there are a lot of problems that CS majors would find cool to solve, those aren't necessarily the same ones that will grab the interest of people "from a wide range of backgrounds," as you say your audience is.
...I want a Brockian Ultra Cricket game.
Actually, the first time I typed in the subject line, I accidentally wrote "Battle Ping," which sounds like one of those competition hacking events at network security conferences.
Of the top of my head, and with the help of my bookmarks:
I personally had high hopes for the GCC BP project. If you feel like doing something that will earn you the admiration of millions, finish that code up. :-)
It's not that hard, really:
Say there's a GPL'd package called Foo. You take it, modify it in-house, and compile it to form a modified binary that we'll call Foo2.
If you only use Foo2 in-house, then you need not release the changes. No problem.
Now, let's say you provide the Foo2 binary to someone else outside your organization. (Free of charge, for money, for chocolate, whatever.) Now you must also provide your modifications. It doesn't need to be public, but whoever gets the Foo2 binary must also be able to get the changes to turn Foo into Foo2.