Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth | Hacker News Reader

Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth

scpd.stanford.edu

62 pointsstardotstar10 comments

I was really looking forward to watching some of these during my lunch break. I followed the links, picked one I thought I'd enjoy, clicked the link ...

"Install Microsoft Silverlight"

With a heavy heart I close the tab in the browser on my Linux box.

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Added in edit:

Thanks for the suggestions. The problem isn't so much that it's Moonlight, per se, it's more that I have to go through a bloody great clog dance to find the resources, download, install, then find the video, see if it plays, and so on.

I was looking forward to a break during lunch to see something interesting, and instead I was going to be sucked into what amounts to system administration yet again.

That's why I was so disappointed. Mostly, anyway.

I was disappointed too, but if you view the page source, you can see the URL of the actual stream.

For example: mms://proedvid.stanford.edu/videocontent/knuth/cs209/871002/871002-cs209-500.wmv

(just grep for: mms:// )

VLC seems to be able to stream and display those for me.

While I still share the sentiment, it works just fine on Linux and Firefox with a recent version of Moonlight (http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/).

That certainly eased the pain - thank you. Still took 15 minutes to sort out, but now tomorrow I can watch a video.

Thanks.

Of all places on the Internet it was really odd to see Standford's site requiring Silverlight to watch its content. WTH, how could something like this happen?

Presumably the greatest minds in computer science sat down and decided that silverlight was the optimum technology

Or perhaps they were suspended over a tank of piranha by an evil laughing Bill Gates somewhere in the basement of http://cs.stanford.edu/info/gates

Or perhaps they just out sourced the web design to the cheapest company who happened to use Silverlight.

Stanford is Stanford, and Knuth is Knuth, in part because both know what issues are important.

Silverlight is reasonable and has market share. Since their goal is to get distribution....

I'd strongly recommend these, if you are interested in these kinds of things. I look forward eagerly to watching the annual Christmas Tree lecture every year (this year on on Bayesian trees and BDDs, to be held December 8, probably posted online a few days later).

One year Knuth offhandedly mentioned a question I had posed in an email a few days earlier (regarding TAOCP), which was a big thrill, and indicates that despite the warning that email may take 6 months to reach him, it is often much quicker.

Computing Bayesian network probabilities using BDDs sounds interesting. Are there any references for this, or do I have to wait in suspense for the lecture? :)

I don't know of any off-hand, but there must be; Knuth is usually collating the work of others.

The abstract for the lecture is here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/musings.html

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