He is also an amazing professor / educator. His class at Carnegie Mellon (15-251: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science) is one of the hardest yet most entertaining CS courses at CMU. One of the first assignments involves a scavenger hunt with a randomly assigned team, across campus, based on challenging algorithmic puzzles inspired from many different areas of computer science.
In one semester, he found people who were copying on their homeworks by creating a website with solutions to a problem on an early assignment. Many people fell into the trap, even after he had given a very clear disclaimer to not use search engines to solve homework problems.
Yeah, they are asking for unique PAN(Permanent Account Number) issued by Income Tax department, Government of India. However, I don't know if PAN issued to individuals will work here. The fourth letter of PAN identifies the type of entity PAN is issued for. For example, my PAN is APUPK3*M.
C — Company
P — Person
H — HUF(Hindu Undivided Family)
F — Firm
A — Association of Persons (AOP)
T — AOP (Trust)
B — Body of Individuals (BOI)
L — Local Authority
J — Artificial Juridical Person
G — Government
I guess they will check PAN to identify if it is "a business entity operating from India".
They can't verify the validity and authenticity of a PAN. Only a government/legal agency will be able to do it. So for this purpose I can just enter any arbitrary number that appears like a valid PAN and get through.
Partners include FISME(Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises), a not-for-profit that has a lot of pull within the government and a really popular bank - ICICI (that has access to PAN numbers anyway); so an internal service to verify PAN numbers would be quite possible.
Are they like SSNs in that they are dangerous information to give out? The grandparent post just wrote his in the comment and doesn't seem to concerned.
That is truly what set Jobs apart. His left and right side of the brain were constantly in bed together while those of his peers (and dare I say most techies today) were satisfied with self-pleasure.
I too would like to have discussions like xarian's thoughts for all lectures.
Regarding the lecture notes - is there a wiki where we can all contribute to? Earlier today, the google doc was complaining about too many people editing the document.
> If the application tries to write to the memory in future, Windows will give it a private copy
It is textbook Copy-on-write. To me it seems no judgement is made about the programmer.
>If the memory is available, you'd do better to use it, no?
I don't understand... if I have 2 GB of RAM, I should always use all of it? The case being made in the article is to minimize memory consumption to increase battery life - something that will be crucial on tablets I assume.
Don't want to sidetrack from the main conversation, but Nathan Myhrvold seems to have a very impressive past [1]. He studied QFT under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge.
By all accounts he's remarkably accomplished and intelligent. To make everything worse, he's already impossibly rich. It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can.
I do not know the man well enough to pass any judgement on him. But, your statement [1] raised a question in my mind: On the wiki page, there is an outline of his plan to eliminate global warming through geoengineering. I assume this will cost a lot of money. What if he is trying to build up his wealth so that one day he can fund a massive geoengineering project to help the earth's climate? He has demonstrated the desire at least.
[1] " It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can."
I am torn. I would love to purchase the books, yet at the same time I don't want to give any money to someone that could potentially sue me and my company for everything it is worth...
Only book four is on the internet as a torrent, and as an owner of the actual books, it doesn't even slightly come closer to comparing. The real books are stunning, and full of fantastic knowledge. They're works of art, and an encyclopaedia of cooking, food, hygiene and nutrition knowledge.
I'm sure they are, also judging from the pics on Amazon. Like the TAOCP of cooking. My response was more about the karma Myrvold has engendered for himself.
Charlie Rose interviewed Myrvold in 1996: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7896274730082503348 [lots of internet predictions/discussion]. It's truly fascinating how much the world has changed and how much things are the same... (half-way through, but hoping to catch him contradict himself on patents.)
P.S. Here are some other interviews he has done with Rose over the years:
In one semester, he found people who were copying on their homeworks by creating a website with solutions to a problem on an early assignment. Many people fell into the trap, even after he had given a very clear disclaimer to not use search engines to solve homework problems.