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--- meetings:pub-2007-05-01-rc [2007/05/04 13:14] – Created based on my email. ralph
+++ meetings:pub-2007-05-01-rc [2008/08/13 23:16] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
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+====== 2007-05-01 The Royal Oak, Dorchester ======
+Present: George, Marti, Ralph, and Terry.
+The pub had a real ale event on!  Some of the things talked about:
+Dell to use Ubuntu on Linux PCs.
+http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/6610901.stm
+How man tries to apply logic to make events fit a model with hindsight
+when in reality unexpected but massively significant events defy
+prediction.  These "unknown unknowns" are exemplified by the black swan.
+Until it was first observed, all swans had been white, therefore all
+swans were white.  //The Black Swan// is a book by Nassim Taleb that
+warns against the hubris of prediction.
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb
+Mark Shuttleworth's company, Canonical, is registered on the Isle of Man
+which has a different tax regime to the UK.
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Isle_of_Man
+He made his money with Thwarte.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte
+Charles Simonyi of Microsoft was the most recent space tourist.
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi
+The lmsensors project to show hardware stats, e.g. CPU temperature.  Try
+the sensors(1) command.  http://www.lm-sensors.org/
+valgrind, a means of detecting invalid memory accesses and other coding
+faults.  http://valgrind.org/
+Three questions asked by Google in a technical phone call interview.
+http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232757&cid=18925745
+  - Imagine you have two marbles and a 100-story building. You are told that the marbles will break if they are dropped from a certain floor. Figure out a way, as effectivly as possible, how high you can drop the marbles before they break. Remember, it could be the 1st floor, it could be the 99th.
+  - Let's say you have a computer with 2M RAM. This computer has a hard drive (with lots of free space) and a 100M file which you should sort. Let me know how you, as effectivly as possible, sort the file.
+  - We take the computer from the previous question and replace the hard drive with a network adapter. You have no local storage but the RAM. You will receive one million eight-digit phone numbers through a TCP stream which you shall sort in RAM. You are now allowed to send any data before all the numbers have been sorted. How would you solve this?
+How job interviews used to be.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_round
+Capuchin monkeys observed engaging in prostitution.
+http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/20/0330232
+Communism, whether it can work or not, and benevolent dictators.
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
+Kenya's leaders, Kenyatta and arap Moi.
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jomo_Kenyatta
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_arap_Moi
+The Computer History Museums new exhibit on Chess, including Claude
+Shannon and Alan Turing's involvement, and how Ken Thompson, creator of
+Unix, was involved with Belle.
+http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/index.php
+A nice photo of Ken, that's Dennis Ritchie, creator of C, in the
+background on the right.
+http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/full_record.php?iid=stl-431e1a07c0d41
+Robert Hyatt's Crafty chess program, and how 64 bit words allows an
+alternative method of storing board positions, e.g. white_pawns is
+x00ff_0000_0000_0000 at the start of a game.
+http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/pubs.html
+--- //Ralph Corderoy//