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Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 155 posts.
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Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
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Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
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8088 MPH: The final version
Although we were very happy with the win at Revision, we were not entirely happy with 8088 MPH as a whole. Because of the time pressure, there were some things we could not finish as well as we wan…
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Sleeping Through a Revolution
Letter to the Millenials 2
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Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi
“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
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Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)
This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
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A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…
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Porting third-party programs to TempleOS
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
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Greece
Greece is a remarkable country full of wonderful people, but along dimensions of development and governance, the place is plainly pretty fucked up. It has been fucked up that way for a long time, for decades at least . This has never been secret. Anyone who has visited Athens knows it has far more in common with…
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The Aol Chat Room Monitor Revolt (2014)
In 1999, America Online's volunteer chat room monitors sued the company for back wages. Do today's hot Internet companies risk the same fate?
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Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
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The Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
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The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
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Reasons the MI6 Story Is a Lie
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by…
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
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A Constructive Look at TempleOS
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
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NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
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They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
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Unix is not an acceptable Unix
The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?