Archive for December, 2010

Mind Crunch 12.22.10

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Can a ship sail faster than the wind?

Suppose we illustrate. You put a ball on a billiard-table, and, holding the cue lengthwise from side to side of the table, push the ball across the cloth. Here, in a rough way, the ball represents the ship, the cue the wind, only, as there is no waste of energy, the ball travels at the same rate as the cue; evidently it cannot go any faster. Now, let us suppose that a groove is cut diagonally across the table, from one corner-pocket to the other, and that the ball rolls in the groove. Propelled in the same way as before, the ball will now travel along the groove (and along the cue) in the same time as the cue takes to move across the table. The groove is much longer than the width of the table, double as long, in fact. The ball, therefore, travels much faster than the cue which impels it, since it covers double the distance in the same time. Just so does the tacking ship sail faster than the wind.

.:futilitycloset.com->

Autumn in Richmond

Speak Ruby in Japanese

: Continue on to the dictionary :

There are lots of reasons to pay for software. You want to get support, you want to reward the developer, you want to make sure that the app keeps improving. But the most important one is that you want me, the developer, beholden to you and not to some third-party that doesn't have your interests in mind.

The American composer John Cage became more interested in the silence between notes than the notes themselves. In the same way, perhaps the key to having an enjoyable career is to focus on the aspects of your career that you don't like. By improving yourself in this area of Everything Else, you might make the whole career more enjoyable. If you hate every new career you try, perhaps the problem isn't the career itself. Maybe you are getting overwhelmed by Everything Else, and because of it, you cannot enjoy the aspects of your career that you originally liked. When we first learn to skate, we are so overwhelmed by all the things that can go wrong that we can't enjoy it. It is only after we master Everything Else that we begin to enjoy the aspects of skating we like (like the sensation of flying). Because of our cultural bias towards specialization, we have been lead to believe that it's possible to spend our life doing nothing but what we like. The real world is not so Utopian. I believe the key to success lies in how we deal with Everything Else.

India Developing New OS

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The Indian government is still intent on developing its own operating system so it can own the source code and architecture rather than rely on Western technologies.

Dr V K Saraswat, scientific adviser to India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) said that the Indian OS is needed to protect India’s economic framework. While we admire India’s decision to write its own OS, the decision seems to be driven by paranoia about Western technology.

Saraswat said earlier this month that Western hardware and software are likely to be "bugged". By bugged, he doesn’t mean that Windows is chock full of unsecure hackable exploits. Saraswat specifically thinks that our technology is bugged so weAcan spy on India.

"Unfortunately even today we import most of these items. They are coming from various countries. So there is possibility that these hardware parts are already bugged," said Saraswat.

"So we have started doing design and development of our own hardware. We are trying to build it in our own country," he said.

"Second part is software. Most of us use commercial software available in the country. We have got Windows and some use Linux. These software packages are likely to be bugged."

.:theinquirer.net->

We knew the revolution wouldn't be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives …

Perth Arts Festival Reel

The premises for making algorithms in the literature are completely out of touch with all these issues. One of the old maxims was to avoid full scans at all costs, but a sequential memory scan nowadays goes atA6 to 14 GiB per second and the limits are mostly the data bus bandwidth. Random access traversal in memory often is several orders of magnitude slower due to the latency issues compounded with branch mispredictions. TheAdata structures often used don’t scale due to fragmentation. In many cases are sequential in nature so parallel execution is either impossible or requires very slow locking mechanisms for critical areas making the code error-prone and filled with hard to predict bottlenecks.