singh

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.

It requires a PAN number, which seems to be a unique identifier for the entity that is registering the domain [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_account_number

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.

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."

How is this misguided?

> 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.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold