TriNetre - Archive for October 25, 2005
(no longer updated)
Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved. (CBS News)
Why do I not find this surprising?
Via kottke.org remaindered links weblog I came across this beauty - Lone Star Statements, select one-star reviews from Amazon of books on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923.
Reading through the 'reviews' I was chuckling along until I read the review of 'Lord of the Flies' by William Golding that went:
I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me.
We had to study this book for our +12 ISC English course and hence this comparison between Golding's great work and Survivor dealt a harder blow than the rest of the reviews. I cannot even begin to express why comparing the two is wrong, at some many levels.
That brings me to the point of this post, are crap TV shows and movies spoiling the appreciation of literature? Living a busy life we do not seem to have the time to read books and ponder the finer points that the author is trying to guide one to, especially when capsulized easily digestible visual substitutes (or so they seem) are available?
If you want to compare Lord of the Flies, compare it to Battle Royale. At the least, the movie does show that all visual medium products are not crap :)
You must have heard of videos being watermarked and fingerprinted to trace the source of leaks. Now, it turns out that New Oxford American Dictionary had inserted a non-existent word to trace copying of materials from the dictionary.
A call was placed to Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of the second edition of NOAD. Upon being presented with the majority opinion, McKean confirmed that "esquivalience" was a fabricated word. She said that Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most copies of the book. (The New Yorker)
A couple of days ago, someone emailed me asking whether Srijith.Net had a privacy policy statement! I had always thought of my site as being small enough to escape without having a privacy policy.
But then I thought, why not? So now I have a slightly somber privacy policy of Srijith.Net
Anyone who has even a passing interest in issue of Internet governance should follow Karl Auerbach's blog. His recent post "Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance" is a must-read.
My supervisor Andy Tanenbaum has announced the release of Minix 3 along with a cute little mascot!
While loosely based on MINIX 2, in many ways it is fundamentally different from its predecessors. It is extremely compact, modular, and designed for very high reliability. The total amount of code running in kernel mode is under 3800 lines (vs. 2.5 million for Linux). Each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process under the supervision of a reincarnation server. If a driver crashes or gets into an infinite loop, the reincarnation server kills it and starts a fresh copy, without rebooting the operating system and without affecting running processes. MINIX 3 has a small memory footprint (it runs in 8 MB with tweaking) and may be suitable for embedded systems as well as PCs. Yet it is quite powerful and comes with over 300 popular UNIX utilities, including two C compilers, emacs, vi, and much more.
It is available as LiveCD and even as VMware image!
Just to clarify, I am not working on Minix 3, though I gave input on the 'qualities' of a racoon, some of which made to the short list - 'small, agile, cute, clever, and eat bugs' :)
