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Computers might struggle to exhibit intelligent behaviour, but blindly performing arithmetic calculations is surely their forte. Or is it?
The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.
Author: Aditya
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links for 2009-10-31
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links for 2009-10-30
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On July 22, 1941, a young girl watches from the window of her parent's apartment as her neighbors – he in a top hat, she clutching a bouquet – leave for their honeymoon. The video was shot, of course, to capture a special moment in the lives of the neighbors. But it is significant now because of that little girl – Anne Frank, about a year before her family went into hiding.
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Common themes emerged. Some job candidates answer cell phones during interviews. A surprising number ask the interviewer out on a date. A few too many fall asleep midinterview. Several are so nervous or unprepared that they forget the company name, the position they are applying for, or the interviewer's name.
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Quote: 'I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" — it's just psychological.'
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links for 2009-10-29
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Creative pepole really do produce arts out of anything… These are all made from packages of daily commodities.They are called Package Craft and created by Mr. Kazuma TAKAHASHI.
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All of the tools in the world won't beat the chemistry and aligned motivation that come from creative win/win deal-making. The tools are like a hammer for a carpenter. You have to have them, but carpenters are not defined by their tools. However, something substantively different is happening online at the tool level, thanks to social media.
A good carpenter with a power drill will beat a good carpenter using muscle alone. A bad carpenter with a power drill is, of course, just a dangerous maniac! But we don't really have the equivalent of a power drill yet. We can see bits of it, but it is like having a drill, motor and battery that no one has put together. The pieces that make up this hustler's power drill are: email + CRM + LinkedIn + Twitter. -
Tracing origins of quotes ranging from: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." to "In English law, everything is permissible that is not expressly forbidden. In Prussian law, everything is forbidden that is not expressly permitted."
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links for 2009-10-28
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Handy career advice from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert:
"If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things." -
A commentary on the social experiment conducted by Washington Post.
"…the young man finally started playing his violin. He was quite good … He played continuously for 45 minutes and during that time few, pitifully few people actually stopped and payed attention to the stranger. Some not sure of what they should do gave him some coins and walked away in a hurry.
After playing a total of 6 musical pieces, he paused and looked at his money case. Inside there was a small pile: All he had made was 32$. He picked up his pride, packed his violin and with a quick gait, he exited the L'Enfant Plaza Metro Station.
He then did something bizarre: He took a cab.
The real reason behind his decision to spent his money like that, was his violin's price-tag: A staggering 3.5 million dollars. … Joshua Bell is one of the finest classical musicians on this planet and to get a seat at one of his violin concerts, would cost you at least 100$ given that your seat was in the back of the concert hall." -
An interesting social experiment. How many people do you think recognize true talent in the mad rush of our lives? Not many it seems as one of the top violin players found out a couple of years back. Not to forget that he played a $3.5 million violin to make $32 in 45 minutes.
"No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" -
Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.
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links for 2009-10-27
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A handy way to order food online. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone did it in India. Only Ahmedabad & Mumbai at present. Gotta try it out some time. Description:
"Started by 3 IIM students, the site features number of restaurants and allows you to place orders online. It has an intuitive user interface that makes ordering a breeze and a search engine that helps you quickly find your favourite dishes.
Subway, Shaolin, Gary's Menu, Mings, Food Planet are some of the restaurants that now deliver to your door step." -
Some simple tips to revive yourself ranging from plain deep breathing to going outside.
"Recent research confirms what world travelers and adult-education addicts already know: New experiences give you a rush."
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links for 2009-10-26
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Quite a few useful links given in the article.
"The future of music over the next ten years depends on finding the right mix between “free” and “paid,” luring fans away from file sharing networks by offering them services that are faster, easier, and more convenient without asking them to subsidize the industry’s return to CD era profits." -
A useful list of advantages & disadvantages along with some basic description of DSLRs.
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Now this is a way to publicise a wedding, with a poster, trailer et al. And don't forget the multi-layered, multi-flavoured cake either.
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Return of the daily links from delicious
By now you have probably noticed that I’ve reverted to posting daily links from delicious to my blog (this time with more description hopefully) even though I had thought at one point in time that they were cluttering up my blog. One of the main reasons I did this was to keep the blog active as I seem to be bookmarking & twittering a lot more nowadays, and don’t make the time to come up with lengthier blog post.
Quite a lot of water has flowed under the bridge during this period, of which the most notable change is the new delicious interface going live. The other handy feature is the ability to post to twitter and email contacts while bookmarking through the firefox extension. I also refreshed my memory for posting from delicious through this blog post on posting to wordpress from delicious and also noticed that Steve Rubel had recommended daily links post as an essential blogging hack (too bad I gave it up for over a year and a half). So, now the daily links posts are here to stay.
Another thing I noticed while setting up the delicious service was that they’ve tweaked the interface slightly. Now the password field is no longer plain text (whatever made them do that in the initial phase is a mystery to me), and there is a way to effectively utilize the category field to keep the bookmark posts organized. All you need to do is figure out the category id by going to the wordpress blog dashboard –> Posts –> Categories to view the list of categories in the blog. Each category is hyperlinked (something like ….wordpress.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=4360) and the last portion of the URL gives the category id (out_cat_id in delicious). In my case, 4360 is the id for the “bookmarks” category that I had created for such posts. The setup is pretty convenient & should help keep the blog active in some way till I finish my Management course next year.
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links for 2009-10-25
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geek.menu is a fork of the portableApps.com menu system. It has many enhanced features (a complete list is available here such as support for:
* truecrypt
* categories
* custom buttons
* multi wallpaper switching
* auto-executing apps on start
* ejection scripts
* special behavior for authorized PCs
* local/www searchbar
via http://lifehacker.com/5389421/five-best-portable-apps-suites -
Gorgeous! Fire breathing videos captured in 1000+ fps for viewing in super slow motion. Currently only low res version is present. via http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/25/super-slomo-fire-bre.html
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Lupo PenSuite is a completely free suite of portable programs and games. This Suite is designed to simplify the user's life, by collecting the best suites and portable applications available on the Web.
Optimized to be loaded on a USB flash drive and brought always with you, this Suite works perfectly well on any other device. It includes over 200 highly selected portable programs and games (7-Zip, Audacity, CCleaner, eMule, FileZilla, Firefox, Foxit Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Notepad++, Opera, Pidgin, Thunderbird, µTorrent, VLC and many more). -
A handy open source file renaming utility
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A handy portable applications suite – includes multimedia, disk management, internet, productivity, security & utility software. Perfect fit for a thumb drive. Comes in 3 flavours ranging from a 56 MB setup to 186 MB.
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Crowdsourcing at its best! What happens when you let loose crazy Star Wars fans on a remake project of the movie? You get a ton of 15 second clips that get put together to recreate the original. It's a work in progress though.
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What happens when X-men meets peanuts or He-man meets Garfield. A really interesting & innovative take on comics.
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A couple of workarounds for the high CPU usage in the Online Armor firewall. The first solution seems to work for me. Hope they fix it some time. Hopefully it's not the second case with the nvidia drivers for me.
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links for 2009-10-24
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Interesting real-time simulation displays the CO2 emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.
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Group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.
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links for 2009-10-23
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Yet no amount of checking and rechecking could account for a dismaying number of inconsistencies: In a little over 10 percent of cases, she just couldn’t reconcile her figures with those of the commission. Online commentary – http://timoelliott.com/blog/2009/10/blind-and-incompetent-justice-thanks-to-spreadsheet.html
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Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Today Gatsby is read in nearly every high school and college and regularly produces $500,000 a year in Scottie’s trust for her children.
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