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The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 143 posts.
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by…
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Ethiopian Binary Math
Today, a witch doctor practices computer arithmetic. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The scene is a remote Ethiopian village in 1940. A Farmer offers his herd of 34 goats for sale…
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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Why didn't we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid? (1999)
We didn't patent VisiCalc at Software Arts because you really couldn't patent software prior to 1981, and VisiCalc was shown to the public in 1979.
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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First actual computer bug was found today, 66 years ago
On the 9th September, 1947, operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard University, found a bug. And, in so doing, made history.
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Message threading (1997-2002)
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
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The Z-80 has a 4-bit ALU. Here's how it works.
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
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The Rest of the Lenna Story
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”
(I know some people will be interested in a followup post to Don’t Fly During Ramadan . I plan on writing one, but this post happens to be timely.)
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Of Wizards and Magical Machines (2012)
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news…
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Turning the Apple //e into a lisp machine, part 1
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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When Einstein Met Tagore
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
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Some killjoys have removed the blink tag from Firefox
Some killjoys have removed the <blink> tag from Firefox. Dropped blink effect from text-decoration: blink; and completely removed <blink> element. Of course, <blink> still works on my sites. And with proper MILSPEC 3 units on, 1 unit off timing, as is right and proper, and which I believe the non-Unix versions of…
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Volvo Gave Away the Most Important Design They Ever Patented
In 1959, Volvo invented the 3 point seat belt we use today. Then they gave the design away for all other car manufacturers to use for free.
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Wired Love: a novel from 1880 that could have been written last week
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…