Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing

Here is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Apple in advertising. It is kind of funny in the sense of a what-the-heck-is-going-on thing. It is hard to tell if anything is actually advertised. The trick is to wait until the end and look for the symbol that Microsoft uses for Windows Vista.

jerryleecooper, that is. Mr. Cooper is a frequent poster and proponent of Microsoft Vista on the ZDNet forums. He has quite a cult following for his often hilarious comments regarding Linux. I’ll be posting some of these ZDNet forum comments below. They for personal, noncommercial use and are used with permission from CNET Networks, Inc., Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

Other jerryleecooper sites: The Return of JerryLeeCooper, JerryLeeCooper Fan Site

——–

On the topic of “Why Linux will not displace Windows”

that wont work without THEFT of intellectual property

Linux looks very interesting, even if some of the screen colours and menu options appear to be a little out of the ordinary.

But you are missing a vital point, a point which takes some experience and depth of knowledge in the field of computers. You see, when a computer boots up, it needs to load various drivers and then load various services. This happens long before the operating system and other applications are available.

Linux is a marvellous operating system in its own right, and even comes in several different flavours. However, as good as these flavours are, they first need Microsoft Windows to load the services prior to use.

In Linux, the open office might be the default for editing your wordfiles, and you might prefer ubuntu brown over the grassy knoll of the windows desktop, but mark my words young man – without the windows drivers sitting below the visible surface, allowing the linus to talk to the hardware, it is without worth.

And so, by choosing your linux as an alternative to windows on the desktop, you still need a windows licence to run this operating system through the windows drivers to talk to the hardware. Linux is only a code, it cannot perform the low level function.

My point being, young man, that unless you intend to pirate and steal the Windows drivers and services, how is using the linux going to save money ? Well ? It seems that no linux fan can ever provide a straight answer to that question !

May as well just stay legal, run the Windows drivers, and run Office on the desktop instead of the linus.

^^^^^^^^^^^
Read the rest of this entry »

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Follow the link to read more of the very funny satirical review of the latest Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows XP.

While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we’ve all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.

As we’re more than aware, Vista Ultimate comes at a premium. For an additional $160 over the Premium SKU price, Ultimate gives you a complete backup and restore option, BitLocker Drive encryption, the ever so popular Windows Fax & Scan, and the “Ultimate Extras.” But what started with a promise of “Extras” by summer, quickly turned into an apology from Microsoft and the eventual release of DreamScene and Windows Hold ‘Em (among others) today. And while each of the “Extras” runs just fine, Microsoft’s “Extras” blunder is just another reason why the company must abandon Vista before it’s too late. …

Continue reading…

A interesting take on Microsoft’s new operating system. I haven’t used Vista yet so I can’t comment too much, but what I’ve heard from classmates that got it with their new computer is that they are not too happy. For all its graphical appeal, they’ve said that much of the current software doesn’t work, has bugs, drivers are missing, complicates things rather than keeping it simple and efficient, and requires a top-of-the-line computer in order to begin to take advantage of all the “features.” These comments are coming from people that are familiar with computers and those that are novices.

All I can say is that Microsoft better watch out when Apple’s Leopard gets released in about a month. Tiger already does much of what Vista does and more and Leopard is going to be a step above Tiger.

Here’s the obligatory “switch to Mac” post by none other than Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks: Once you go Mac

And he even just recently did a commercial for HP!

Yesterday it took me about 5 hours to install Windows XP! The basis of the story is that I have an old (but still pretty fast) Toshiba laptop (5105-S607 for those interested). I had been running Linux on it until the hard drive crashed about a year and a half ago. I upgraded to a Powerbook G4, which I still have and love. Though the hard drive did not work, I had a roommate that used it via a Linux LiveCD. He just had to remember to email himself his documents often because if it crashed he lost all his documents.

Anyway, I’ll tell more of the details later, but there is an organization that I’m donating the laptop to. I found a pretty cheap hard drive on Ebay, put it in the computer, and began reinstalling Windows. The actual installation only took about 40 minutes and required minimal human input and only restarted twice I believe (once to copy the install files and a second time upon completing the install). The other 4+ hours were spent running Windows Update. The version of Windows XP Pro that I was installing was dated to August of 2002. I had over four years of security updates to install!
Read the rest of this entry »

I started using Dvorak at the start of the school year, September 2004 and tried to use it as much as possible. This meant that I would use it when typing anything that wasn’t too long. I was still too slow to type a paper or long email in an reasonable amount of time. But now I’ve been using it ever since and have gotten quite fast, though not quite as fast as I once was in QWERTY. I can still feel myself slowly improving and once I start practicing with a typing tutor (dvorak-ng) I’m sure that I’ll get faster than I was before. Typing in Dvorak is kind of cool. It’s still a relatively obscure term. It’s fun to watch when people try to type on my Dvorak keymap. Since I deleted Windows from my computer and solely use Linux, I had gotten very competent at using the bash (similar to DOS) prompt. Relearning the tightly engrained bash combinations (ls, cp, mv, cd, uptime, grep, etc, etc) proved to be the most challenging aspect of learning Dvorak.

Here’s a really good Dvorak resource: Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard

Edit (July 1st, 2005): I’m so fully switched over to Dvorak that now I have to almost hunt and peck to type in QWERTY!

By TechWeb News

Bill Gates’ keynote presentation Wednesday night at the Consumer Electronics Show didn’t quite go according to plan: glitches, including a dreaded “Blue Screen of Death,” interrupted the show several times.

Microsoft’s chairman, who shared the stage with late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien, kept his cool when Microsoft Media Center crashed during the presentation, and an Xbox displayed the blue screen of death.

As the Xbox went down for the count, the Microsoft executive running that part of the presentation, Garrett Young, said, “This is a little bit of demo karma, sorry, I’m out of system memory apparently. Yeah, so just imagine, if you will, that I was customizing my car and doing some really cool stuff.”

O’Brien played to the crowd during the crashes with lines like “right now nine people are being fired,” and “Who’s in charge of Microsoft? Oh.”

TNO has produced the largest digital panoramic photo in the world. So, what do we mean by large? After all, modern consumer cameras can easily take a picture with 5 million pixels. Well, we are talking about a photo of completely different dimensions. One with 2.5 billion pixels – that’s 500 times more pixels. If this photo were printed, it would measure 6.67 m by 2.67 m (300 dpi). The photograph shows Delft and its surroundings in the autumn of 2004. It was taken the top of the Electrical Engineering faculty of Delft University, at a height of about 100 m, by TNO.

Here’s the Slashdot link.

The coolest part is that they have the entire picture hooked up to a flash app. You can see the entire view and then specifically zoom to see something in the distance. I was even able to view the license plate and makes of some of the cars in the picture!