> In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
No, no! Looks like the poster hasn't understood Zipf's law to begin with. The law states that the number of occurences of a word (and not its rank) is roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency squared.
A rank of r means that the word is the r-th most frequent word. Zipf's law then leads to the conclusion that for large ranks, the number of occurences of a word is roughly proportional to the inverse of its rank. For example, the 100-th most frequent word occurs 10 times more than the 1000-th most frequent word. This is not at all a trivial observation if you think carefully about the difference between the rank of a word and the number of its occurences.
So to truly understand Zipf's law, first you have to clearly grok the difference between the number of words which occur a given number of times, the number of times that a word occurs, and the rank of a word which is the number of other words that occur lesser times than this word.
http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/ hs links to articles for a clearer understanding of the law.
>> [HD-DVD] is mostly an excuse to introduce a new CSS system since the old one is cracked..
> I disagree. The big CE companies are all vying for marketshare in the forthcoming HDTV space.
From the article, it looks like e HD here stands for High Density, not High Definition.
Though, of course, a higher disk density allows for higher definition video formats to be stored. But I have seen HD-DVD as meaning High Definition DVD in other articles. So I am not sure which is the right expansion of HD.
> Honestly, the whole geek image has been one of stereotype since the beginning. Not everyone who uses computers and goes online frequently has thick glasses and no girlfriend, sitting around playing EverQuest all day.
Do you realize that you just replaced one stereotype with another. Not everyone wearing thick glasses and/or with no girlfriend is a geek.
> > The most important thing that IPv6 does is quadruple the size of the Internet address field from 32 bits to 128 bits.
> Quadruple? 2^32 * 2 != 2^128. In fact, there is a very distinct difference. I would hope a writer for the M.I.T. Tech Review would know the difference.
Sheesh. He is talking about quadrupling (4 times) size of the address, not address space. And you didn't even make your wrong argument correctly. You should have said 2^32 * 4 != 2^128 which is the right wrong argument.
> To wit, what do Bill Gates and Paul Allen have to do with the history of the Internet
For that matter, what does Linus have to do with the history of the Internet? The Internet helped to make Linus legendary, not the other way round. The same applies to Bill Gates.
No, no, no, brother, Om was not uttered by Buddha. It basically originated in the Vedas/Upanishads in an attempt to explain life, the universe and.. everything. Yes, Om = 42.
Let me tell you all about it, as someone born in India in a Hindu Brahmin household to a Sanskrit-teaching Veda-quoting father.
In India, whenever we utter a Vedic hymn, it must be prefixed with the syllable of assent, namely "Om." In fact, the entire Vedic recitation begins by saying "Om, let us hear." All this sounds very cool in Sanskrit, so I suggest you learn the language first. Meanwhile I will try best to express the concepts in English.
You see, OM is the eternal; OM is this entire universe. OM is the syllable of assent. OM is the sound that projected the universe. During cosmic dissolution the universe merges in OM. OM has no beginning. OM has no end. OM was before time was created. OM is beyond time, space and causation. OM is beyond past, present, and future. OM is beyond Saleva (brilliance), Rajas (passion) and Tames (darkness). OM is beyond Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver) and Shiva (destroyer). OM is Supreme above the supreme (Paratpara). In living beings, OM expresses prana or the life force. Hence it is called Pranava.
For more of such insane ramblings, read from the book called Mandulya Upanishad which is some 3000 yrs old. I am not kidding. THREE THOUSAND friggin' years old. That's way before even Bob Dole was born.
It is amazing how most of the American tech press is either ignorant of this or does not want to acknowledge it. Maybe it has something to with Khosla being an Indian immigrant and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. I mean, placing Khosla alongside superhuman prophetic 'native' American geniuses like Bill Joy and Scott McNeally? C'mon, the audacity! It is almost subconscious, the way immigrant contributions to Silicon Valley are automatically forgotten. And weeded out of its historical accounts so thoroughly that anyone like your truly who complains about this is considered insane and will probably be modded down to Flamebait -1. Heck, I don't care. Let the truth be known.
The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982 in Khosla's mind when he was a Stanford Business School grad student. The idea was to team up with Andy Bechtolscheim who at the time was licensing his workstation design idea to companies in Silicon Valley. Khosla wanted Bechtolsheim to join in a partnership with him to build the workstations for sale. Khosla already had experience starting a company called Daisy Systems which went on to become one of the most successful IPOs of 1984. Anyways, he recruited Scott McNeally to help in the business side of things. Now they had two business people and a hardware expert. All they needed was a software expert to cover all facets of the product. And thats when they roped in Bill Joy, who was just 27 like the other 3, but unlike them was already nationally famous in the CS community.
Now after reading this story, tell me if the idea of Sun was not born in Khosla's mind instead of Bechtolscheim's or McNeally's or Joy's.
The notion of time and space dimensions as real number lines (or rays to be more accurate) from 0 to infinity is just a model that has served science well so far to explain most phenomena. Remember that real numbers = rational numbers + irrational numbers where the latter are expressible as limits of infinite progressions of sets constructed from rational numbers (Dedekind's theory of real numbers.)
It is entirely possible that a theory that excludes irrational numbers and considers time or space dimensions as derived in some fashion only from rational numbers may be able to resolve the singularity and divergence problems that crop up in physics theories.
Ah, like most Westerners, you seem to confuse meditation and yoga as originiating in Buddhism. Far from the truth. Buddhism is only about 2600 years old (Buddha was born as a Hindu prince in 623 B.C. in a town called Kapilavatsu on the modern Indo-Nepal border.)
On the other hand, the practice of Yogic poses and meditation in India is * real ancient". More than 3000 yrs old. In fact, Yoga is mentioned in the RigVeda, the oldest known Hindu text. RigVeda is currently estimated by historians as at least 3300 years old.
However, the first authoritative treatise on Yoga was written by the Indian sage, Sri Patanjali Maharishi about 2000 years ago. Yoga derives from 'yuj', a Sanskrit word meaning 'to unite.' Yoga was therefore used to connote union of one's consciousness with a presumed universal consciousness. Yoga is just one of the 6 main Indian philosophical systems or Darshanas :
( Darshana literally means 'sight' or 'revelation' in different contexts in Sanskrit, Hindi, and many other Indian languages.)
1. Yoga - union of individual consciousness with universal consciousness
2. Vedanta - knowledge of self, universe and God.
3. Sankhya - philosophical classification of the universe
4. Vaishesika - analysis and characterization of the universe
5. Nyaya - logic
6. Purva-Mimamsa - laws of formal religion
" Does anyone know if he routinely let people know what type of pen he was using when he wrote that particular document? Here's one of the ones I found. "
I read Dijkstra's homework problem, EWD1248, that you linked to above, about coloring of finite number of grid points, and I immediately found a very simple proof using mathematical induction on the number of grid points. (Induction is my favorite proof technique for problem involving integers.)
Only later did I read the rest of EWD1248 and read the unnecessarily convoluted proof that Dijkstra had come up with! On the other hand, he refers to the original argument in EWD996 which I haven't read yet.. so hopefully he has pointed out the simple induction proof there.
> I suspect this is more a case of extremely poor English than misleading marketing. I'm amazed that it's a US-based company -- most Taiwanese companies have better English on their sites
As an Indian (residing in the US currently), I can recognize the phrasing style and the grammar mistakes on the site to be distinctively Indian. It is English with a moderately expressive vocabulary, but the words are arranged in the manner that they would be in Hindi or Tamil, hehe.
Besides, the new CEO is Soma Sundaram, an obviously Indian name, specifically a Tamilian. And they plan to sell the PCs in India. So I am guessing that Linare was started by Indians residing in the US.
of a guy spamming slashdot with his "published" spam-blocking paper.
If publishing papers were as easy as putting them up on your webpage, I would have gotten my PhD like umm a decade ago.
Ok, back to writing thesis and 'em darn journal papers.
>> "...and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it..."
> I thought Oprah's book club was?
It's a close contest.
Be a leader and not a follower, at your age.
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Now that you are older with a strong background and the wisdom and high-level perspective of some tech area or another, you must be bold and try to create ideas yourself instead of spending all the time learning other people's ideas as you used to in your youth.
Exploit the wisdom and wide and/or deep perspectives of a field that only get better with age. Youngsters simply cannot compete with you in this ability. Well, except for some geniuses maybe.
So become a leader and stop being a follower in your field. Don't spend all your time passively following the technology developments. Instead actively develop new ideas yourself. Even if this does not help you in your day job or lead you to fame, you will still have the deep satisfaction that comes with creative activity. And if some technology idea or invention is *your* baby, then you will have the natural passion and enthusiasm to follow it up and popuralize it in conferences and standards committees and what not. You will actually enjoy it instead of feeling like its hard work done in a thankless job or whatever.
You know you have the potential to do this. You simply have to actualize it.
Especially in quantum computing where you will be left in the dust if you fart around worrying about open source too long.
Why, is there a frenzied rat race going on in quantum computing to solve some nice toy problem?
Far as I know, decent quantum computers are many decades and at least a few einsteins away. The speed of programming to control cute toy experiments will hardly determine the speed of progress of quantum computing as a field.
You can't achieve real breakthroughs in quantum computing by throwing a hundred code monkeys at it.
The president made the speech at IIIT, not IIT. And by the way, there are six different IITs situated at 6 different cities in India and each of them functions independently. In fact, the 6 IITs are always competing with each other in overall rankings and in different fields.
For example, IIT-Bombay (now named IIT-Mumbai) greatly increased in overall rankings after yours truly graduated from it.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
by Steven Levy. The mother of all hacker books. Hacking used to mean 'clever means of improving electronic and computer systems'. At what point did it get perverted to mean unauthorized access to computer systems? Sigh.
The books begins at MIT in the late 50s, with hacking at the model railroad club, and ends at MIT in the 80s with the Richard Stallman about the freedom to hack software. I found the beginning and the end of the book much more interesting than the stories in the middle set in Stanford and the Valley.
> Canon ink comes in transparent plastic "dumb" cartridges that are completely sucked dry when the driver tells you they're empty...
Wrong. The black ink cartridge on my Canon F30 was supposed to have 'emptied' one week ago and I am still printing from it.
This is a crazy monster switch/router for the Internet core! In fact it is in principle an infinitely scalable switch and its architecture supposedly departs radically from that of even the most monstrous inventive switches/routers from Cisco or Juniper. The basic idea behind it was that of Larry Roberts who incidentally invented the Internet. Well, so to speak; he was in charge of the first ARPA contract awarded by director Ivan Sutherland to implement a packet-switched network, back in early 1965.
With Apeiro, you can stack module upon module in an existing 10 Gig router until it becomes a monster multi-Terabit router! All this without any downtime practically and with linear cost increase. Try that with a Cisco core router upgrade, hehe. Also Apeiro claims micro-flow-grained QoS handling capability. If it works well, it may well destroy the conventional religiously applied end-to-end philosophy of keeping the Internet core dumb as possible. Can you imagine the fantastic applications once support for fine-grained QoS comes to the core? HDTV quality video-on-demand, real-time 3D holography.. these would only be the beginning. I wouldnt be surprised if the Internet architecture of 50 years from now radically departs from a blindly applied end-to-end philosophy/religion.
Apeiro's workings are a trade secret of course. But lets hope their claims aren't far fetched. Roberts' company is Caspian Networks and here is a link to their QoS and scalability claims: http://www.caspiannetworks.com/products/benefits/
Why might this be an innovation on the edge? Because Larry Roberts (and his company) were dismissed as far out nutcases by most leading researchers and experts in the Internet community. Lets see who turns out to be right.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing officially or unofficially to do with Caspian Networks.)
I have gotten to love the fine print. Its a game of wits between you and the vendor. They write the rules in a confusing deceptive manner so even a rocket scientist wouldn't get it.. so to speak. But you got to beat them at their game!
After having successfully beat a formidable array of vendors such as Staples, Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Amazon, Sony, Belkin and Khypermedia at their own rebate game, I get actually disappointed when I don't see any fine print and everything is clearly explained and there's no battle of wits, hehe.
Anyways, here's a few tips from a self-proclaimed champion of the rebate game (I applied for 12 rebates till now and gotten every one of them on or before time):
1. Always phone the rebate center once before mailing your rebate in and check and double check with them that the contents of your rebate mail is EXACTLY what they are looking for. 2. The UPC is always needed with any rebate submission. Check and double check before buying if they need the original or just a copy. Same goes for store receipts. 3. The first thing you should do after taking the product out of its box is to cut out the UPC and file it in your rebate folder. If possible, cut out a larger part of the product box that includes both the UPC and the product name. Some rebates asks for the product name cut out too. The larger your UPC cutout, the less the chances of it being lost in the rebate center. 4. If they ask for it, be sure to circle with a felt-pen, the part of your receipt that shows the rebate product, price, purchase date and your name, etc. 5. If your handwriting tends to be illegible, take a little extra time to write slowly and legibly. 6. Make copies of EVERYTHING involved, including even the mailing envelope just prior to posting it. Buy a cheap multifunction printer cum copier for your home.. believe me, nothing could be more useful in efficient rebate submission. 7. Organize all rebate material into folders. I keep 3 separate ones for rebates to be mailed for, those in processing and those already received. 8. Note down your rebate submission date and expected check arrival date on your copy of the store receipt in your folder and in your organizer/palm thingie or whatever. 9. Make sure you don't accidentally tick a box on the form that says you want to be included in some spam mailing list.. unless its a well-known useful list that mails promo codes and coupons, etc.
Sounds like too much effort I know, but once you make it a habit, it's a breeze and takes up very little of your time. The fruits of that lil extra effort will be boxes full of FAR (Free-after-Rebate) items and stuff that you actually got paid for buying from the store..after rebates plus coupons, hehe.
as is commonly believed by those familiar with his mental prowess. Who else could
1. get an undergrad degree in chemical engg with straight As in all subjects AND a PhD in math for axiomatizing set theory, all by the age of 22,
2. write the axiomatic mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics a year later,
3. write 32 brilliant math papers over the next two years while starting a whole field of game theory which alone should merit a Nobel Prize for economics
4. be a key figure in the Los Alamos project for the atomic bomb, contributing to the idea of mathematical modeling and the implosion bomb,
5. start an entire subfield of pure math called von Neumann algebras,
6. and uh.. last but not the least, lay down the logical foundations for computing machines by borrowing ideas from Turing,
7. and oh.. formulate a theory and architecture of self-replicating machines,
8. and oh..pioneer an idea of nuclear deterrence at RAND.
Slashdot Mirror
> In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
No, no! Looks like the poster hasn't understood Zipf's law to begin with. The law states that the number of occurences of a word (and not its rank) is roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency squared.
A rank of r means that the word is the r-th most frequent word. Zipf's law then leads to the conclusion that for large ranks, the number of occurences of a word is roughly proportional to the inverse of its rank. For example, the 100-th most frequent word occurs 10 times more than the 1000-th most frequent word. This is not at all a trivial observation if you think carefully about the difference between the rank of a word and the number of its occurences.
So to truly understand Zipf's law, first you have to clearly grok the difference between the number of words which occur a given number of times, the number of times that a word occurs, and the rank of a word which is the number of other words that occur lesser times than this word. http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/ hs links to articles for a clearer understanding of the law.
> Exactly, repeat after me "Life is too short to eat crap".
Life will be too short if you eat crap.
In Bill Gates mansion there is a sign that says "Use of the words 'Micro' and 'Soft' are strictly prohibited while in the bedroom."
>> [HD-DVD] is mostly an excuse to introduce a new CSS system since the old one is cracked..
> I disagree. The big CE companies are all vying for marketshare in the forthcoming HDTV space.
From the article, it looks like e HD here stands for High Density, not High Definition.
Though, of course, a higher disk density allows for higher definition video formats to be stored. But I have seen HD-DVD as meaning High Definition DVD in other articles. So I am not sure which is the right expansion of HD.
> Honestly, the whole geek image has been one of stereotype since the beginning. Not everyone who uses computers and goes online frequently has thick glasses and no girlfriend, sitting around playing EverQuest all day.
Do you realize that you just replaced one stereotype with another. Not everyone wearing thick glasses and/or with no girlfriend is a geek.
> > The most important thing that IPv6 does is quadruple the size of the Internet address field from 32 bits to 128 bits.
> Quadruple? 2^32 * 2 != 2^128. In fact, there is a very distinct difference. I would hope a writer for the M.I.T. Tech Review would know the difference.
Sheesh. He is talking about quadrupling (4 times) size of the address, not address space. And you didn't even make your wrong argument correctly. You should have said 2^32 * 4 != 2^128 which is the right wrong argument.
> To wit, what do Bill Gates and Paul Allen have to do with the history of the Internet
For that matter, what does Linus have to do with the history of the Internet? The Internet helped to make Linus legendary, not the other way round. The same applies to Bill Gates.
No, no, no, brother, Om was not uttered by Buddha. It basically originated in the Vedas/Upanishads in an attempt to explain life, the universe and .. everything. Yes, Om = 42.
Let me tell you all about it, as someone born in India in a Hindu Brahmin household to a Sanskrit-teaching Veda-quoting father.
In India, whenever we utter a Vedic hymn, it must be prefixed with the syllable of assent, namely "Om." In fact, the entire Vedic recitation begins by saying "Om, let us hear." All this sounds very cool in Sanskrit, so I suggest you learn the language first. Meanwhile I will try best to express the concepts in English.
You see, OM is the eternal; OM is this entire universe. OM is the syllable of assent. OM is the sound that projected the universe. During cosmic dissolution the universe merges in OM. OM has no beginning. OM has no end. OM was before time was created. OM is beyond time, space and causation. OM is beyond past, present, and future. OM is beyond Saleva (brilliance), Rajas (passion) and Tames (darkness). OM is beyond Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver) and Shiva (destroyer). OM is Supreme above the supreme (Paratpara).
In living beings, OM expresses prana or the life force. Hence it is called Pranava.
For more of such insane ramblings, read from the book called Mandulya Upanishad which is some 3000 yrs old. I am not kidding. THREE THOUSAND friggin' years old. That's way before even Bob Dole was born.
It is amazing how most of the American tech press is either ignorant of this or does not want to acknowledge it. Maybe it has something to with Khosla being an Indian immigrant and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. I mean, placing Khosla alongside superhuman prophetic 'native' American geniuses like Bill Joy and Scott McNeally? C'mon, the audacity! It is almost subconscious, the way immigrant contributions to Silicon Valley are automatically forgotten. And weeded out of its historical accounts so thoroughly that anyone like your truly who complains about this is considered insane and will probably be modded down to Flamebait -1. Heck, I don't care. Let the truth be known.
The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982 in Khosla's mind when he was a Stanford Business School grad student. The idea was to team up with Andy Bechtolscheim who at the time was licensing his workstation design idea to companies in Silicon Valley.
Khosla wanted Bechtolsheim to join in a partnership with him to build the workstations for sale. Khosla already had experience starting a company called Daisy Systems which went on to become one of the most successful IPOs of 1984. Anyways, he recruited Scott McNeally to help in the business side of things. Now they had two business people and a hardware expert. All they needed was a software expert to cover all facets of the product. And thats when they roped in Bill Joy, who was just 27 like the other 3, but unlike them was already nationally famous in the CS community.
Now after reading this story, tell me if the idea of Sun was not born in Khosla's mind instead of Bechtolscheim's or McNeally's or Joy's.
They are logical constructs of our consciousness.
The notion of time and space dimensions as real number lines (or rays to be more accurate) from 0 to infinity is just a model that has served science well so far to explain most phenomena. Remember that real numbers = rational numbers + irrational numbers where the latter are expressible as limits of infinite progressions of sets constructed from rational numbers (Dedekind's theory of real numbers.)
It is entirely possible that a theory that excludes irrational numbers and considers time or space dimensions as derived in some fashion only from rational numbers may be able to resolve the singularity and divergence problems that crop up in physics theories.
Ah, like most Westerners, you seem to confuse meditation and yoga as originiating in Buddhism. Far from the truth. Buddhism is only about 2600 years old (Buddha was born as a Hindu prince in 623 B.C. in a town called Kapilavatsu on the modern Indo-Nepal border.)
On the other hand, the practice of Yogic poses and meditation in India is * real ancient". More than 3000 yrs old. In fact, Yoga is mentioned in the RigVeda, the oldest known Hindu text. RigVeda is currently estimated by historians as at least 3300 years old. However, the first authoritative treatise on Yoga was written by the Indian sage, Sri Patanjali Maharishi about 2000 years ago. Yoga derives from 'yuj', a Sanskrit word meaning 'to unite.' Yoga was therefore used to connote union of one's consciousness with a presumed universal consciousness. Yoga is just one of the 6 main Indian philosophical systems or Darshanas : ( Darshana literally means 'sight' or 'revelation' in different contexts in Sanskrit, Hindi, and many other Indian languages.)
1. Yoga - union of individual consciousness with universal consciousness
2. Vedanta - knowledge of self, universe and God.
3. Sankhya - philosophical classification of the universe
4. Vaishesika - analysis and characterization of the universe
5. Nyaya - logic
6. Purva-Mimamsa - laws of formal religion
" Does anyone know if he routinely let people know what type of pen he was using when he wrote that particular document? Here's one of the ones I found. "
I read Dijkstra's homework problem, EWD1248, that you linked to above, about coloring of finite number of grid points, and I immediately found a very simple proof using mathematical induction on the number of grid points. (Induction is my favorite proof technique for problem involving integers.)
Only later did I read the rest of EWD1248 and read the unnecessarily convoluted proof that Dijkstra had come up with!
On the other hand, he refers to the original argument in EWD996 which I haven't read yet.. so hopefully he has pointed out the simple induction proof there.
> I suspect this is more a case of extremely poor English than misleading marketing. I'm amazed that it's a US-based company -- most Taiwanese companies have better English on their sites
As an Indian (residing in the US currently), I can recognize the phrasing style and the grammar mistakes on the site to be distinctively Indian. It is English with a moderately expressive vocabulary, but the words are arranged in the manner that they would be in Hindi or Tamil, hehe.
Besides, the new CEO is Soma Sundaram, an obviously Indian name, specifically a Tamilian. And they plan to sell the PCs in India. So I am guessing that Linare was started by Indians residing in the US.
of a guy spamming slashdot with his "published" spam-blocking paper.
If publishing papers were as easy as putting them up on your webpage, I would have gotten my PhD like umm a decade ago.
Ok, back to writing thesis and 'em darn journal papers.
>> "...and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it..."
> I thought Oprah's book club was?
It's a close contest.
Now that you are older with a strong background and the wisdom and high-level perspective of some tech area or another, you must be bold and try to create ideas yourself instead of spending all the time learning other people's ideas as you used to in your youth.
Exploit the wisdom and wide and/or deep perspectives of a field that only get better with age. Youngsters simply cannot compete with you in this ability. Well, except for some geniuses maybe.
So become a leader and stop being a follower in your field. Don't spend all your time passively following the technology developments. Instead actively develop new ideas yourself. Even if this does not help you in your day job or lead you to fame, you will still have the deep satisfaction that comes with creative activity. And if some technology idea or invention is *your* baby, then you will have the natural passion and enthusiasm to follow it up and popuralize it in conferences and standards committees and what not. You will actually enjoy it instead of feeling like its hard work done in a thankless job or whatever.
You know you have the potential to do this. You simply have to actualize it.
that a gun-wielding egomaniac should be quoting Gandhi. LOL.
Especially in quantum computing where you will be left in the dust if you fart around worrying about open source too long.
Why, is there a frenzied rat race going on in quantum computing to solve some nice toy problem?
Far as I know, decent quantum computers are many decades and at least a few einsteins away. The speed of programming to control cute toy experiments will hardly determine the speed of progress of quantum computing as a field.
You can't achieve real breakthroughs in quantum computing by throwing a hundred code monkeys at it.
Hehe. You got it.
The president made the speech at IIIT, not IIT. And by the way, there are six different IITs situated at 6 different cities in India and each of them functions independently. In fact, the 6 IITs are always competing with each other in overall rankings and in different fields.
For example, IIT-Bombay (now named IIT-Mumbai) greatly increased in overall rankings after yours truly graduated from it.
by Steven Levy. The mother of all hacker books. Hacking used to mean 'clever means of improving electronic and computer systems'. At what point did it get perverted to mean unauthorized access to computer systems? Sigh.
The books begins at MIT in the late 50s, with hacking at the model railroad club, and ends at MIT in the 80s with the Richard Stallman about the freedom to hack software. I found the beginning and the end of the book much more interesting than the stories in the middle set in Stanford and the Valley.
> Canon ink comes in transparent plastic "dumb" cartridges that are completely sucked dry when the driver tells you they're empty...
Wrong. The black ink cartridge on my Canon F30 was supposed to have 'emptied' one week ago and I am still printing from it.
This is a crazy monster switch/router for the Internet core! In fact it is in principle an infinitely scalable switch and its architecture supposedly departs radically from that of even the most monstrous inventive switches/routers from Cisco or Juniper. The basic idea behind it was that of Larry Roberts who incidentally invented the Internet. Well, so to speak; he was in charge of the first ARPA contract awarded by director Ivan Sutherland to implement a packet-switched network, back in early 1965.
With Apeiro, you can stack module upon module in an existing 10 Gig router until it becomes a monster multi-Terabit router! All this without any downtime practically and with linear cost increase. Try that with a Cisco core router upgrade, hehe. Also Apeiro claims micro-flow-grained QoS handling capability. If it works well, it may well destroy the conventional religiously applied end-to-end philosophy of keeping the Internet core dumb as possible. Can you imagine the fantastic applications once support for fine-grained QoS comes to the core? HDTV quality video-on-demand, real-time 3D holography.. these would only be the beginning. I wouldnt be surprised if the Internet architecture of 50 years from now radically departs from a blindly applied end-to-end philosophy/religion.
Apeiro's workings are a trade secret of course. But lets hope their claims aren't far fetched.
Roberts' company is Caspian Networks and here is a link to their QoS and scalability claims: http://www.caspiannetworks.com/products/benefits/
Why might this be an innovation on the edge? Because Larry Roberts (and his company) were dismissed as far out nutcases by most leading researchers and experts in the Internet community. Lets see who turns out to be right.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing officially or unofficially to do with Caspian Networks.)
I have gotten to love the fine print. Its a game of wits between you and the vendor. They write the rules in a confusing deceptive manner so even a rocket scientist wouldn't get it.. so to speak. But you got to beat them at their game!
After having successfully beat a formidable array of vendors such as Staples, Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Amazon, Sony, Belkin and Khypermedia at their own rebate game, I get actually disappointed when I don't see any fine print and everything is clearly explained and there's no battle of wits, hehe.
Anyways, here's a few tips from a self-proclaimed champion of the rebate game (I applied for 12 rebates till now and gotten every one of them on or before time):
1. Always phone the rebate center once before mailing your rebate in and check and double check with them that the contents of your rebate mail is EXACTLY what they are looking for.
2. The UPC is always needed with any rebate submission. Check and double check before buying if they need the original or just a copy. Same goes for store receipts.
3. The first thing you should do after taking the product out of its box is to cut out the UPC and file it in your rebate folder. If possible, cut out a larger part of the product box that includes both the UPC and the product name. Some rebates asks for the product name cut out too. The larger your UPC cutout, the less the chances of it being lost in the rebate center.
4. If they ask for it, be sure to circle with a felt-pen, the part of your receipt that shows the rebate product, price, purchase date and your name, etc.
5. If your handwriting tends to be illegible, take a little extra time to write slowly and legibly.
6. Make copies of EVERYTHING involved, including even the mailing envelope just prior to posting it. Buy a cheap multifunction printer cum copier for your home.. believe me, nothing could be more useful in efficient rebate submission.
7. Organize all rebate material into folders. I keep 3 separate ones for rebates to be mailed for, those in processing and those already received.
8. Note down your rebate submission date and expected check arrival date on your copy of the store receipt in your folder and in your organizer/palm thingie or whatever.
9. Make sure you don't accidentally tick a box on the form that says you want to be included in some spam mailing list.. unless its a well-known useful list that mails promo codes and coupons, etc.
Sounds like too much effort I know, but once you make it a habit, it's a breeze and takes up very little of your time. The fruits of that lil extra effort will be boxes full of FAR (Free-after-Rebate) items and stuff that you actually got paid for buying from the store..after rebates plus coupons, hehe.
as is commonly believed by those familiar with his mental prowess. Who else could
1. get an undergrad degree in chemical engg with straight As in all subjects AND a PhD in math for axiomatizing set theory, all by the age of 22,
2. write the axiomatic mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics a year later,
3. write 32 brilliant math papers over the next two years while starting a whole field of game theory which alone should merit a Nobel Prize for economics
4. be a key figure in the Los Alamos project for the atomic bomb, contributing to the idea of mathematical modeling and the implosion bomb,
5. start an entire subfield of pure math called von Neumann algebras,
6. and uh.. last but not the least, lay down the logical foundations for computing machines by borrowing ideas from Turing,
7. and oh.. formulate a theory and architecture of self-replicating machines,
8. and oh..pioneer an idea of nuclear deterrence at RAND.