Recent content by jedishrfu

Our school has an ethics policy in place for it. We can use AI for research but we must check its results. We can use it to help us write better but not do our writing for us ala Grammarly. On taking open book tests, we can only rely on our notes and cheatsheets to work out answers. No phones...

Didn’t Claude Shannon and his collaborator create a shor computer to predict where the ball will land? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer?wprov=sfti1#1960s

Every computer architecture is different. I started out on a mainframe. The core instruction set was general purpose but tended to slowdown COBOL. The solution was to add the extended instruction set which used packed decimal format which improved COBOL’s math processing dramatically. It...

But the mass isnt balanced. If a fireman on the ground holds the rope then he will feel 200 hundred pounds of force pulling on the rope at his end. From the hanging fireman, he only feels 100 pounds pulling on his hands. For every foot he pulls the rope raises him 6 inches. Hence he...

Your self-haul with a single fixed pulley has a 2:1 MA in the ideal case: half the force, twice the rope. The confusion clears the moment you draw the free-body diagram and remember that the rope lifts you at two contact points (harness and hands). However, for someone pulling you up from the...

Looking to the past for an actor analogy brings up the popularity of the old micro computers of the 1980s. As an example, the Commodore 64 was probably the most popular of the bunch. Nowadays folks will play its games on the Vice emulator which does a phenomenal job of replicating its...

As this thread has run its course, its a good time to close it to posterity. Jedi

What about an evolving desktop background of photos she might like? You could do the program I mentioned earlier where it starts up and greets her in different ways and then returns control back to the session. Repeated greetings can get really boring.

Your posts here are like those from the movie Little Buddha, where Jessie, a young boy and the possible reincarnation of a Tibetan teacher, quizzes the senior monk, Lama Norbu, on Buddhism. After answering some of his inexhaustible stream of questions, Lama Norbu says to Jessie, "You ask an...

A contractor once came to our site to customize a software product we bought. He opened a terminal session and worked quite well using VIM. I asked him why he used VIM over EMACS. His response was simple because VIM is everywhere. It's true, EMACS is very powerful, but it needs to be installed...

Things discussed in your courses don't always reflect the reality of professional programmers and the stress they are under to meet schedules, deadlines, and fix test team defects...

Another point against pseudo code is updates. Often programmers fix a defect and comment about what was wrong and how they fixed it, but they don't go back and adjust the pseudo code; they just don't.

This is a Wikipedia page of astronomy acronyms listing HESS, DESI, GAIA, but not IceCube, ACT, or GRAND. However, IceCube is also known as ICL or IC, and it is in the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomy_acronyms

It's sad to learn of another great scientist passing the torch. The Big Bang theorists have won out over Hoyle's and Narlikar's steady state universe theory. But it survives as a historically important alternative cosmology and as an inspiration for exploring modifications of gravity.

At IBM, code attribution was important. At the completion of a major project copyright statements would added as comments and sometimes as embedded strings. Also code scans were done to identify non IBM code. In one case, the programmer had left an attribution to say what magazine or book he...