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Tag Archives: fail

Bitter Sweet Symphony

Monday, November 23, 2009

One of the biggest copyright failures of copyright law ever is the The Verve song “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” The distinctive string sample comes from an orchestral arrangement of “The Last Time” by The Rolling Stones. Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? The two bands do share a taste in the I – flat [...]

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Filed in autobio, music | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Biz Markie gets the copyright smackdown

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Biz Markie. Who doesn’t love him? Our broken intellectual property system, that’s who.

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Filed in music | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Soft failure and the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Why do computers crash? What can you do about it? It’s very rare for your computer to physically break. Most of the routine glitches you experience happen at the software level, as different running programs compete for your computer’s finite memory resources. To understand and hopefully avoid crashes, it first helps to know a little [...]

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Filed in hardware, software | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Be brave, go ahead and divide by zero

Thursday, May 14, 2009

When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?

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Filed in math, software | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over. It’s hard to [...]

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Filed in software, video games | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)