Member for

15 years
Points
31.00

Recent Comments

Date Title Body
These two lists

Suggest to me you might not fare so well on an Implicit Association Test.

Some folk'll never lose a toe

But then again some folk'll

I've been waiting for

I've been waiting for Montana/Tennessee all offseason.

'Possible vacating of 02

'Possible vacating of 02 national championship."

The NCAA does not award a national championship.

I am going to boo a

I am going to boo a non-sarcastic use of smilies. Literal smilies are for little girls.

To be fair

The chant's between the upperclassmen and the underclassmen, and not directed at the other team or their fans. Supposedly they used to chant "Great Taste" and "Less Filling" back in the 80's.

For a second

I thought you were referring to Matt Millen's younger brother Hugh, not Hugh Millen the NFL player, which was entertaining.

Are you sure

Schad's not referring to the UM professor of psychology?

Rumor

The rumor at work today was that Iowa was considering pulling out of the Insight Bowl due to the number of expected suspensions. It will be an interesting press conference tomorrow.

Plus

Plus, it's "fewer than" because wins are countable.

Luck

The injuries are not good but I don't think "luck" has cost us any games. It may have even helped us beat Temple when their stud RB went out with an injury. The problem is obvious in the preseason photo of our starting offensive line:

Penn State O-Line

Also, I heard Stefen Wisniewski prefers little spoon.

250
Hey

At least nobody ripped someone else's balls off.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/stories/091207dntexokla…

Something about this poll is invalid

And it's not Tim's choices, it's something with the deltas.  How can USC stay at #22 from last week, but MSU drops one spot to #23?  Were both teams ranked #22 last week? Is it possible to rank two teams at the same spot? Smells like a bug in the code.

As a former college corner

I have to disagree.  I considered myself good against the run and if I couldn't meet someone with momentum, it became a tripping game.  You can't win most wrestling matches with 220 lb running backs.  At best you can wrangle and hope for help.

Aaronson

Aaronson is just taking his default position w/r/t this problem.  He's been in Europe for a week and hasn't seriously read the paper.  Terrence Tao, on Dick Lipton's blog, has pointed out there are counterexamples to a few of the refutations that give Deolalikar some wiggle room.  This is a tough scenario for the Internet crowd to get a feel about; the closest example is Andrew Wiles publishing a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, being told it was wrong, then taking nearly a year to fix it.

This is a reasonable point

To me, Simmons seems like possibly the greatest guy on the planet to grab a beer with.  He has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture and he's the best at picking and weaving these strands into a compelling narrative. But I have never been reading a column of his and been absolutely shocked by something he wrote, the way I have with, say, Chuck Klosterman or Carl Sagan or David Foster Wallace, to pick three names currently on my bookshelf.  I don't think I'd buy his book.

CrossOver Office

As a Linux user, this directly affects me since they do not make a Linux version of iTunes.

You probably are aware, but iTunes briefly ran on Linux with the help of CrossOver Office until Apple began to actively fight their work.  Apple's put a lot of effort into obfuscating and encrypting the wire protocols they use for iTunes-to-iTunes and iTunes-to-iPod communication, to prevent development on other applications and operating systems, and for DRM-related reasons.  The best bet at this point is to run Windows in a virtual machine if someone wants iTunes on Linux.

UI Design

UI design is more than just skinning, though you're right that that's where their products get a lot of their flair.  It's more about thinking about what the user is trying to accomplish and reimagining the steps he could take to get there.  One example off the top of my head is: initial attempts to reproduce a cursor/mouse on smartphones with a two-axis nub, so that users could navigate as if on a desktop, failed miserably.  The ingenuity by Apple to reintroduce a nearly 40 year old technology in multitouch screens was fantastic and solved the problem quite neatly, at least in this engineer's opinion.

I think Apple has produced a ton of cool stuff

Hell, the roots of OS X are in the Mach operating system developed at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon.  I even once ported Bell Labs' Plan 9 OS to the iMac G4 and Mac Mini.  I think hating the whole company is wrong - they have world-class UI designers and good engineers.  It was weak when they dropped the PowerPC architecture in favor of Intel's, but the economic argument was strong.  I just think they're going to lose or concede total control over their platform the same way Microsoft did for many of the same reasons, and that's a decent reason not to buy an iPhone right now.

Many interpretations are possible

I'm just saying, how annoyed would you be if you had to buy all of your desktop or laptop applications through Microsoft's app store and they reserved publishing rights and could even remotely disable them on your desktop if they got into a huff with the developing company?  The average quality of the user experience would absolutely improve, but I doubt it's better for the industry as a whole.

Microsoft

At this point Microsoft has removed many of the original criticisms of Windows, or at least the ones I remember - the inability to change which programs (Microsoft's) launch by default for various media types, the inability to separate and remove Internet Explorer from the operating system, purposefully hiding performance advantages in their APIs from 3rd party developers, and other less important ones.

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to about stealing Windows from Steve Jobs - Xerox invented the most of today's graphical desktop UI and gets most of the credit in the research world, at least.  Are you talking about the idea of packaging and selling the PC as a home workstation?

Apple

If you want to know my reason, it's that Apple is behaving similarly to '90s-era Microsoft.  Thanks to a combination of development and aggressive business tactics (i.e. hard work) they own the majority market share of a powerful platform.  They now want to leverage this to control how the Internet is presented to mobile users, under the guise of open and free standards.  The blow-up they had with Adobe was the most shallow moment in tech news this year - they proclaimed, "We're going to ditch this propietary platform for delivering Internet video that we have no control over, and we're going to our new, free one based on the H.264 codec, and we'll carry you to freedom with us." but the catch is that H.264 is not free either, it requires a proprietary codec that smaller websites are not going to have the money to purchase (or their licenses could be outright denied).  It is more expensive than developing with Adobe's software.

The business majors on here might suggest this is just a firm acting rationally. I've chosen to not reward this behavior and took my money elsewhere.  A lot of people probably don't care about this.  Those people are probably not Linux users.

BEAT THE LIMEYS

That's all, I'm off to the bar.

American beer

Yuengling is fantastic if you live anywhere on/near the east coast.

They have some history

Penn State robbed Nebraska of a perfect season in 1982 with the help of a terrible officiating call, then went on to win the national championship; in 1994, Nebraska claimed both national titles despite Penn State's 11-0 (8-0) undefeated season, their second in the Big Ten.

My preference

My preference is to not go witty, or at least not cheap witty, and focus on something honest.  Anything cute will become endlessly lame years into the actual work ("Google", "eBay" and the alarmingly named "Yahoo!" fall into this category for me). My two favorite business names ever are "General Electric" and "International Business Machines".  Here is an Achewood link that sums up my feelings.  High-brow suggestion, at the risk of falling into the trap I've laid for myself: something like "Entropy Solutions".  Lower-brow: "Cleaning Your Mess".

Impugn

Interesting word choice.  Impugn derives from the Italian word impugno which means "to attack" (with the Latin prefix "im-" [not] and root "-pugnus" [fist] implying nonphysically) but the usage has shifted over the past few centuries to mean calling into question, I'm guessing due to its use in law.  It doesn't necessarily mean to affect adversely anymore.  In that sense, last August was hardly the first impugnment of Rodriguez's integrity or character*.  I feel we're seeing some first-class lawyering here - impugn is technically used correctly to describe "self-appointed pundits" questioning Rodriguez, and also implies to the casual reader the Free Press Jihad that the athletic department cannot come out and directly say.

*Do these mean different things? PR babble, to me.

Part of it started there, too.

The DHARMA Initiative was started by two Michigan doctoral candidates.

I think they're going to kill

I think they're going to kill off Jack.  Right now the end seems too obvious, and these producers love making a mess.

Haters gonna hate

Haters gonna hate

Physical hack If you have physical access to a server, you can snoop the private information it uses to hide its communication with its users by tricking it into thinking its hardware is failing. Some clever electrical engineers out there might use this to decipher DRM keys stored on DVRs or iPods or whatever, but it is pretty unlikely to find a practical application. Plus, most computer scientists would tell you if that somebody has access to your hardware, you are already hosed. If that explanation has earned me a two-sentence soapbox: the Engadget people don't understand what they're talking about when they say "until RSA hopefully fixes the flaw" because the while this paper suggests a new class of attacks, the attacks themselves are dependent on the physical implementation of the algorithm. You should track these types of stories on Slashdot instead, where they're not perfect either, but their user community is far superior. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/04/1954259/Researchers-Find-Way-T…
my guess You're probably not engaging him in a way that he finds worthwhile. I've traded emails with him a few times over the last four years, so I can attest that he does read and respond to some. Shorter emails are better. Also, 'idiot' is a bit strong - dude is a Brookings scholar. I would call what he wrote here lazy. Brian's argument is better, and it's because he's thought more deeply about what's going on. I doubt Gregg spent more than an hour researching his argument.
On a related note When I was going through training to become a high school referee, one piece of conventional wisdom that came up a lot was "former players tend to become bad referees".
M1EK Got the banhammer from Black Shoe Diaries, if you'd like an indicator on how valuable M1EK's contributions are.
Link to some debate http://forum.officiating.com/football/54935-fed-block-back.html Looks like it is a judgment call; some refs will call it, some won't.
Holy Shit dude Pretty much everyone on the blog has agreed that Penn State didn't belong in the Top 25 prior to this game. It is some crazy revisionist history to label them "what has been a top ten team"
small quibble PSU has beaten OSU three times this decade ('01, '05 and '08)