Archive for November, 2007
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
Apple's running this obnoxious commercial featuring a possibly bogus airline pilot who, as a passenger on a weather-delayed flight, heroically saves the day by using his magical iPhone to check the weather:
(video link)
Now, an anecdotal tale has emerged where another guy tried to use his iPhone on a delayed flight ...
Posted in funny, tech, travel | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
This fortune I read today seems like a natural follow-up to my previous post:
This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the
power of computers:
Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct
the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a
minimum ...
Posted in computing, funny, tech, toys | No Comments »
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
All you have to do is help Netflix read people's minds!
The Netflix Prize is a contest that has been going on since October 2006. I didn't hear about it until today. When you rate movies on the Netflix DVD rentals site, their proprietary Cinematch algorithm will predict which ...
Posted in computing, math, movies, tech, toys | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Computer science professor Dr. Ryan Garlick of University of North Texas has a very interesting setup for his symbolic processing course this semester: Each student's objective is to contribute towards cracking the unsolved 340-character Zodiac cipher.
From a UNT news article:
Cracking the cipher is a difficult task for more than one ...
Posted in computing, tech, toys, zodiac | 16 Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
Another evil incarnation of "turduckenology" arose yesterday at work. From my virtual Windows XP instance running inside Parallels Desktop on my Mac, I needed to make a remote desktop connection to my Windows XP desktop, which is running a Virtual PC 2007 instance of a virtual machine that itself ...
Posted in bizarre, computing, crackbaby, pain, tech | 9 Comments »