Pythagoras, is that you?!

A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Could you put multiple network cards on your scheduler machine, put the workers on different subnets and randomly dole out the jobs between those subnets? Seems like you'd be less likely to drop UDP packets that way, I'm pretty sure I ran across a utility (lsipc or something) that would list IPC resources, including shared memory. I seem to recall that the segments also show up in /proc somewhere. It's been a while since I've looked at it.

Not being able to ack important message packets seems like a design flaw.

Even though we have a LOT more hardware now than we did back in the day, you still can't BFI your way through a lot of the big data applications that companies are starting to try to get into. In the past, the company would just throw more hardware at a poorly designed application and that would "solve" the problem. I once saw a team throw 48 gigabytes of RAM at a leaky Java program, and schedule weekly restarts for the goddamn thing. But it's a lot easier to hit hard walls with big data, to the point where you absolutely can't throw more hardware at the problem.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

Pretty much every manager I've ever had thought they are. All the big companies just see you as a "resource". They don't know a thing about your actual skills. They're just buzzwords to those people.

I took nothing past Calculus either and up until two or three years ago never even used trigonometry in my professional programming. The last few years I've been writing satellite simulations, which has forced me to knock the rust off some of my old math skills. Most programmers can get away with very little math a lot of the time. A lot of very interesting programming involves a fair bit of math. That programming is generally being done by some guy with a Ph.D. in another field, and he's usually doing it in Fortran.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

"Warzones" as defined by who? The FAA didn't include this area in the area they warned US carriers to avoid in April. Should the airlines monitor the media for reports of SAM installation sightings?

Certain parts, apparently not including the area this plane was flying over.

Time to put a big pot of carbon on the barbie!

Oh, yes, that was it. "Now is a great time to unionize your labor!"

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.