Long live XP

XP, the OS that won't quit... I guess.

That's amazing, Dell is now charging $150 in addition to the cost of Windows Vista to put the older, Windows XP, on your computer.  Lets look at this from another perspective, to buy Windows Vista in the "home premium" edition costs about $100 from Amazon.  This is the first OS where the "upgrade" to the older version costs more than the newer version!

If you're still not convinced that Dell and everyone else in the PC world is robbing you blind, lets look at it by comparison to other operating systems on the market.  

Linux = Free

Enterprise Linux = $80 (RedHat Desktop), $50 (SuSe Enterprise Desktop)

Apple Mac OS X = $129

So in order to "downgrade" to XP, it costs you more than the new Mac OS.  And for those people who continue to think that Macs cost more than PCs, I'm pretty sure an extra $150 for an OS that works should convince a few people that the price differential isn't really that big.

Or, the XP downgrade costs you 2.5-3 licenses of a major Linux (enterprise) distro (comes with phone support and free upgrades as you'd expect of Windows). Now someone will complain that Linux doesn't do everything Windows does.  They will likely be playing video games.  So what else will $150 buy you?  A PlayStation 2 with Rock Band, or a PS2 with just about any other game.  It's 3/4 the cost of a new XBox 360 Arcade ($199) with two games.  Go play those games.   Or put the $150 towards a PS3 or buying your own Arcade...

In other modern terms, the downgrade will cost you roughly 10 DVDs, or 19 movie tickets, 1 night at Disney World's "moderate resort", or nearly 100 gallons of gas.  That is absolutely absurd!  Look people, Windows 7 is going to look a lot like Vista.  It's going to be roughly the same speed as Vista.  If you're holding out for Windows 7, you're going to be holding out for Windows 8.  Go ahead and give a Mac or Linux a try and save yourself $150 while you wait 9 months for when Microsoft thinks it might ship Windows 7.

The things you learn...

Every programmer learns how to pass things by reference. Arguably, most of us learn how to pass pointers back and forth. The trick is, remembering how to do it when you haven't tried in a long time! For instance, I tried to pass "by reference" in Objective-C the other day and got a nice error. Turns out, you have to do it c-style with pointers and addresses... or you can change the compiler to objective-c++ and continue to do by reference. In either case, the program is below with the output after that.

void myfunc2( int &a, int &b ) //c++ by reference;
{
a = a + 2;
b = b + 6;
NSLog(@"a: %i, b: %i", a, b );
}

void myfunct( int *a, int *b ) //c passing pointers
{
*a = *a + 1;
*b = *a + 2;
NSLog(@"a: %i, b: %i", *a, *b );
}

int main (int argc, const char * argv[])
{

int one, two;
one = two = 3;

NSLog(@"one: %i, two: %i", one, two );

myfunct(&one, &two); //c-style way of doing things

NSLog(@"one: %i, two: %i", one, two );

myfunc2( one, two ); //c++ style way of doing things

NSLog(@"one: %i, two: %i", one, two );

return 0;
}

OUTPUT:
[Session started at 2008-12-02 16:06:12 -0600.]
2008-12-02 16:06:12.513 test[4872:10b] one: 3, two: 3
2008-12-02 16:06:12.517 test[4872:10b] a: 4, b: 6
2008-12-02 16:06:12.518 test[4872:10b] one: 4, two: 6
2008-12-02 16:06:12.519 test[4872:10b] a: 6, b: 12
2008-12-02 16:06:12.520 test[4872:10b] one: 6, two: 12

The Debugger has exited with status 0.

Couldn't be more true

VP Debate tonight

I don't think there's been a more important time to watch the VP debate.

Anonymous fees

Ever look at your cell phone bill and think - "what the heck is that $3 for?". That's exactly what being billed by some of the larger state universities is for classes. I kid you not - here's a list of charges I got:

09/04/2008 Credit Card Convenience
09/04/2008 Payment-Credit Card-Thank You
09/02/2008 Emply Waiver UH RA/TA
09/02/2008 Fee - Academic Service, Grad
09/02/2008 Fee - Computer Tech-Grad
09/02/2008 Fee - Instruct. Acc&Sup-Grad
09/02/2008 Fee - Library-Grad
09/02/2008 Fee - Utility Assessment-Grad
09/02/2008 TUIT-PHD-CLASS-NON-RESIDENT
08/29/2008 GATF FELLOWSHIP
08/27/2008 Emply Waiver UH RA/TA
08/27/2008 Fee - Academic Service, Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Computer Tech-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Graduate/Prof.Enrollment
08/27/2008 Fee - Id Card-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Instruct. Acc&Sup-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - International Edu-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Library-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Rec & Well Ct-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Student Services-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - University Center-Grad
08/27/2008 Fee - Utility Assessment-Grad
08/27/2008 Late Registration
08/27/2008 TUIT-PHD-CLASS-NON-RESIDENT - Doctoral Dissertation

Lets look at some of the truly absurd charges:

ID CARD: I get charged for having a student ID card -- even though they made it years ago - they charge me just to have it and have it keep a line in their Microsoft SQL database. I don't use it for anything - it's just a line that says I have a card.

Credit Card Convenience: I get charged to pay my bill if I want to use a credit card. It's roughly 1.5% which is of course more than my cashback bonus.

Late Registration Fee: $20 - how can I get charged a late fee on 8/27 if the last day to register is 8/29? Enter the truly absurd.

Now lets figure out the other conundrum that confuses me. Why is my fee bill different from other people who take the same number of classes? That's right - same credit hours - different fee bill. We're both out of state - we're both PhD candidates. No explanations.

They probably figure that most of their students don't give money back - so they'll try to make the money off of us now.

Things we should care about

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah-palin-gender-card

At least one news outlet is noticing this...

A moment of silence

A moment of silence for the cancelled shows of 2007-2008.

Big Brother is knocking

Your information is not private...

So I understand that there's a piece of paper somewhere that I believe is called the 4th amendment and it reads something like this:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Are computers digital paper? Or could we just call them effects? I think the major problem isn't just with the ability to seize and search anyone's laptop - it's the potential for unguarded abuse of the data collected. Sure, the claim is that they only look for terrorism - particularly the people who talk about it in their outlook calendar or as a text file outlining their plans. But seriously folks - when will the movie execs and software people ask for the government to search for downloaded movies and music and illegally installed software?

Further, what about protected information? I have encrypted patient data on my laptop that we do data analysis on. It's even encrypted at 256-bit using a multi-pass encryption algorithm that I think is beyond most people's understandings. But if that information is shared from organization to organization "for other reasons" to see if they can break the encryption and read the data - that seems like a violation of patient privacy (HIPPA). And while no one expects that to be a problem - we live in a country where an undercover agent's identity was unveiled as a political move -- what's to stop the data of someone's cognitive decline being used in a similar manner?

Windows... bad odds

Windows is the only OS of the major three (Windows, Linux, Mac) that can get infected on the internet despite doing nothing. That's right, install it and wait. 5 minutes to 16 hours. Those aren't good statistics. So if a virus can infect your computer without you doing anything, imagine what someone who actually wanted access to your computer could do.

Read This

Drilling the end result?

Read First

It didn't strike me until reading this article that maybe we're looking at the gas "crisis" a bit sideways. Bush was the recipient of a huge amount of corporate $$ in his first election. More so than any other politician ever received to run for President. A lot of that money came from people who make gas, drill for oil, and big businesses.

For those of you who don't know, there are a lot of businesses that want to drill for oil on the continental shelf and also in Alaska (Wild Life Refuge). Well, now with gas prices really high, it seems the perfect opportunity for Bush to make it appear that _not_ drilling is only going to cause more issues. Could it be that Bush along with corporate oil companies came up with the idea of pressuring people into wanting to drill for oil in historically protected areas?

I like seals and polar bears a lot. Sure, I've seen them in zoos and on Planet Earth (Blu-Ray or DVD) and not in the wild - but I like them just the same. I think animals might be a little put off by increased human presence. Anyone watching "Ice Truckers" knows that those oil rigs don't just magically transport oil back to the public. The oil pipelines take a long time to build and require a lot of materials to be shipped back and forth. We're not talking about a _small_ impact to start drilling.

So the question is, could fear mongering go beyond getting the US tied to a never-ending war in Iraq. Fear mongers have already convinced people to give up some essential freedoms of privacy to warrant-less wiretaps (FISA bill just passed). And can someone explain how the democrats are being so ineffective? If anyone was elected with a "Mandate" it was the democratic congress in opposition to where the country was going and yet they've managed to go along with just about everything that the White House has wanted. Sure - they passed a child health care plan and even over-rode a veto or two. But in terms of standing up and saying "we're not going to just be pushed around" they're falling short. People want law-makers to be tough on crime and keep us safe. But they clearly didn't want the wiretaps or continuations of the war in Iraq or possible wars in other nations because they voted out a huge number of republicans!

From Wil Shipley

Avie Tevanian had been working on Mach as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs recognized he was a star and hired him straight away. (Microsoft countered by hiring Avie's old advisor to work on NT, which is kind of like Microsoft hiring my mom because I'm a good programmer.)

Books...

So here I am, writing a program to process data because while the program itself has taken me a couple of weeks to write, the actual process of analyzing the data would have taken me a few months to do by hand. Not to mention the extreme repetitiveness that is data processing. I had an old old C program that did something similar and I was trying to update it to a mixture of C/C++/Objective-C. The whole process wasn't too bad, I just had a question about the most efficient design - so I fired off an email to Wil Shipley, the guy behind Delicious Library and within 5 minutes he wrote me back with a fairly comprehensive answer.

Unfortunately his comprehensive answer mentioned something that had been updated about the C programming language in 1999, hence the name C99. Having never heard of this really cool ability to resize "static" arrays, I grabbed my two C reference books and looked it up. No dice... Google found me numerous references to how to use these new resizable arrays but I was wondering why my programming books failed to mention it. Turns out, that my C/C++ reference book was published in 1995. It's the second edition, and I bought it my first year of college (which was 1999). Well it turns out the 4th edition of that same book is now on the market. That and my CS program at college used a really old compiler that didn't allow for C99 is why it was all new to me.

SO moral of the story, it's good to keep books updated.

Computers and Science

Are you a scientist? Do you know the difference between a 32-bit computer and a 64-bit computer? If not, please take 20 minutes and go look it up.

Shopping

Was doing some shopping today, noticed this odd tidbit:

Dell with 8 cores of Xeon power 64-bit with 4GB of RAM, Vista Ultimate, and matched for everything else against a Mac Pro.

Dell Computer = $4,244
Apple Mac Pro = $2,999

That's a substantial chunk of change.

Impeachment

I'm not entirely sure why everyone is so gun-shy of the idea of impeaching Bush. The guy has an approval rating lower than any other president in history. It's generally accepted that he did lie on a number of occasions and that his administration has refused to cooperate with Congress.

Impeachment doesn't mean removal from office. But it does mean looking at whether or not the law has been broken by the person who is trusted with upholding the constitution.

Link

Leaning Tower of Pisa

Read First

You've gotta wonder if the guy who designed the leaning tower of Pisa, or even the people who put the finishing touches on it while it was leaning thought to themselves, "gee, it'll fall down and people will forget that we accidently built this on a swamp". Oh well, the mistake is safe for at least another 300 years, oh and they've restored the tilt that it was at earlier. I guess people were running into walls or maybe someone kept winning while playing marbles.

TED

TED

Go there. Learn something.

TV series survival list

So far:

Surviving:
1. How I Met Your Mother
2. Burn Notice
3. Big Bang Theory
4. Reaper
5. Boston Legal
6. House MD
7. Monk
8. Chuck
9. Numb3rs
10. Scrubs


Dead:
1. Shark

What a difference Vista doesn't make

I barely ever use Windows. For the most part, everything runs on my mac or I've written programs to do what I need so I don't have to use Windows. There are a couple exceptions -- the first is Office 2007's Equation editor that we had to use for my SEM and MLM classes. I know LaTeX, so I could easily have made the equations in pristine 600dpi quality, but in order to make them embedded in Word documents and editable, I had to use Word 2007. The other exception is SAS -- funny enough SAS runs on Linux and UNIX (like BSD and RedHat), but I can't find anyone at the company who will sell me a copy of the Linux version. That's right, money in hand waiting for someone to take it and no one is really interested! What's the world come to? Maybe that's why the economy is in trouble.

Anyway, for those _two_ cases, I run Windows on a virtual machine on my laptop in VMWare. I used to run Vista because it was only $14 at the campus store and I figured I could save myself the time of the 2 service packs and other 190+ updates that have to be installed. I was genuinely not impressed by the new OS. It felt sluggish, and the eye-candy didn't really help. I certainly wasn't any more productive due to the eye candy and as I just discovered - it's a lot slower. See, I thought for a while that Vista was slow because of my virtual machine. My virtual machine weighed in at just over 20GB with Vista, SAS, and Office 2007 installed. Well today I have more insight into the issue. I trashed my Vista install and put XP with all of the Service Packs (even SP3) on, installed SAS and Office 2007. The result, my virtual machine is now 8GB. That's right, less than half as large as the Vista install. And the more surprising feature - my entire computer doesn't grind to a very slow crawl when I'm running Windows. Right now I have SAS and Word 2007 open in Windows. On the mac side, I have iTunes, iChat, Safari, and Mail open. To see what kind of performance penalty I was taking, I briefly opened MATLAB and to my surprise, it opened and ran at a fairly decent speed, despite one of my processors being used for Windows and 1 of my 2 GB of RAM being used for Windows. So in conclusion, Vista really does suck up a lot of hard drive space and a lot more processor than XP. Why would anyone upgrade? I guess it's sort of telling that Microsoft is being forced to continue selling XP even though Vista is out. Mass demand for an older product is something you don't hear very often - it's like people demanding a 2001 car instead of the 2008 car.

Too true...

So true... although I've been very lucky this year to go to a number of conferences, including one in Hawaii.

Cloning

I'm not advocating cloning.  But I think it's scary that the government is beginning to challenge scientific freedom.  It may start with animal cloning or the prohibition of harvesting stem cells from wherever.  But it could quickly spiral out of control.  

In his state of the Union address for 2008, President George W. Bush talked about reprogramming stem cells and called for a ban on cloning.  The interesting thing about this idea of a ban on cloning is that for most people it probably starts from fears illustrated in many SciFi novels.  Which is also amusing since 1984 was a great SciFi novel and here we are today with most of our communications monitored and people don't seem to be nearly as upset as they should be!  

But seriously, what is it about cloning that has people so freaked out?  If you're a materialist, then you don't believe in an independent soul that would be the uniqueness.  Therefore a clone would merely be the same genetic material with differences in environment would produce a different person.  Take for example identical twins!  Are they the same person?  Are they clones?  If you are a dualist - then you believe that at the start of life, God (or some being) introduces a soul that is linked to our flesh and blood bodies.  Even clones would have separate (different) souls.  Just as identical twins do.  

Most people don't have objections to modifying the genes to prevent autism or any other birth defect.  Did no one see Gattaca but me?  

Standards

I wonder if people understand that not all web pages work in Internet Explorer.  Sure, it came "free" with your Windows PC.  Why would anyone need anything else?  A browser is a browser, or so Microsoft would like you to think.  Take a moment and download Firefox, I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised at both the speed and accuracy that it works.  What does that mean?  It's faster, looks better, and doesn't occasionally spy on you.  

The truth is that most web developers design a site and then test it with numerous browsers.  Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was a pain in the butt to debug your web pages for.  Pages that were fine in Safari, Firefox, and Opera looked mangled in IE7.  The major reason for this is that Microsoft doesn't support all of the standards of HTML.  If that's all greek to you, think of it as speaking a foreign language but refusing to acknowledge certain words or phrases!  

I've got your prior art right here

In case we needed further evidence that the US patent system is broken.  Filed in 2003 and then revised repeatedly until awarded January 22, 2008.   A patent covering mobile entertainment and communication device.  So lets overlook the fact that talking on a phone is entertainment and communication - lets say it's just communication.  Now lets turn to the Palm Treo, originally introduced in 2002.  The thing came with games and limited music playback abilities.  I'd say that's prior art.  Next is the Nokia Communicator introduced in 1996, then updated substantially in 2000 (still before 2003).  Somehow this company was awarded essentially a patent on any cell phone that can play music or movies.  So today they're suing just about every cell phone company and maker out there.  Including - Apple for the iPhone.  

Patents are supposed to be excluded based on prior art concepts.  So if I invent a waffle iron shaped like a computer monitor, that's not a patent because those things already exist.  Similarly, you would think that if Apple takes an iPod and puts a phone into it - that would be prior art.  Right?  I think what ultimately angers me about these lawsuits (other than driving stock prices down) is that they seem unethical.  There are genuinely important patents out there.  But then there are companies that do nothing but file for patents with intention of making all of their income off of them.  Before you say - "what about a think tank" I should remind you that this is not a think tank.  Filing a patent for a hybrid car after you rode in your friends prius isn't the same as inventing and implementing an electric car before anyone else did.  That's where the patent system has gone wrong - there are no longer requirements on an implementation to file for them.  Essentially I could go patent the idea of making a car run off my own urine and then if it ever came about - I could sue anyone who actually made it possible later on.  Hopefully the writers from Back to the Future were creative enough to patent the idea of time travel, or at least a car that ran on garbage (time travel optional).

If you think this doesn't happen often - google the SCO vs. Linux fiasco.  

Dissertation-izing

It's really hard to revise a paper that's more than 30 pages.