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History & Retro Computing
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4208

Zawinski's Law

“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…

4209

P.S.: The Best of Intentions

Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.

4214

Some AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…

4220

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released

[08 Oct 2009] Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition [07 Oct 2009] Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD port [23 Sep 2009] First Debian Mini Conference to be held in Taiwan [05 Sep 2009] Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 updated [06 Aug 2009] 2009 Annual International Debian Conference finished…

4229

The Meaning of ‘Hack’

“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…