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"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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Steve Jobs: 1955–2011
I didn’t know Steve. I never met him. I never worked for him. I never even got one of his famous one-liner email responses.
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Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the …
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This One Hurts: Dr. Walter Bortz on Dr. John McCarthy
John McCarthy died four days ago. He was 84. His obit in the “New York Times” made specific reference to his generally attributed parenthood of artificial intelligence. John was my good…
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Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released
The C64 conversion of Prince of Persia, based on the original Apple II code by Jordan Mechner has been released today. It requires a Commod...
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Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
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Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
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Unladen Swallow Retrospective
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
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The secret history of the about:jwz url
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
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Guido van Rossum: Before Python
This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog ...
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The strange story of etherpad
I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at making...
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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…
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Lovelace's Leap
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
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How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings
Here's an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings. In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the…
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Flash is dead. Long live the internet.
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…
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What Google Learned from Wave and Buzz
สล็อตเว็บตรง แตกง่าย ด้วยการเล่นผ่านโทรศัพท์มือถือสามารถเล่นได้ทุกที่ทุกเวลาตลอด 24 ชั่วโมง ทำให้ได้รับความนิยมอย่างแพร่หลายเหตุปัจจุบัน
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Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit
You have probably all heard the following story about Jobs meeting Knuth for the first time in 1983. Steve had managed to get Don Knuth, the legendary Stanford professor of computer science, to give a lunchtime lecture to the Mac team. Knuth is the author of at least a dozen books, including the massive and somewhat...
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The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)
This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which…
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Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
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Google Acquires Over 1,000 IBM Patents
While Google may have lost the recent bidding for Nortel's patent portfolio, they did quietly acquire over a 1,000 patents from IBM this past month.
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