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The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
Tomorrow I head for “ Sci Foo ” at the Googleplex. I proposed a discussion session there, “Are We Becoming Less Cooperative? If So, Why?” and I’d like to use today’s blog to help…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 202 posts.
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X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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Memories of Kurt Gödel
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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HyperCard On The Archive
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
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Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
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Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
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Languages Which Almost Became CSS
When Tim Berners-Lee announced HTML in 1991 there was no method of styling pages. How a given HTML tag was rendered was determined by the browser, often with significant input from the user’s preferences
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MS Paint is here to stay
MS Paint fans rejoice: The original art app isn’t going anywhere – except to the Windows Store for free!
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The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.
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Pascal at Apple
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
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Hidden dungeons of the London Underground
Underneath the London Underground, lies another city
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Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
Google trends, Apple, Google Chrome and plenty of developers put a cross on Flash. In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different. Credentials I wrote my first line of code in ActionScript 2.0 it was 13 years ago and it was streamlined with the style of web. Big boom of
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“You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product”
Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Claire Wolfe? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
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I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announ
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Steve Jobs and the Missing “Intel Inside” Sticker
I’d be quite content if I never again heard the Intel “bong” at the end of every PC ad.
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Gambiarra: repair culture (2015)
Maker culture has gained a lot of ground in the last few years. Maybe too much, in fact. We can of course ignore those people who are only, as always, surfing the current wave of hype. They seldom have any clue of the ideas they are selling themselves with anyway. But it also feels as though everybody else is talking…
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Fixing bugs like it's 1988
I grew up in the 80's, the decade home computers went from curiosity to mainstream. In primary school we had several Philips P2000T home com...
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The story of the Slovak national top-level domain
The top level domain of Slovakia is operated by a private company which abuses its monopoly. In the Central Europe it is something unusual.
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Typecasting: The Use and Misuse of Period Typography in Movies (2001)
Chocolat (2000, Mirimax) wasn’t a bad movie.
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Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
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Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
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Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe
Students brewed an ancient beer during class with Stanford archaeologist Li Liu, who discovered evidence of earliest beer-making in China as part of her recent research.