Another way to look at is: MS has 43,000 employees worldwide. Any group of 43,000 people could collectively contribute up to a billion dollars combined in a year.
So, viewing MS as a "corpus" equivalent to an individual suggests a huge inequity. Viewing it as a group of individuals yields a different picture.
They probably figured that it fell too far on the techie side of the "cosmic message," where they were looking for the human interest side.
For me, though, that circle just blew my mind even more.
The funny thing is, that circle is there! (along with mpeg4 renditions of every movie ever made, plus a disturbing one of Genghis Khan and Janet Reno making out)
We'll just never calculate enough digits of pi to reach any of it.
Sir Ernest is actually a distant uncle of mine. Instead of the usual transcriptions and whatnot, he convinced Queen Victoria to record his knighting solely using his Numerical Optico-Magnetron. This 3 tonne mechanism transferred images onto a decorative ribbon coated in ferrous suspension.
Because Sir Ernest died soon thereafter (while tearing the warning label from a new mattress), he was unable to invent a playback device for the ribbon, and he and his accomplishments languished in the gloom of commoner history.
Luckily, I stumbled upon the ribbon last year up in the attic (quite literally!) and, to my great surprise, found myself driven to spool same into a MiniDV cassette. The resulting images of a Victorian knighting left me at once startled, and somewhat disappointed: Queen Victoria was indeed much homlier than even her most daring caricaturists had suggested.
Nonetheless, this find at least allowed Sir Ernest to be elevated to the ranks of the historically recognized.
This search for patterns is surely the driving force of pi computation.
Maybe a little bit, but if a pattern started after 10 trillion digits, like "1234123412341234...", the search would then begin for the *end* of the pattern. That end *must* exist, by definition of "irrational number", then the pattern search would start again.
'course humans are pattern-seeking machines.
I personally liked the end of Contact, where a bitmap of a circle is found somewhere deep in pi.
Slashdot Mirror
How quaint!
I already have plenty of coasters, though.
I rotated my CDs into coaster duty a while back.
The 3.5" floppies were moved from coaster duty to table-stabilization.
The 5.25" floppies were moved from table stabilization to roof patch.
The audio data cassettes went from roof patch to birdcage lining.
Thus, I was finally able to burn all those guano-soaked punchcards.
Looking ahead, I'm interested in any information on the permeability of MP3's.
These robots reminded me of W.I.S.O.R., a robot built by Honeybee Robotics to repair the ancient steam pipes under New York's streets.
Very interesting to anyone reading this would be a docudrama about the creation of W.I.S.O.R. This is a cross between Pi, 2001, and Junkyard Wars.
Of peripheral, yet substantial interest is Honeybee's RoboTender, a robotic bartender.
Another way to look at is: MS has 43,000 employees worldwide. Any group of 43,000 people could collectively contribute up to a billion dollars combined in a year.
So, viewing MS as a "corpus" equivalent to an individual suggests a huge inequity. Viewing it as a group of individuals yields a different picture.
That said, the whole system's a load 'o bullturd.
I don't seem to recall it having been mentioned.
Sad, but true.
They probably figured that it fell too far on the techie side of the "cosmic message," where they were looking for the human interest side.
For me, though, that circle just blew my mind even more.
The funny thing is, that circle is there! (along with mpeg4 renditions of every movie ever made, plus a disturbing one of Genghis Khan and Janet Reno making out)
We'll just never calculate enough digits of pi to reach any of it.
Sir Ernest is actually a distant uncle of mine. Instead of the usual transcriptions and whatnot, he convinced Queen Victoria to record his knighting solely using his Numerical Optico-Magnetron. This 3 tonne mechanism transferred images onto a decorative ribbon coated in ferrous suspension.
Because Sir Ernest died soon thereafter (while tearing the warning label from a new mattress), he was unable to invent a playback device for the ribbon, and he and his accomplishments languished in the gloom of commoner history.
Luckily, I stumbled upon the ribbon last year up in the attic (quite literally!) and, to my great surprise, found myself driven to spool same into a MiniDV cassette. The resulting images of a Victorian knighting left me at once startled, and somewhat disappointed: Queen Victoria was indeed much homlier than even her most daring caricaturists had suggested.
Nonetheless, this find at least allowed Sir Ernest to be elevated to the ranks of the historically recognized.
Maybe a little bit, but if a pattern started after 10 trillion digits, like "1234123412341234...", the search would then begin for the *end* of the pattern. That end *must* exist, by definition of "irrational number", then the pattern search would start again.
'course humans are pattern-seeking machines.
I personally liked the end of Contact, where a bitmap of a circle is found somewhere deep in pi.
Err, many in Redmond have put it the other way, so entranced was Bill by the program manager that Bob was not killed quietly before launch.
I think that is closer to the actual truth, although either way, Bob approximates a well-intentioned, yet downtrodden stepchild.
[I still can see Spielberg, proudly wearing a Bob cap as he promoted the Dreamworks Interactive alliance with MS]
The much-maligned critter, by the way, was known to the grudging MS developers who shoehorned it into Office 97 as "the f**king clown"...
Hmmm... wouldn't **Bob** be a more appropriate analogy? So entranced was BG by this product, he married its head program manager!
SO, would it be too outlandish to propose that MG sees in longhorn the redemption of her embarassingly disappointing Bob?
We'll know if longhorn's boot screen is a doorknocker.