151
Crazy Eddie Fraud
The Crazy Eddie fraud may appear smaller and gentler than the massive billion-dollar frauds exposed in recent times
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 202 posts.
152
The Man Who Almost Never Succeeded (2012)
## The Rather Sad Story of the Father of American Photography It’s been a long time since I did a photography history article. I generally prefer the early days of photography. People just were, I…
153
Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts
Vintage computers and retro gaming
154
155
The Other Half
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
156
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
157
Bruce Lee’s Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy… actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than …
158
Why is there ancient Greek text on Afghan banknotes?
This, as I probably don’t need to tell you, is a banknote. To be specific, it’s a 10-afghani banknote printed in 2004 (my thanks to Dr Amelia Dowler of the BM for that astonishingly pre…
159
Id Software Programming Principles
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
160
161
162
The Great Moon Hoax
On August 25, 1835 the <i>New York Sun</i> announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle. Over the course of the next week the <i>Sun</i>…
163
Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
164
Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad
This is a map showing where all of the characters originated in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. I know Greece is small by today’s standards, but it was surprising
165
166
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
167
168
169
Happy 15th Birthday .NET
Today marks the 15th anniversary since .NET debuted to the world. On February 13th, 2002, the first version of .NET was released as part of Visual Studio.NET. It seems just like yesterday when Microsoft was building its “Next Generation Windows Services” and unleashed a new level of productivity with Visual…
170
171
Can I Talk to that William Fellow? He was so Helpful (2009)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
172
Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
173
How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
174
175
NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened
Had Steve Jobs’ first company not bought his second, history likely would have been very different. Apple might not exist today. No iPhone. But what could have happened to NeXT?
176
Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
177
178
How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
179
How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
180