Articles
June 7, 2010
Simplicity Revisited
A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted...
December 2, 2009
The Latest from the Large Hadron Collider
As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you've probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous, given our level of expertise. So he or she or it travels...
September 29, 2009
The Latest from Gordon Bell
A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It's a project called "MyLifeBits," and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall, by Bell and Jim Gemmell. For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan...
June 26, 2009
Kodachrome Dying: The Fading Away of the Analogue?
Tuesday morning. Guardian read of the day... And a shocking news - for me: Kodak is taking its 'Kodachrome' product range off the market. Kodak's decision is quite understandable. That type of film, which most of those among us below 30 do not really remember, does not sell any more with the rise...
June 8, 2009
Those Anniversaries We Love ... And Those We Avoid...
A quick glance at the calendar reminded me the other day that my family birthdays' season is starting up as every year... This got me to think about the computing birthdays passed during the last decade or so... A quick stroll on-line and so we have had so far, at least, those of: the transistor,...
April 29, 2009
Geocities
By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the...
April 17, 2009
Pirate Bay, pirates of the modern virtual world
So the verdict is in. After being indicted in February for copyright infringement and the promotion of illegal file-sharing, The Pirate Bay has finally - maybe not so surprisingly - lost its case against the Swedish government. That means one year imprisonment for the four leaders of The Pirate...
March 10, 2009
Computers in Moving Pictures, Then and Now
As part of a search for material for an animation for the local popular science festival, I went back looking out for videos and films usable for computing history. Returning, hopeful, to the on-line prelinger Internet Archive, three videos emerged out, one was On Guard! The Story of SAGE, a film...
February 23, 2009
From Berkeley's 'Giant Brains' to Chess Playing Computers...
A couple of weeks ago, Evan Koblentz, president of MARCH, non-profit user group for vintage computer collectors, asked the SIGCIS members' opinion as regards to E.C. Berkeley's paternity of the expression 'Giant Brains'. Given his famous eponymous 1949 Giant Brains or Machines that Think, of which...
January 30, 2009
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
Last week Palm introduced a new smartphone, designed to compete with Apple's iPhone. It is an amazing device, with all sorts of features that you could hardly imagine could fit on something that small. But there's a price--and it is a lot more than the retail price of the phone. In coming out...
January 2, 2009
New Year Thoughts
By now you've all heard about the Microsoft Zune bug that was caused by its software having difficulty dealing with a leap year. On at least one other post I talked about the problems the Gregorian calendar gives computer programmers (actually it was Church officials, which is sort of the same...
November 28, 2008
Bell Telephone Antwerp's American Ways
While in the just-over hectic fortnight spent at pre-preparing for a project proposal with the FNRS, the Belgian funding agency for scientific research, I got the sad news that Nicolas Rouche, one of the Belgian pioneers who had helped our research on the Machine Mathématique IRSIA-FNRS had died...