You are currently browsing the daily archive for September 18th, 2007.
Suppose you have an array of floating point numbers with each index into the array being an id number corresponding to some external data structure. You want to sort this array, but in doing so you would destroy the references to the id numbers, since the indexes of the array would no longer correspond to the correct id numbers in the external data structure. For example, let’s say we are dealing with customers of a store and each value in the array is their current balance.
balances = {25.61, 13.45, 89.75, 21.2, 96.50}
Each index in the balances array corresponds to an index in some other array, say:
names = {"Marjory Stewart-Baxter", "Hubert Cumberdale", "Barbara Logan-Price", "Jeremy Fisher", "Mable"}
A professor in my department (primarily affiliated with the LTI and the CSD, but also the MLD and HCII) invented the smiley 25 years ago on a bboard here at CMU. The fateful message that spawned the smiley is reproduced below [source]:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to markthings that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
In honor of the 25th birthday of the smiley, the CS department is holding a TG where Scott will inaugurate an annual Smiley Prize. I’m probably not going to be able to make that, though, on account of other engagements.
As someone who has been getting the New York Times headlines by email everyday since 9/11, the announcement to get rid of their archaic pay-to-view Times Select service is great news. Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch thinks this will herald the end of an age when content wasn’t free (aka Web 1.0). The Wall Street Journal was recently acquired by News Corp, so speculation has been running high that the owners of MySpace will wise up to the new world order of the intertubes and kill their pay for content service too.
While this would be a good thing, it really won’t impact me all that much since I would only have read the occasional story locked behind the Times‘ barricade. I don’t read the WSJ at all (possibly because it’s pay-to-view), so that won’t affect me either. What I want to see lose their pay-to-view statuses are science magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist. These guys are still clutching onto this old model like a drowning man on a life preserver. As Duncan pointed out, you can still make money without imposing these draconian restrictions.
