Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020175 points23 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
Explains through a model of selling coconuts while value added taxes distort the economy less than sales taxes.
As I found out, Affinity Designer is a worthy rival to Adobe's sacred trinity for designers: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Excalidraw introduces browser-based end-to-end encryption using Web Cryptography APIs for secure, private drawing storage.
Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people’s Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter’s system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly. The hacker used that…
There are too many packages and too many dependencies, too deeply nested. Can we measure the problem? And what do we do about it?
At Mozilla, we want the web to be capable of running high-performance applications so that users and content authors can choose the safety, agency, and openness of the web platform. ...
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS
FPGAs can be seen as a bridge between the domains of hardware and software as their hardware operation can be reprogrammed using code, giving developers unprecedented flexibility. In advanced products that Antmicro helps its customers build, this flexibility to process parallel data often needs to be complemented with…
Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn't even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you ever wondered just how slow modern web development has made the web - Lynx will show you the meaning of haste. I use Lynx most…
New SBCL versions are usually released at the end of each month: check the Sourceforge File List to see the current version. The new features of all SBCL releases are listed below.
The era of USB-C has come. The other day I threw all other cables into a box, and bought a set of USB-C to USB-C, Lightning, and microUSB cables. USB-C chargers around the house, USB-C PD power bank, even a nice small USB-C dock that works with the Nintendo Switch if the charger can do the right voltage. It's glorious.
With our first beta release of Bootstrap 5, we're calling it on new features and breaking changes. From here on out, we're only fine-tuning features, bugs, and…
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.
Well, the title says it all!
When casting from YouTube to a Chromecast, sometimes the audio playback will skip and stutter. We can use VLC and Unix pipes to address this problem.
We created a centralized authentication service, called Identity, by building upon functionality from the OpenID Connect (OIDC) specification.
As a company grows, people and projects change. To continue to nurture the culture we want at GitHub, we’ve found it useful to remind ourselves what we aim for when…
Next.js 9.5 introduces Stable Incremental Static Regeneration, Custom Base Path, Redirects and Rewrites, Webpack 5 Beta, and more!
Founding a company is hard. You’ve got an infinite number of decisions to make while simultaneously trying to catch lightning in a bottle with creating something out of nothing. It’s even harder when you’re doing it alone. Being a solo founder, in many ways, stacks the deck against you. You’re left shouldering the…
Next.js 9.3 introduces new static-site generation improvements, native support for SCSS, reduced bundle sizes, static 404 pages, and more!
You can now create organization secrets, reducing the need to duplicate secrets across repositories. Access policies let you control which repositories have access to the organization secret Updating a secret…
Or, a case for using punctuation in Slack
Two days ago, ZDNet published this article: Meet the iPad, your work computer: These 10 apps make real productivity possible . These kinds of articles, where writers explain how they use their iPads productively, musicians talk about how the iPad is truly a professional tool, or painters show how they use the iPad for…
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
