The obvious question finally asked!

And there you go, when it makes sense, on exit, we get a nice an non intrusive:

Hope to see it as a de facto standard.

SilverLight Streaming

Here's a nice freebie for us all: Silverlight Streaming. The concept is simple: Microsoft gives us 4GB of free streaming, limited to 5 min. videos and a limited traffic, with no fees. If the monthly traffic limit is reached we are probably in a position to use the ad model to pay for the traffic itself. Nice way to start streaming without risks.

Thanks for the tip, José António.

Turing and the Halting Problem

Petzold has just posted about it. He argues:

The association of Turing with the "halting problem" is an anachronism. Turing's original conception in his 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" was of machines that compute real numbers. Because real numbers (in general) have an infinite number of digits, these machines run forever. A machine that gets into a non-printing loop, or which enters a configuration that doesn't exist, will no longer compute digits of the real number and hence (in Turing's terms) is "unsatisfactory."

And continues:

As the concept of the Turing Machine was later generalized and applied to problems of computability, it became convenient to reformulate the machine. Instead of computing real numbers, these reformulated machines calculate a single value of a number-theoretic function and then halt. The satisfactory and unsatisfactory machines were swapped: In this new concept, machines that halted were "good" machines and machines that didn't halt were not.

I'll probably have to read his Annotated Turing to clear this out, I also holded this as true.

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

After yet another geek talk with the some younger old geeks (yeap, Diogo and Pita, again!...), the Ackermann function just dropped by. I was just googling about it when I stumbled uppon this great (and funny) essay: Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

The essay starts:

In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win."

And continues saying:

The contest’s results are never quite what I’d hope. Once, a seventh-grade boy filled his card with a string of successive 9’s. Like many other big-number tyros, he sought to maximize his number by stuffing a 9 into every place value. Had he chosen easy-to-write 1’s rather than curvaceous 9’s, his number could have been millions of times bigger. He still would been decimated, though, by the girl he was up against, who wrote a string of 9’s followed by the superscript ⁹⁹⁹. Aha! An exponential: a number multiplied by itself 999 times. Noticing this innovation, I declared the girl’s victory without bothering to count the 9’s on the cards.

And about the Turing Machine goes on:

Set a tape head loose on a sequence of symbols, and it might stop eventually, or it might run forever—like the fabled programmer who gets stuck in the shower because the instructions on the shampoo bottle read "lather, rinse, repeat."

One of my favorites:

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers.

Hilarious! Please take some time an read the essay. It's pilled with great stories, Computer Science references, gurus and concepts, lots of interesting data, and the writing is just fabulous.

Interviewing people

Every now and then I get to interview people. My interviews are based on a FreeMind diagram that acts kind of like a meta script.

I believe this kind of interview can give me a pretty good idea of the candidate's skills and attitude, but is probably not deep enough from the technical point of view.

I've found a site that can help me here. Well the purpose of the site seems to be helping candidates getting a great interview, but it still is a great resource for technical questions. The site is FEDIA.NET, and stands for Free EDucational Interview Answers on the NET.

Jack of All Trades

Though not the opinion of Ferriss, I think Jack of All Trades is a dying breed on our business. The thing is our business body of knowledge is getting too fat to be comprehended by one individual. These are bad news for me, an old Jack of All Trades in this industry.

Some years ago I started to feel the need to some specialization, and opted for the Microsoft branch. Now even on Microsoft, the technology is getting too wide to be known by one guy, so I'm considering dropping some of my new areas of interest. It's sad...

European Community: 497 - Microsoft: 0

The European Justice Court has just confirmed the 497 Million fine for Breaches of European Competition Law.

Oops...