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From: cate3@netcom.com (Henry Cate)
Message-Id: [199405171331.GAA09300@netcom.com]
To: JWry.dl@netcom.com
Subject: Life A.I
Reply-to: cate3@netcom.com
Status: R
---------------
Date: 31 Aug 93 10:07:59 PDT (Tuesday)
Subject: Life A.I
All of the following are selections from Keith Bostic's mailing list
bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu
----------------------------------------------------
Unlike with Reagan and Bush, who seemed groomed for this kind of thing,
you get the feeling with Clinton that every now and then he closes the
shades to the Oval Office, locks the door and screams, 'Whoa! This is
really cool!'
-- comedian Mike Tilford, of The Capitol Steps
--------------------------
Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repost it every month,
with diffs marked with change bars.
-- Ed Vielmetti
--------------------------
Being a businessman of sorts [publisher of the occasional paper 'The
Carolina Israelite'] I was often invited to the Gentile luncheons,
namely, Rotary or Kiwanis. When they were having pork chops or ham
they were careful to order another entree for me such as shrimp or
lobster, which was just as non-kosher and twice as expensive. I'd
smile and eat it.
-- Harry Golden
Some of his books: "For Two Cents Plain," "Ess, Ess, Mein Kind."
--------------------------
Flying Lumberjacks
Timber harvesting by helicopter is moving wood faster and in more
rugged terrain than ever before. Columbia's Helicopters' Boeing 234, a
commercial version of the CH-47 Chinook, recently moved 300,000 board
feet of logs a day near Yosemite, Calif., compared with an estimated
ground-only production of 60,000. Helicopters eliminate the need for
environmentally damaging logging roads and can work smaller plots.
{AW&ST August 2, 1993}
--------------------------
[[ In RISKS 14.89 ]]
The Feedback section of the latest New Scientist relates the following
Computer Weekly story about an unfortunate programmer at an unnamed
bank. Apparently, the bank wanted to target its wealthiest customers
with a mailshot promoting various new services and the programmer in
question wrote a program to select the 2000 wealthiest customers from
the bank's records and to generate an appropriate letter for each. In
the process of testing the program, he made use of a fictitious customer
named Rich Bastard.
Unfortunately, as you may already have guessed, something went amiss and
every single one of the bank's 2000 prize customers received a letter
which began "Dear Rich Bastard, ..."
--------------------------
September Harpers Index:
Ratio of the number of Canadians who favor a U.S.-style health-care
system to those who believe Elvis is alive: 1:2
Number of Shemp Howard's canceled checks sold this year by Odyessey
Group in Corona, Califirnia, for $695 apiece: 37
Estimated number of cows it takes to supply
the 22,00 footballs the NFL uses each season: 3,000
Number of pigs: 0
--------------------------
]From the 8/9/93 Digital News & Review "Rumor Roundup":
... he could be in worse shape though -- he could be dealing
with Sybase's tech support. Lot's of folks are submitting
horror stories. Calls go unreturned, sometimes for weeks.
In one case, Sybase called a customer's manager -- to complain
about the customer's attitude! When the customer called
Sybase again, his call wasn't returned after five days. The
customer is always what?
One voice says it best: Sybase, in general, behaves like
people who hold too much stock stock that went from $13.50
to $75 in two years. Sounds downright Oracle-like, doesn't
it? I'll be interested to see what happens when the nascent
Unix RDBMS world matures, and users have more choices.
--------------------------
The latest IEEE Spectrum reprints some important new consumer safety
labels, reproduced from J.I.R. Here are four of them.
Warning: This product attracts every other piece of matter in the
universe, including the products of other manufacturers, with a force
proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to
the square of the distance between them.
Handle with care: This product contains minute electrically charged
particles moving at velocities in excess of five hundred million miles
per hour.
This is a 100% matter product: In the unlikely event that this
merchandise should contact antimatter in any form, a catastrophic
explosion will result.
Important notice to purchasers: The entire physical universe including
this product may one day collapse back into an infinitesimally small
space. Should another universe subsequently emerge, the existence of
this product in that universe cannot be guaranteed.
--------------------------
From: Scott_Forstall (Scott Forstall)
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93
Cosmopolitan Magazine, one of the few remaining bastions of hard-hitting
journalism, has done a piece titled 'Careers in Computers' in their August
issue on how to get a job in the high-tech industry. Some excerpts:
[title]
"Careers in Computers -- No longer for nerds only, this heady,
high-tech world is where brilliant, sexy dynamos work, play, earn
megabucks!"
"There are *some* classic nerds, complete with plastic pocket pen
holder, but many in the field are intelligent and *hunky*! You'll find
them at computer conferences, seminars, expos and users' group
meetings. (Any business in which a major player is named Rod Canion --
founder and former CEO of computer manufacturer Compaq -- can't be
bad!) And a woman who sparkles when she's discussing megabytes and
hard drives can have her pick of the pack."
[sidebar]
"CompuSpeak Glossary -- Communicate with handsome computer jocks in
*their language*. Here's a quick guide to basic terms."
--------------------------
From: "Joe Dellinger" [joe@montebello.soest.hawaii.edu]
Several months ago we started noticing that (now and again) the
network connection to the mainland would become very very slow; this would
continue for 10-15 minutes or so, then all would suddenly be well again. A
while after this started happening a coworker of mine complained to me that
the connection to the mainland _never_ worked anymore. It seems that he had
some FORTRAN source that he needed to copy to a machine on the mainland, but
he never could because "the network wouldn't stay up long enough for the ftp
to complete".
Yes, it turned out that the network outages happened whenever he
attempted to ftp that _particular_ FORTRAN source file to the mainland. We
next tried compressing the file; it copied just fine then (but unfortunately
the machine on the mainland had no uncompress program, so it was still no go).
Finally we "split" his FORTRAN program up into very small pieces and sent them
one at a time. Most of the pieces would copy without trouble, but a few would
either not go at all or only go after many _many_ retries.
Examining the troublesome pieces, we found they all had one thing in
common: they contained comment blocks that began and ended with lines
consisting of nothing but capital C's (his preferred FORTRAN commenting
style). At this point we started sending e-mail to the network gurus on the
mainland asking for help. Of course, they wanted to see an example of our
un-ftp-able files, so we mailed some to them... but our mail never got there.
Finally we got the bright idea of simply _describing_ what the unsendable
files were like. That worked. :-) [Dare I include in this message an example
of one of the offending FORTRAN comment blocks? Probably better not!]
Eventually we were able to piece together the story. A new gateway had
recently been installed between our part of campus and the connection to the
mainland. This gateway had GREAT difficulty transmitting packets that
contained repeated blocks of capital C's!!!! Just a few such packets would
occupy all its energies and prevent most everything else from getting through.
At this point we complained to the gateway manufacturer... and were told "Oh,
yes, you've hit the repeated C's bug! We know about that already.".
Eventually we solved the problem... by buying new gateways from another
manufacturer. (In the manufacturer's defense I suppose an inability to
propagate FORTRAN programs might be considered a feature by some!)
--------------------------
The following material is copied verbatim from the Asahi News Service
of Tokyo. It has not been edited or changed in any way.
"TOKYO -- Do bread or noodles whose raw materials have been exposed to
the music of Beethoven or Vivaldi taste any better than conventional ones?
That's the latest pitch from food makers trying to make a big hit in a
stagnant market.
The theory behind these classical music-assisted products is that while
humans relax by listening to the music, enzyme and yeast-fungus activity
becomes livelier at the sound of classical music, manufacturers explain.
Udon, or wheat noodles made with classical music in the background will
be put on sale in supermarkets in September ...
[stuff left out]
Ohara Brewery in Kitakata City, in Fukushima Prefecture in northern Japan,
has made sake against a background of Mozart music for the past five years.
Its researchers found that Mozart makes the density of yeast used for
brewing sake about 10 times higher than normal.
They have also tried the music of Saburo Kitajima, a veteran Japanese
singer, and Beethoven, but Mozart brought the best result. Ohara now
has a special category of sake, known as ginjo-shu (a high-quality sake),
which has been highly evaluated in sake competitions.
[stuff left out]
The frequency of vibration from music seems to affect the growth ..., a
company spokesman said."
--------------------------
A NEW WORLD RECORD IN PASSWORD CHECKING HAS BEEN SET:
Roch Bourbonnais, a Thinking Machines Corporation engineer, has ported
and optimized the CM/2 port of the UFC-crypt to a CM/5 system.
The UFC-crypt (Ultra Fast Crypt) implementation on the CM/2 Connection
Machine (parallel computer) is a UNIX password checking routine (crypt())
ported by Michael Glad at UNI-C.
The port, that is written in CM-fortran, utilizes the CM/5 vector units
and is partly programmed in cdpeac (vector unit assembly language).
The package achieves 1560 encryptions/second/vector unit. This scales to
6,4 million encryptions per second on a large 1024 node machine.
800,000 - - - - - small 128 - -
With this impressive performance, all combinations of 6 letters can be
tried in less than an hour and all combinations of 6 lower-case letters
can be tried in less than one minute.
Congratulations,
Jorgen Bo Madsen
--------------------------
From: Peter Langston [pud!psl@bellcore.bellcore.com]
[forwards shaken]
Subject: Mac vs. Etch-a-sketch: you decide
. __________
. | ______ |
.________ | | | |
| ______ | 'But that isn't a fair | | | |
|| || comparison. People | |______| |
||______|| like the Etch-A-Sketch.' | |
| o o | | _ _ _ _ _|
|________| (|__________|\
. | ________)_
Roger Earl [^] | |
roger_earl@outbound.wimsey.bc.ca [_] |__________|
After admiring the above signature I thought I'd post a comparison,
similar to the other great computer wars.
Etch-A-Sketch Mac Classic
No. of Colours 2 2
Resolution ~2000*~2000 512 * 342
No. of buttons 2 1
Preemptive Multitasking Yes No
Hardware line draw Yes No
Price [ $20 ~ $1000
Power Consumption No Yes
Laptop Yes No
Slow Operating System No Yes
Non Volatile Memory Yes No
Choice of Coloured box Yes No
Robust design (shakeable) Yes No
After considering the above options, I decided to buy the Etch-A-Sketch.
For all you die-hard Amiga fanatics out there rumour has it that the
Etch-A-Sketch-Emulator is coming out for the Amiga, and will in fact
be faster than the true E-A-S.
--------------------------
]] If the auto industry were like the computer industry, a car would now
]] cost $5, would get 5000 miles to the gallon, and at random times would
]] explode, killing all its passengers.
And Sun Soft would be selling used cattle trucks to limo companies and
calling them "Open Luxury Cars". (Solaris)
IBM would be selling coal powered scooters to people and calling them
station wagons. (AIX)
Microsoft would be peddling raw sewage to restaurants around the country
as ketchup. (In the software top ten & climbing.)
Nothing would be different in Detroit.
OPEC would be suing the nuclear power industry since they own the concept
of generating electricity. (USL v. BSD)
AND ...
All commercial interest in the petroleum output of OPEC would have recently
been bought by Greenpeace. (Novell x. USL)
[And I would be on the high seas shooting at rubber rafts. Neil]
--------------------------
What The Professor Really Means
By J. Timothy Petersik
from the Chronicle of Higher Education
You'll be using one of the leading I used it as a grad student.
textbooks in the field.
If you follow these few simple rules, If you don't need any sleep, you'll
you'll do fine in the course. do fine in the course.
The gist of what the author is saying I don't understand the details either.
is what's most important.
Various authorities agree that... My hunch is that...
The answer to your question is beyond I don't know.
the scope of this class.
You'll have to see me during my office I don't know.
hours for a thorough answer to your
question.
In answer to your question, you must I really don't know.
recognize that there are several
disparate points of view.
Today we are going to discuss a most Today we are going to discuss my
important topic. dissertation.
Unfortunately, we haven't the time to I disagree with what roughly half of
consider all of the people who made the people in this field have said.
contributions to this field.
We can continue this discussion outside 1. I'm tired of this - let's quit.
of class. 2. You're winning the arguement -
let's quit
Today we'll let a member of the class I stayed out to late last night and
lead the discussion. It will be a good didn't have time to prepare a lecture.
educational experience.
Any questions? I'm ready to let you go.
The implications of this study are I don't know what it means either,
clear. but there'll be a question about it
on the test.
The test will be 50-questions The test will be 60-questions multiple
multiple choice. guess, plus three short-answer
questions (1000 words or more) and no
one will score above 75 per cent.
The test scores were generally good. Some of you managed a B.
The test scores were a little below Where was the party last night?
my expectations.
Some of you could have done better. Everyone flunked.
Before we begin the lecture for Has anyone opened the book yet?
today, are there any questions about
previous material?
According to my sources... According to the guy who taught this
class last year...
It's been very rewarding to teach I hope they find someone else to
this class. teach it next year.
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