I’ve spent an hour or two today watching fascinating talks on a site I found called TED. I’m not sure what TED stands for, but it is a conference held each year where interesting people speak about their ideas. It is in a similar vein to Edge Magazine, which I mentioned earlier this year.
The TED website hosts many videos of talks given at their conferences over the last few years, from such people as Daniel Dennet, Stephen Pinker and a number of other people who I respect greatly as thinkers. Each week they post new talks to the website, and there is a feed for these talks.
I’ve tried taking pictures of food several times. It is much harder than I imagined, the pictures often making it look like I ate a garish yet limp concoction. So it was to my surprise when, looking back through my iPhoto collection today, I spotted these two. The meat looks succulent and the salad crispy. I’m pleased, they came out surprisingly well.
The food is a simple steak sandwich. Marinade the steak for a few minutes to half an hour in some oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Whilst the steak is marinading, heat up a griddle pan, one of the heavy cast iron ones works a treat. When the pan is very hot, let the steak sizzle for a few minutes a side.
Several months ago I linked to a paper about Vista’s draconian DRM “features”. Today I came across an article on Microsoft’s TechNet that goes further and describes some exact circumstances when Vista will arbitrarily decide to stop access to premium-content. It is more than a little shocking.
Vista will only play back premium-content — basically, any HD content like HD-DVD, blue-ray or other purchased content — if it can guarantee the path taken by the media is “clean”. A path is clean if there is no way for it to be intercepted and copied on its way to the display. So far this may be seen as reasonable (at a push).
Two concepts — one from computing lore, the other from psychology — should be discussed together: code-read/understand-ability and the magic number seven. This article is about them, and how almost every coding practice you have ever read should be seen through the lens of the magic number seven.
The magic number seven refers to the amount of information which a person can store in short-term memory, their immediately available working-set of data. This can be thought of as the number of slots in short-term memory into which things can be temporarily stored.
When I was younger, I thought nothing of pirating software. The copied CDs and scrawled serial numbers are still in the bottom of my wardrobe. Copies of Office still run on computers, replete with their illegitimate serial codes, stolen software used daily to write documents and calculate totals.
Around four years ago I started using Linux, deleting my pirated copy of Windows XP a year later. Since then, my software has been fully licensed and I no longer think nothing of piracy1. Several aspects have come together to change my view.