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Who killed Prolog?
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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The IPv6 mess (2002)
Each computer on the Internet has its own public IPv4 address, similar to a phone number: for example, 131.193.178.181. The target of each packet of data is identified by a public IPv4 address.
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The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
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Chrome will use gpu to render pages
For some time now, there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system. New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS tr...
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The sad evolution of wikis
I set up my first wiki in 2001, in preparation for hiring our very first software developer employee. Until then, software development at N...
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2010 Nobel Prize for Peace Awarded to Liu Xiaobo
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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Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies
Chocolat (2000, Mirimax) wasn’t a bad movie.
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Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
Warning: the following is excessively technical, and is intended more for the sake of the next poor sod who types "vista dns round robin resolution" into Google than it is for my actual friends list. (Except for a few of you. And you know who you are.) Also, since I want this to be searchable on…
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MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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The Diskette That Blew Trixter's Mind
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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How a WWII Jet Fighter Was Designed in 150 days & shipped in six months
Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed …
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Satoshi Kon's last words
Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at the age of 46. ( NY Times obituary .) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document , which his family has posthumously posted…
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Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
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Chrome Dev build comes with Flash 10.1 beta "integrated"
Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used web browser plug-in. It enables a wide range of applications and content on the Internet, from g...
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Paul Rand's Unused Ford Logo from 1966
Paul Rands Unused Ford Logo Design Concept from 1966, and Recreated in Vector by The Logo Smith | Smithographics — Logo Designer, Blogger & Photographer; over 30 Years Experience in: Logo Design & Brand Identity Design.
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Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
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Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1
No hackerspace is complete without it's own rockin' supercomputer - and when a Gibson isn't available, a Cray-1 will have to do. My 1/10-scale,
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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…
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The Capacitor Plague
I woke up from a nap to a loud pop and a smell of burning plastic. The source turned out to be one of the most precious and important to me digital devices: a ReadyNAS NV+, a small silver box with over a terabyte of hard drives that store my backups, music, and photos. Network attached storage (NAS) is an engineering…