the body of a very slow loop
As much as I hate Hungarian notation, I must admit that Charles Simonyi was an interesting speaker.
Charles began by recalling some of the writings of John von Neumann. Since the quotes predate the modern notion of a “computer program”, von Neumann used the word intent instead. Simonyi clearly thinks that there is a very important distinction between intent, and this strange artifact we call a program.
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:
For some reason I can no longer remember, I didn’t wander downstairs right away on Monday morning. Consequentially, I missed Ian Piumarta’s talk at the Dynamic Languages Symposium (official program, another one). Once I got in the room, however, I could hardly leave. It was that great.
I’ll list the presentations I saw and give some brief commentary. I’ll also link to slides, etc, when possible.
Larry Wall gave a keynote entitled Present Continuous, Future Perfect at OSDC 2006. It was back in February, but I didn’t discover the audio and slides until tonight.
The deck is 150+ slides, and covers the upcoming features in Perl 6. There’s a Wiki page for the talk here, which includes a full text transcript.
Christopher Soghoian is being questioned by the FBI right now. I don’t suppose they are there to thank him for his research. Read his blog for details.
This tutorial was supposed to be taught by Morgan Deters, Kenneth Zadeck, and Ron Cytron. For various reasons, the talk ended up being just Morgan. This was somewhat disappointing, because Ron and Ken are co-inventors of SSA.
One additional note: this was designed as a 6 hour talk, but was reduced to 3 hours without changing the scope of the talk. (Uh oh)
I sat near Kang Su Gatlin (a familiar face from Microsoft), as well as Arno Hasse from SE-Radio.net.
This will be the first in a series of articles about my OOPSLA experiences as they happen. I’ll keep everything in the OOPSLA 2006 Trip Report category, for easy access.
How’s that for a shameless attempt to pass off blogging as actual work, eh?
I had to remove the Google Reader Shared Items widget from my sidebar. If you got a popup on a previous visit, that was why. It also broke K2’s nifty AJAX search feature.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so I just disabled the thing for now.
Update:
This is fixed now. See Stephanie’s blog for more info.
According to tech2, Creative has released a firmware update for their Zen players that disables FM recording. I don’t even have one of these, and this makes me irate.
Why, do you ask, has Creative done this? Was it for your safety? Might the FM recording feature somehow interfere with your pacemaker?
With regards to your enquiry, you may like to know that the FM recording feature is removed due to licensing issue.
Oh.
Here’s my take: You forked over your $200, they forked over the Zen, and now you own it. End of freaking transaction. I don’t care how many “Accept” buttons you clicked, or how much shrinkwrap you broke: a sale is a sale.
And there’s a name for taking something back after a sale: theft. Creative better pray for a class-action. They’d be getting off easy, because this seems downright criminal to me.
Sure you say, the upgrade is optional. And, yea, perhaps there is a way to downgrade. But, damnit, if there is one single bug fix in that firmware, they had better get Jonnie Cochran on retainer. Go go Gadget EFF.
There’s some further discussion on the official Creative forums. Here’s one choice quote, from a Creative apologist:
How is it sneaky if they posted it publicly with the firmware release? Do you also sign contracts without reading them?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this fella has never closed on a house.
Really, people, of course we don’t read everything we sign. Contracts are written in a kind of pseudo-English which requires 7-years of college to properly parse. They use as small a font as they can. They make the contracts as long as possible. They are designed to screw you.
Update:
Since writing this, I’ve discovered The Small Print Project, which is a sort of catalog of ridiculous EULA terms.
Wil Shipley and Larry Bodine argue Mac vs PC. This exchange totally LOL’d me:
Larry: For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser.
Wil: It simply can and does read Flash, and you are, quite simply, a big stupid.
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