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Slashdot reports that the sex.com domain name sold for $14 million. Recall that people spend billions every year buying software, which effectively costs nothing to copy. The best route, these days, to become really rich is to find a way to create something that effectively costs nothing to…
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Google was eating all my bandwidth!
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Some of you who tried to access my web site in recent days have noticed that it was getting increasingly sluggish. In an earlier post, I reported that Google accounted for 25% of my page hits, sometimes much more. As it turns out, these two issues are related. Google was eating all my bandwidth. I…
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Peter Turney sent me a pointer to Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers which is somewhat old (1994) book made available online. Here are some of the chapter titles (all are available online): WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (ECSE)? AN ACADEMIC…
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Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers
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JOLAP versus the Oracle Java API
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Meetings == bad
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I just stumbled on the Java 4K Game Programming Contest. This looks like an excellent contest for programmers out there trying to get into the video game industry or just trying to prove their hacking skills: The Java 4K Programming Contest is the ultimate byte-squeezing Java challenge! Using only…
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Some years ago (in 2000), the Java OLAP (JOLAP) spec. was proposed and it was finally ratified by all parties (including Oracle, Sun, Apple but not IBM and Microsoft). One point that has been puzzling me is why JOLAP wasn’t more widely adopted, at least partially. (Update: though the Final JOLAP…
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According to Education Guardian, meetings are bad: (…) having too many meetings (…) may have negative effects on the individual. As one who goes to great extends to avoid meetings and any synchronous event, I think we definitively need to move from a synchronous culture (meeting people at…
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Matthew is reporting that technorati now allows you to plot word usage frequency over time in the blogosphere. Here’s the usage of the word “segmentation” over time: I think BlogPulse has been offering this sort of things for some time. I’m confused by the relationship between these various…
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Ok, Ernie linked to the Best Blonde Joke Ever! I’ve got to say, it is amazingly funny.
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I just had a look at the browser stats for the visits to my site. The results are strange. Googlebot seems to be taking up a huge share of the traffic. I think I have read an explanation somewhere, maybe it was on Tim Bray’s site. Nevertheless, these numbers are…
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I’m having fun with Java Sound under Linux, though my troubles are probably not Linux specific. My setup is that I have a sound card plus a USB microphone. Both are correctly configured and I have the two devices appear as /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1. Using kamix, I initially made sure that the alsa…
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My French XML Course content has been updated. You can download the lecture notes for free as well as browse my version of the web site (Firefox is required). The entire content of the course is in XML, and I generate the PDF automagically by piecing together everything. There is a lot of XHTML…
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Optimal Algorithms for Unimodal Regression
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State-of-the-art in automated translation
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I don’t usually post abstracts of papers other than my own here, but this one is particularly significant to me though I don’t know the author. This paper gives optimal algorithms for determining real-valued univariate unimodal regressions, that is, for determining the optimal regression which…
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Véronis compares Systran and Reverso, two popular automated translation tools. In order to compare them, I take a sentence in English, have it translated in French, and then back. This has the benefit that even if you don’t read French, you can appreciate the quality of the tool. I start with…
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Michael wants his CPU cycles back! Anyhow, using some benchmarking, we can make comparisons between languages (or rather, some implementations). Here are some possible conclusions (using an AMD CPU which is what I own): Python is faster than Perl. Python is faster than Ruby by a wide…