From a ZDNet story on the lack of IP addresses:
The history of IP is one of practicality and pragmatism mixed with idealism. First mooted in 1974, IP gradually accreted functions and standardisation and by the early 80s was standard in Unix.
"mooted"? Ok, so if you look it up you find that moot means "to bring up for discussion". But really, using it in a ZDNet article?
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
From this article by the Seattle Times:
An unusually creepy and clever form of identity theft has cropped up in Washington.
Here's how it works: Con artists prowl retail aisles on the lookout for victims. When a customer steps up to make a purchase, the thief pulls out a cell phone and calls the cashier. Posing as store security, the thief indicates there's a past problem with the customer.
Wanting to protect the store, the cashier then requests additional information from the customer, passing along driver's-license and credit-card numbers to "security."
This was an (apparently) isolated incident at the Sears in Shoreline, WA.
Sears spokeswoman Jan Drummond yesterday said the Shoreline incident was the first reported case of its kind among the chain's 870 department stores.
Drummond said the store had started an investigation immediately and was "still working on some aspects."
Drummond also said the store was reinforcing training of all retail employees to maintain confidentiality of information and was instructing them "not to provide information over the phone, no matter who the individual says they are."
The Shoreline cashier acted reasonably under the circumstances, Drummond maintained.
"This is a very clever thing," Drummond said of the scam. "It's very difficult to stay one step ahead of these guys and figure out where they will find the next vulnerability."
From David Brin's book, "The Transparent Society" published in 1998. This is from ch 7, in the section "A Need for Pragmatism" (pg 206 in my hardback edition):
As early as 1993, FBI director-designate Louis Freeh described how his agency perceived a looming danger [from widespread availability of encryption] and predicted, "The country will be unable to protect itself against terrorism, violent crime, foreign threats, drug trafficking, espionage, kidnapping, and other grave crimes."
As a mental experiment, let's go along with FBI director Freeh and try to envisage what might have happened if those bombers [in 1993] had actually succeeded in toppling both towers of New York's World Trade Center, killing tens of thousands. Or imagine that nuclear or bio-plague terrorists someday devastate a city. Now picture the public reaction if the FBI ever managed to show real (or exaggerated) evidence that they were impeded in preventing the disaster by an inability to tap coded transmissions sent by the conspirators. They would follow this proof with a petition for new powers, to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Such requests might be refused nine times in a row, before finally being granted on the tenth occasion. The important point is that once the bureaucracy gets a new prerogative of surveillance, it is unlikely ever to give it up again. The effect is like a ratchet that will creep relentlessly toward one kind of transparency, the kind that is unidirectional. A one-way mirror, under which we are all watched by officials, from on high.
Check out this preview series of articles (use the "next" links to navigate through). Pretty cool stuff.
You can go directly to some shots from a prototype 4 megapixel camera. The first is the complete image scaled down, the second is a 100% zoom. If you look close and see some artificats, these are jpeg so there are some compression artifacts from jpeg itself.
Below is an excerpt of the complete article. Here's a link to a nicely formatted HTML version. Here's the official link, but it's a zip file containing a text file, so it's not quite as friendly.
by Neal Stephenson
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
"Nothing is worse than an expert out of his field, and Microsoft is very good at office software."
— Robert Cringely in his 17 Jan 2002 column
The blurb below is from the 21 Jan 2002 issue of The Harrow Technology Report:
Fifteen years ago, when Pixar introduced its then-amazing computer-generated video titled "Luxo Jr.", it required 75 hours of Cray supercomputer time to render each second of photo realistic animated video. Today's GeForce 3 chip in many PCs can now render similar video in real time!
With computer performance increasing exponentially, it's easy to lose track of how far we've come. I remember being blown away by Luxo Jr. when it was first released, but now it's no big deal.
JavaWorld has a nice summary of Aspect Oriented Programming(AOP). This is the first part of a series that will focus on AspectJ, a Java implementation of AOP. But the first article is mostly language neutral.
Geeky sig on a post by slashdot reader Jon Abbot (but it made me laugh)…
A bash poem:
time for echo in canyon; do echo $echo $echo; done