1
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 68 posts.
2
1960s IT department
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
3
James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation
Science historian James Burke’s entire iconic Connections series, tracing the origin of innovation, is now available for free online.
4
Windows-NT vs. CP/M
Microsoft has come out with a number of benchmarks and comparison papers championing the fact that Windows-NT is much better than Linux. I find such comparisons fascinating, but rather than rehash this argument, I've decided to create my own comparison. Not of Windows-NT vs. Linux, that's been done. But of Windows-NT…
5
Paul Rand's Unused Ford Logo from 1966
Paul Rands Unused Ford Logo Design Concept from 1966, and Recreated in Vector by The Logo Smith | Smithographics — Logo Designer, Blogger & Photographer; over 30 Years Experience in: Logo Design & Brand Identity Design.
6
BYTE, the most beloved computer-magazine brand of all, is coming back.
What's the most-loved computer magazine of all time? There's really only one contender: BYTE, which was founded in 1975 and ceased print publication a dozen years ago. If you worked in computer magazines, as I did, you got used to old-timers comparing your publication unfavorably to BYTE. (And actua
7
A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning
Chelsea Manning enlisted in the United States Army in 2007. Back then, she was known as Bradley Manning and struggled with gender identity disorder. This identity crisis made it difficult for Manning to fit into the military’s masculine and patriarchal environment. Throughout Manning’s career in the military, it was…
8
A Homebrew 8-Bit Computer
Sadly, I was born a couple years too late to grow up with an 8-bit home computer. (though I did use Apple IIs in elementary school.) In an attempt to compensate, and relive a childhood I never had, I've decided to design and build my own 8-bit home computer.
9
10
Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
(en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We…
11
How Ultima Online rares were born
Amaranthar in the comment thread on the last post referred to “rares” in Ultima Online as a feature. They weren’t really, though. They were a bug .
12
13
14
Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
In September 2005 the kids and I took several very accurate cesium atomic clocks from home and parked 5400 feet up Mt Rainier (the volcano near Seattle) for a full two days. The goal was to see if the clocks actually gained time, even if billionths of a second, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity…
15
The time I hacked my high school
When I was in high school, I started the Chess Club. I needed money to buy chess sets and chess cl...
16
How the pantheon has lasted 2000 years without steel in its concrete
This famous building stands in the business district of Rome--much as it was built some 18 centuries ago. Amazingly, it has withstood the ravages of both the elements and war permitting a firsthand view of a unique product constructed by Roman hands. Now, it is exposed to acid rain and fumes from passing automobiles…
17
The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, l…
18
19
Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP
Nothing in the news media yet, but many folks on Twitter and colleague Nassim Taleb are reporting that the father of fractal geometry is dead at age 85. We’re n
20
21
22
23
24
25
Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
26
27
The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
28
Why the iPhone will fail (2007)
The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself aga...
29
The sad evolution of wikis
I set up my first wiki in 2001, in preparation for hiring our very first software developer employee. Until then, software development at N...
30
Who killed Prolog?
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…