In 2012, half a million students took the test to vie for a paltry 10,000 seats. Acceptance rate of 1.9%. The acceptance rate has crept UP because they have increased the number of seats by an order of magnitude since my days. In my year the closing rank (last student admitted to a real IIT, not Banares Hindu University which shared the entrance examn) was 1350. The number of applicants in my year was also less, around 100,000.
It starts simple like this, and it could eventually consume all your time.
I was simply drinking coffee in Starbucks. Then someone told me you can actually brew the coffee at home. Start with a simple stove top percolator, he said. Then it became a cheap 10 cup presto coffee maker. Then came the French Press, then the "grinding your own just before brewing", roasting your own bean just before grinding just before brewing, espresso machines, pump based espresso not the wimpy steam pressure espresso,.....
Now I am driving 150 miles each way to slopes of the Smoky Mountains each weekend to tend a patch of coffee shrubs which I am going to harvest, dry, grind and brew. They are saying the next step is to feed the coffee fruits to some weasels and collect the beans from its other end, then to dry, grind and brew. No one told me this is where I am going to end up. So watch out.
There will be some N number of registered users. When a proposal comes through a sub set of users who have earned "points" will give them on the proposals. And the creators of the petition that gets lots of "points" will get points to bestow up on the next set of proposals. A well known nerdy website follows such a system.
We can improve it even more by allowing the points to be positive or negative, and classifying these into categories, like "informative" "insightful" or "flame" or "troll".
Are they asserting copyright? That is very strange. There are things called "design patent". Essentially it patents a "form" of an object. Like a particular floral pattern on a door knob or something. It does not prevent others from making door knobs. Just gives the rights holder the right to prevent others from making an exact replica or something very close. Very heavily used in garment industry, and chinaware cutlery side of things. I am surprised the comics is going after copyright claims.
So many people just shrug their shoulders and show no interest at all in any of these outrageous patients. Sort of, "only raving lunatic nerds who read slashdot bother about it. The situation can't be that bad". When they suddenly face the prospect of being slapped with a law-suite they might sit up, take notice and stir up a storm. Like the fine print in the Instagram was not new or anything. Probably all those YouTube videos too have similar clauses. But nobody bothered. But suddenly it became a media frenzy.
Let us be very helpful to this troll and send him names and addresses of all the congresscritters and judges who might have been in violation of the claimed patent. Some how get him to include the names of these figures whose power/IQ ratio approaches infinity. Then may be some reform might happen.
Significant by its absence: mpg, avi. Almost all my home videos are in mpg and my local server dishes them out. I am not reencoding that again. Ever. iMac nickeled and dimed me for 20$ to get QuickTime to play mpg, after I pluncked down 1300$ for their machine. And I have not forgiven Steve for that yet.
I don't know if netflix, hulu and channellive.tv use a format that is compatible.
Last time I looked at Chromebook, it was reported that most video formats are not supported. Only web streaming H264 formats are supported. And all the older ones, mpg or even avi is not supported. So I backed off. It has everything else I was looking for: A cheap wi-fi enabled full keyboard full browser device to sit next to the TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse next to the couch.
Here is an almanac: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101102661/PAMBU-PANCHANGAM-2012-13
This one is compiled by Anna Aiyengar, son of Appanai Aiyengar of Kanjanur. They are the official astronomers for the Maharajah of Thanjavur, Shivaji Raja Bhonsle and have the rights to publish this almanac. But this is not the almanac my family uses. Ours is compiled for the Maharaja of Ramnad. Ours predicts, among other things, the amount of rain. This one does not. But it has whole slew of predictions, like, "Since the new moon day of the month of Thai happens on a Saturday, there will be bad things happening to the country".
The real new years day happens on April 14th on the day variously called Ugathi, or Puththaandu or Vishu. The month Panguni will be gone, and the new year will begin with the month of Chithrai. Curiously it does not start at midnight. These guys are very precise. It starts when the Earth completes the orbit around the sun and comes back to exactly the same location. Typically it will be something like 7AM in one April 14, then around 1PM April 14 in the next year, then it will be around 7PM of April 14 of the next year, then it will at 1AM of April 15 of next year, but the leap year would yank it back to 1 AM April 14.
And yes, people will cook the festive dinners, offerings to the Gods etc and patiently wait for the new year to be "born" before starting the prayers. The patriarch will read the almanac that predicts how much rain there will be that year, "Measure it by the ark. Ark of 1000 cubits long and 2000 cubits wide and 500 cubits deep. 2590 arks of rain will fall this year". Let me see if I can dig up the precise time and the amount of rain for the coming New year.
In my company when we did a major upgrade of our coding environment we needed a good name for the whole project. We were following a scheme where the code tree was named by a number. Like "/vobs/$company/three/source" or/vobs/$company/six/source. But this one was supposed to be such a huge big deal we needed to depart from the old scheme. What did they come up with? Nextgen. That was way back in 2000. Now for more than a decade we are stuck with that name. What do we do next?/vobs/$company/next2nextgen/? and then/vobs/$company/next3nextgen/? So stupid. At least the cell phone techies learnt the lesson and started using 3G and 4G.
Hope the Russians name their technology something other than Next Gen Spacecraft.
Newton was very much after glory and fame. Became an MP, attended the House of Lords, (but never delivered a speech ever), got himself appointed as the Controller of the Mint and excessively obsessed about priority and credit. BTW logarithms were calculated by John Napier, not Newton.
Ramanujan is a totally different ball game. Completely self thought, from a book of identities and formulae. He found a sort of Cliff notes for the BA in Math in England. He assumed that is the way to present mathematics. Just the final result without any deriviation or proof. Did not know what was already invented and well known. He reinvented the wheel so to speak so many times. Almost all the major math break throughs of the previous century, he reinvented all over again, independently. Think about it. One century of mathematicians original work completely reinvented by this lone clerk toiling away in colonial India working as a harbor master's assistant. He presented his inventions without any proof or even a hint of how it was arrived at. Most of his first letters were rejected as some crackpot's ravings by math professors in England. Hardy was the only one who saw that among all the well known identities, that were being presented as new inventions, were real gems never seen before. He invited Ramanujan to England and the rest was history.
A special tit bit: BTW he and I both have the same ancestral temple, that of Lord Oppiliappan at Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, but his favorite god was not Oppiliappan, but Nama Giri Devi, the ancestral god of his mother's family. I wish we were related. His personal life was very sad. Died at age 30. His wife was left as a destitute and ended up working as house maid.
My take on this is, Google managers have the freedom to choose whatever software product that is best for their neck of the wood. No need to hastily hide white earphones when Steve Ballmar is spotted coming around. But this is also the organization where a mid level executive put out a huge rant against google for no eating its dog food, while Amazon does.
I just hope Google will talk to these managers and understand why they are not eating their own dog food and improve Google docs.
The text book prices in USA are outrageous, and there is severe conflict of interest in profs recommending books and getting kick backs from the publisher. True. But that does not mean we should sensationalize this issue and exaggerate the consequences of the possible court rulings.
The case involves a U.S copyright holder who gives a limited license to a foreign entity to sell books within that country. People who purchase such books in that country have all the first sale rights within that country, (depending on that country's laws). Even if the courts rule against the importer of the books, it will only apply to US copyright round-tripping via a foreign entity. Someone buying a product with foreign IP will have the same first sale rights to buy and sell within USA, like any Taiwanese student who buys these Eastern Economy Edition books to buy/sell within Taiwan. What these publishers are objecting to is, the books very specifically marked "not for sale outside Taiwan" are being smuggled in and sold in USA.
Most of us slashdotters work in the software industry and it is the Intellectual Property protection is responsible in large part to the size and security of our pay checks. Let use look at it objectively.
Indeed. Please tell me all tools of which you are aware. All tools not on your list will be unsuccessful. Your lack of knowledge will determine the fate of untold hundreds of tools!
If Microsoft design suite is unknown to 4 digit slashdotters, it is doomed indeed. So even if you had intended it to be a snark, it turned out to be insightful.
Patrilineal endogamy [*] is not an Islamic doctrine. It is practiced by Muslims in the regions that were once a part of Ottoman Empire. Endogamy in general is encouraged by societies to conserve the family wealth, and to reduce subdivision of land among the heirs. Most eastern countries allow child of a woman to marry the child of her brother. It is less common but not taboo in Europe. Most aristocrats end up marrying their cousins. Even Einstein married his cousin.
Deleterious (harmful) mutations are lot more common than beneficial mutations. So when the marriage happens between very closely related individuals, the deleterious mutations reduce the fitness of the off spring. But if marriage always happens between very distantly related individuals, the beneficial mutations do not get a chance to take hold. So what is the optimal genetic distance? Jared Diamond mentions that a genetic distance of 1/8 to 1/64 was found to be the optimum. Genetic distance between siblings, parent-child is 0.5. Between first cousins it is 0.125. (0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5). Between second cousins it is 1/64. This was found by genetic analysis of bird populations that are free to choose their mates. The assumption is whatever genetic distance is the most favored or most common would have been the optimum arrived at by millennia of evolution.
Coming back to the patrilineal endogamy, it explains very well the allegiance of most Iraqis to their sheiks (clan leaders) rather than religion, sect, country. Some people attribute the lack of women's rights in a divorce also sets a completely different social dynamic. But whatever is the root cause, Pakistan is a failed state with nuclear weapons. It can not be left to sort its future out the way we let Angola or Sierra Leon. They got nukes. Either they give up nukes like Ukraine, and other *stans. Or they shape up.
[*] Patrilineal endogamy: Marriage between children of brothers is allowed. Sometimes encouraged.
OK, so now they have over taken India. Interesting. Some time back, India had the largest muslim population. Then Indonesia overtook it. Now Pakistan too. Thanks for the info. I stand corrected.
India and Pakistan are basically same culturally. Of course, India is largely Hindu but with substantial Muslim population (actually India has more Muslims than Pakistan!) and Pakistan is mostly Muslim. But apart from the religious division, culturally, linguistically, ethnically they are not far apart and they were the same country till 1947. Theoretically Hindus with their caste divisions are supposed to fare worse than casteless Muslim majority Pakistan. But somehow in the last seventy years they have charted a completely different course. Both had the same judicial system, revenue/governance systems, English language, and railways, armed forces inherited from the Brits.
Pakistan allied itself to NATO and America, allowed its land to be used freely for US spy planes, Voice of America broadcast stations, bought every bit of military hardware US was allowed to export, from Patton Tanks, to F-16s to E-3 Hawk-eyes to stinger missiles to.... India claimed to be a leader of Non-Aligned movement, but in fact it was leaning towards USSR with MIG-21, MIG-23, Sukai, Hind helicopters and T-72 tanks etc.
But though both countries were mired in poverty, somehow India's democracy thrived. No one would mistake India for a developed country, with its slums and open sewers and congested roads and perennial power cuts and corrupt politicians and periodical flare up of communal violence. But somehow it is emerging out of it, in fits and starts, cornered the cheap back office white collar market, some good IT companies, decent medical systems, eradicated polio, making good progress on other diseases...
I don't think the difference is religion. I think the difference is government dominated by the military in Pakistan, and civilians in firm control of the military in India. That I think set a completely different social processes, incentives in the economy etc. I think economists should study how this process happened instead of wasting their time out doing one another in forecasting gloom and doom following the fiscal cliff. More and more the economists are looking like Mayans predicting the end of the world at the end of their long count calender.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Correlation is not causation and most of it is mere coincidence and the entire statistical wizardry displayed by google is merely calculating correlation coefficients. But don't diss it or dismiss it. It gets to be amazingly powerful.
Once I was looking for the lyrics of a song in the language Malayalam (BTW Malayalam is longest one -word palindrome in English). I don't speak Malayalam. I typed in Google, my best impression of the opening line of that song. Transliterated into ASCII English keyboard. Instead of dismissing the strange sequence of characters as gibberish, Google came back with "Did you mean______ ________", exact song I was looking for. So taken to the level Google has taken it to, plain vanilla correlation coefficients become almost sentient!
Slashdot Mirror
In 2012, half a million students took the test to vie for a paltry 10,000 seats. Acceptance rate of 1.9%. The acceptance rate has crept UP because they have increased the number of seats by an order of magnitude since my days. In my year the closing rank (last student admitted to a real IIT, not Banares Hindu University which shared the entrance examn) was 1350. The number of applicants in my year was also less, around 100,000.
I was simply drinking coffee in Starbucks. Then someone told me you can actually brew the coffee at home. Start with a simple stove top percolator, he said. Then it became a cheap 10 cup presto coffee maker. Then came the French Press, then the "grinding your own just before brewing", roasting your own bean just before grinding just before brewing, espresso machines, pump based espresso not the wimpy steam pressure espresso, .....
Now I am driving 150 miles each way to slopes of the Smoky Mountains each weekend to tend a patch of coffee shrubs which I am going to harvest, dry, grind and brew. They are saying the next step is to feed the coffee fruits to some weasels and collect the beans from its other end, then to dry, grind and brew. No one told me this is where I am going to end up. So watch out.
We can improve it even more by allowing the points to be positive or negative, and classifying these into categories, like "informative" "insightful" or "flame" or "troll".
Are they asserting copyright? That is very strange. There are things called "design patent". Essentially it patents a "form" of an object. Like a particular floral pattern on a door knob or something. It does not prevent others from making door knobs. Just gives the rights holder the right to prevent others from making an exact replica or something very close. Very heavily used in garment industry, and chinaware cutlery side of things. I am surprised the comics is going after copyright claims.
Let us be very helpful to this troll and send him names and addresses of all the congresscritters and judges who might have been in violation of the claimed patent. Some how get him to include the names of these figures whose power/IQ ratio approaches infinity. Then may be some reform might happen.
John McCain is an American. No way he is found in Australia.
Microsoft Office files (read-only): .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx
Media: .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mp3, .ogv, .ogm, .ogg, .oga, .webm, .wav
Images: .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp
Compressed files: .zip, .rar, .tar, .tar.gz (.tgz), .tar.bz2 (.tbz2)
Other: .txt, .pdf
Significant by its absence: mpg, avi. Almost all my home videos are in mpg and my local server dishes them out. I am not reencoding that again. Ever. iMac nickeled and dimed me for 20$ to get QuickTime to play mpg, after I pluncked down 1300$ for their machine. And I have not forgiven Steve for that yet. I don't know if netflix, hulu and channellive.tv use a format that is compatible.
Has anything changed?
I agree with you. The people who don't give a fuck about that are a bunch of nobodies.
Here is an almanac: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101102661/PAMBU-PANCHANGAM-2012-13 This one is compiled by Anna Aiyengar, son of Appanai Aiyengar of Kanjanur. They are the official astronomers for the Maharajah of Thanjavur, Shivaji Raja Bhonsle and have the rights to publish this almanac. But this is not the almanac my family uses. Ours is compiled for the Maharaja of Ramnad. Ours predicts, among other things, the amount of rain. This one does not. But it has whole slew of predictions, like, "Since the new moon day of the month of Thai happens on a Saturday, there will be bad things happening to the country".
And yes, people will cook the festive dinners, offerings to the Gods etc and patiently wait for the new year to be "born" before starting the prayers. The patriarch will read the almanac that predicts how much rain there will be that year, "Measure it by the ark. Ark of 1000 cubits long and 2000 cubits wide and 500 cubits deep. 2590 arks of rain will fall this year". Let me see if I can dig up the precise time and the amount of rain for the coming New year.
Hope the Russians name their technology something other than Next Gen Spacecraft.
Ramanujan is a totally different ball game. Completely self thought, from a book of identities and formulae. He found a sort of Cliff notes for the BA in Math in England. He assumed that is the way to present mathematics. Just the final result without any deriviation or proof. Did not know what was already invented and well known. He reinvented the wheel so to speak so many times. Almost all the major math break throughs of the previous century, he reinvented all over again, independently. Think about it. One century of mathematicians original work completely reinvented by this lone clerk toiling away in colonial India working as a harbor master's assistant. He presented his inventions without any proof or even a hint of how it was arrived at. Most of his first letters were rejected as some crackpot's ravings by math professors in England. Hardy was the only one who saw that among all the well known identities, that were being presented as new inventions, were real gems never seen before. He invited Ramanujan to England and the rest was history.
A special tit bit: BTW he and I both have the same ancestral temple, that of Lord Oppiliappan at Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, but his favorite god was not Oppiliappan, but Nama Giri Devi, the ancestral god of his mother's family. I wish we were related. His personal life was very sad. Died at age 30. His wife was left as a destitute and ended up working as house maid.
I just hope Google will talk to these managers and understand why they are not eating their own dog food and improve Google docs.
You do make a very valid point.
The case involves a U.S copyright holder who gives a limited license to a foreign entity to sell books within that country. People who purchase such books in that country have all the first sale rights within that country, (depending on that country's laws). Even if the courts rule against the importer of the books, it will only apply to US copyright round-tripping via a foreign entity. Someone buying a product with foreign IP will have the same first sale rights to buy and sell within USA, like any Taiwanese student who buys these Eastern Economy Edition books to buy/sell within Taiwan. What these publishers are objecting to is, the books very specifically marked "not for sale outside Taiwan" are being smuggled in and sold in USA.
Most of us slashdotters work in the software industry and it is the Intellectual Property protection is responsible in large part to the size and security of our pay checks. Let use look at it objectively.
I am really stunned to see Steve Jobs choosing 40 foot tall Windows for his yacht.
Why don't we sentence that student to a picture of a prison.
oh. wait.. it did not come out right.
Every classroom should be secured by a policeman armed with a picture of a weapon. How about that!
Indeed. Please tell me all tools of which you are aware. All tools not on your list will be unsuccessful. Your lack of knowledge will determine the fate of untold hundreds of tools!
If Microsoft design suite is unknown to 4 digit slashdotters, it is doomed indeed. So even if you had intended it to be a snark, it turned out to be insightful.
Deleterious (harmful) mutations are lot more common than beneficial mutations. So when the marriage happens between very closely related individuals, the deleterious mutations reduce the fitness of the off spring. But if marriage always happens between very distantly related individuals, the beneficial mutations do not get a chance to take hold. So what is the optimal genetic distance? Jared Diamond mentions that a genetic distance of 1/8 to 1/64 was found to be the optimum. Genetic distance between siblings, parent-child is 0.5. Between first cousins it is 0.125. (0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5). Between second cousins it is 1/64. This was found by genetic analysis of bird populations that are free to choose their mates. The assumption is whatever genetic distance is the most favored or most common would have been the optimum arrived at by millennia of evolution.
Coming back to the patrilineal endogamy, it explains very well the allegiance of most Iraqis to their sheiks (clan leaders) rather than religion, sect, country. Some people attribute the lack of women's rights in a divorce also sets a completely different social dynamic. But whatever is the root cause, Pakistan is a failed state with nuclear weapons. It can not be left to sort its future out the way we let Angola or Sierra Leon. They got nukes. Either they give up nukes like Ukraine, and other *stans. Or they shape up.
[*] Patrilineal endogamy: Marriage between children of brothers is allowed. Sometimes encouraged.
OK, so now they have over taken India. Interesting. Some time back, India had the largest muslim population. Then Indonesia overtook it. Now Pakistan too. Thanks for the info. I stand corrected.
Pakistan allied itself to NATO and America, allowed its land to be used freely for US spy planes, Voice of America broadcast stations, bought every bit of military hardware US was allowed to export, from Patton Tanks, to F-16s to E-3 Hawk-eyes to stinger missiles to.... India claimed to be a leader of Non-Aligned movement, but in fact it was leaning towards USSR with MIG-21, MIG-23, Sukai, Hind helicopters and T-72 tanks etc.
But though both countries were mired in poverty, somehow India's democracy thrived. No one would mistake India for a developed country, with its slums and open sewers and congested roads and perennial power cuts and corrupt politicians and periodical flare up of communal violence. But somehow it is emerging out of it, in fits and starts, cornered the cheap back office white collar market, some good IT companies, decent medical systems, eradicated polio, making good progress on other diseases...
I don't think the difference is religion. I think the difference is government dominated by the military in Pakistan, and civilians in firm control of the military in India. That I think set a completely different social processes, incentives in the economy etc. I think economists should study how this process happened instead of wasting their time out doing one another in forecasting gloom and doom following the fiscal cliff. More and more the economists are looking like Mayans predicting the end of the world at the end of their long count calender.
Once I was looking for the lyrics of a song in the language Malayalam (BTW Malayalam is longest one -word palindrome in English). I don't speak Malayalam. I typed in Google, my best impression of the opening line of that song. Transliterated into ASCII English keyboard. Instead of dismissing the strange sequence of characters as gibberish, Google came back with "Did you mean______ ________", exact song I was looking for. So taken to the level Google has taken it to, plain vanilla correlation coefficients become almost sentient!
Now I counter your Artificial Intelligence with my natural stupidity. Check. Mate.
Game Over. Boing!