The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage…
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld-ROM…
Anybody who has ever taken an advanced computer architecture class has heard of the CDC6600, which was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969. It was the machine that put Seymour Cray…
Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership
I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves…
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it , and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020cited by 42History & Retro Computing details
This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
Regular readers of this blog will have seen me reference “Arcade Raids” in previous articles. This might create images in your head of hooded gangs of arcade collectors breaking into warehouses in …
TL;DR: Down and to the right I wasn’t going to do this post until I learned IBM PR is out browbeating reporters (one of the rare activities where the company is still world class) for being “too ha…
We've all been there, right? You debug something, you try telnet to see if a port is open, and now you're stuck in a telnet session.
Over 3,000 military maps, views and prints collected by King George III have been digitised and published online free to visit by the Royal Collection
Of all the technologies against infectious disease, which mattered most? A data-driven approach
About the rise and fall of Microsoft's take on the web.
Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position…
Why didn't the FOAF standard give us distributed social networking in the 2000s?
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
Prelude In late 2004, I was the Program Manager for Microsoft’s clipart website, delivering a million pieces of clipart to Microsoft Office customers every day. It was great fun. But there wa…
The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…
