Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, December 8, 2003

Lecturing on parallel programming with MPI -- Comment()
Tomorrow and the next day I'll be organizing a course on parallel programming with MPI. I'm happy to note that the course is fully booked. See my essay on MPI for more information. Also, my guide on MPI is available on the web (in PDF format, written in Finnish).

-- Comment()
SCO, MPAA, RIAA jointly sue entire world: 'During a fictitious teleconference yesterday, three of America's most active intellectual property litigators announced that they have decided to pool their efforts and jointly file what they're calling "a reverse class action suit against every human being on the entire planet."'

A bad week for the SCO Group: "There are bad weeks and there are bad weeks, but few weeks have been so disastrously bad for the SCO Group as this one has. Yesterday SCO CEO Darl McBride was gaily flinging yet another open letter at the open source community. Let's take a look at a few of the things that went awry after McBride released that letter."

More and more spam -- Comment()
As predicted, there will be a record number of spam messages this month. A few weeks ago I had 184 spam messages in my spam folder. Now I have 317 messages. The folder only stores one week worth of spam, so I now get over 40 spam messages daily.

Fortunately, almost all spam messages are caught by the spam filters. I have filtering both on the server side and in Mac OS X mail, and only 0-2 messages get though daily.

Guide on mathematical software -- Comment()
Recently updated guide on mathematical software is now available on the web (pdf format, written in Finnish). This guide discusses problem-solving with mathematical software such as Matlab and Mathematica. The previous update of the guide was over five years ago, so there were quite a lof of changes.

I have also written reviews of Matlab 6.5 and Mathematica 4.2 on Mac OS X. I just updated the Matlab review with info on Panther, and G5 PowerMacs.

-- Comment()
McBride's New Open Letter on Copyrights: "An open letter was posted today by Darl McBride, where he restates his claim that the GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, patent laws, copyright laws, and the DMCA. Mostly he just builds up a false image of the Free Software Foundation and open source supporters claiming that they have no respect for intellectual property and believe copyrights should be eliminated, then attacks that image, AKA the straw man attack. Nothing we haven't seen before." [Slashdot]