two talks and a gala time

We had 2 talks this friday.. One by Richard Stallman, the Free software guru, and the other on aware home by Dr Slonim.

The talk by RSM was great, albeit not awesome though. ANybody who had read the wiki article on him probly knew what was coming.. But he is a relly good speaker, and the St.iGNUcius attire really dons well on him. A couple of interesting snippets from his talk,

"When u talk abt free software, think abt it as free speech, not free beer". I think that really captures it all.. free in FS is to be free to do ethically right things in a free manner.

He also ranted about how linux is just a small piece in the big jigsaw puzzle that is GNU, and how crediting Linus for everything open source was not the right way to go abt it.. Infact Linus, made the linux kernel open by mistake. The right way to call a linux distro is to call it GNU+linux..

We got a couple of free stickers, but his autographs meant that u buy his books.. Not sure if that was right on his part.. but if thats the way he wants it.. its fine.. after all, its his signature..

The second talk was the most animated talk here at UMBC i have seen for a long time. Not because of the speaker, but due to an esteemed member of the audience, who also happens to be a prof here. The talk was how they were building an intelligent home for the aged, and how CS meets Medicine kinda talk. The slides looked more like a brochure.. surely not for the techies out there..

Sometime though the talk, the esteemed member asked how would all this improve the state of the art in CS.. a valid question i would say.. and what metrics they were using to see if their solution made any sense. The speaker wasnt happy with the question, and shot back why he dint think about this so called simple idea, when he was at NASA. I liked the reply which went, "I was more concerned with the universe up there than the beds down here". Kindof threw the entire audience into a ball of laughter.

Anyways, during lunch, i was cribbing to anand about how i was getting no ideas out of reading papers. He gave a valid suggestion.. Read papers to understand the problems, not to find solutions. Kindof simple, but to the point i thought.

Had a bad headache... slept at 645 and woke up at 9 in the morning.. God.. save me..