the body of a very slow loop
I just finished watching this Charlie Rose episode where Dr. Mehmet Oz (yes, the dude from Oprah) moderates a round-table discussion on the subject of nutrition. The panel is made up of journalist Gary Taubes, Dr. Dean Ornish, and Dr. Barbara V Howard.
Provocative stuff. Highly recommended.
Do yourself a favor and check out the recently-launched Hulu service from NBC and FOX. It’s fantastic.
Hulu provides movies and TV shows in high quality with limited commercials. But the best part is, it’s totally legal. More details here.
I just subscribed to an RSS feed for new episodes of The Office. The Simpsons are next.
Google better look out. Clown Co is no joke. Pretty soon I’ll only go to YouTube when I want to see dudes getting hit in the nuts.
University of Washington has a pretty cool Crypto course online. Lecture videos, slides… it’s all here.
(Thanks, Preston)
Wish you went to Berkeley and learned Comp Arch from the man who wrote the book? I’ve been working for AMD for almost 7 years, and without hesitation I can say that my answer to this question is an emphatic “Yes!” There is always something more to learn.
Well, wish no more. Head over to Berkeley’s CS 252 site and watch the vids.
Update:
Just discovered the slides in PowerPoint and PDF format here
Add Stanford’s EE380 site to your list of killer video sites. My TV is getting more and more useless every day. I’m just finishing Dave Patterson’s talk, it’s great. I can’t wait for Ian Piumarta’s either — I expect it will pertain to his NSF work with Alan Kay.
With net video like this, who needs TechTV anyway?
(thanks to Mike Wall)
I highly encourage folks to watch Lawrence Lessig’s entire talk at 23c3 — it’s rad.
At least do yourself the favor of listening to the last 8 minutes of the video where John Perry Barlow enters the frey. Both Lessig and Barlow agree that “17 year old kids” will always circumvent the DRM du-jour, but they go toe-to-toe on the efficacy of civil disobedience.
To Barlow, it’s simply a matter of time. If we merely continue to violate the DMCA, creating a sort of underground railroad for culture, today’s stodgy “rights holders” will eventually go to that big studio in the sky, and change will be inevitable.
Lessig’s position is that we don’t have 20 years to waste. As long as we allow the powers that be to write the script, we’ll be playing the part of “criminal” (and, surprise, we lose). Instead, if we generate a parallel universe of free culture we can lawfully supplant the current “consumer oriented” system.
Riveting stuff.
If you haven’t heard of Sun’s ZFS file system, here are the two important summary bullets:
For slightly more info, check out these screencasts, this slide deck, or this set of vids.
I can’t even begin to describe how much I lust for Linux support (currently difficult due to CDDL incompatibility with GPL). With a little effort, one could combine ZFS and something like S3 or rsync.net to get easy off-site backup on the cheap.
Update:
Much of the power behind ZFS comes from its copy-on-write philosophy. The parallels with software transactional memory are stark. One outstanding question re transaction size: are they limited by free disk space? Traditional file systems use in-place modification, but it sounds as though ZFS may require additional free storage proportional to the size of the change.
Update 2:
I just learned about the clone ability in ZFS and my eyes just about fell out of my head. I mean seriously, this is constant time file copying. I’d have half a mind to alias cp zfs clone.
Update 3:
Man the ZFS hits just keep on coming. I’ve got a RAID-5 at home, but I’d never heard of the “RAID-5 write hole” until I read Jeff Bonwick’s blog article. Don’t miss this war story featuring ZFS’s end-to-end checksumming.
Intel Research Berkley has been host to a whole slew of nerd gods lately, and they have been foolish enough to post the seminar videos. Ha, suckers! Now I will become smarter on your dime!
But seriously, Intel is awesome for doing this.
Past speakers include: Hans Boehm, Herb Sutter, Greg Morrisett, Guido van Rossum, Guy Steele, Martin Odersky, and Alan Kay. You’d better get to work watching all of those, because still to come are: Martin Rinard, Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, Charles Leiserson, and Philip Wadler.
Update: The Alan Kay talk is tremendously good. Go watch it. I mean now, really. I’ll wait.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative is pretty cool. I just discovered the MIT 6.046J: Introduction to Algorithms home page. Here you’ll find notes (PDF), audio (MP3) and video (RealMedia) for the lectures. It’s been years since I learned this stuff, but it’s never too late for a refresher course.
If you like watching lecture videos, try searching for engEDU over at Google Video. Google is an important stop on the nerd lecture circuit, and they are cool enough to share their tech talks with the rest of us.
Here are a few good ones to get you started:
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