Wednesday, April 04, 2007

I feel like I am living inside an Apple commercial.

I have just bought a bluetooth "dongle" (who comes up with these terms?) for my laptop, and it came with a booklet of installation instructions. There are 7 1/2 pages of instructions for Windows users (like me). They are followed by the instructions for OS X users that, rephrasing slightly, amount to "stick it in."

Most of the complications, by the way, arise from the fact that when you connect the device, Windows thinks it knows what it's doing, and it installs the wrong drivers. The installation program then has to run a script to uninstall them and re-install the right ones (the whole thing takes a while). This is actually an improvement over the previous installation program. I hope the 12-inch macbook pro comes out soon.

Not that it has anything to do with anything, but this is cute. (via cosmic variance.

Monday, April 02, 2007

And then the president pro-tempore of the Senate

After more than four years of service to the theory community, and beyond, Lance Fortnow has retired from his computational complexity blog, the first and most succesful of its kind. Bill Gasarch, however, will keep that hallowed green space alive. Donald Knuth is rumored to be next in the line of succession, after Bill tires of it.