Greetings,
welcome to another episode of TWIG. The week has been full of interesting ideas, blown clean out of the water and into space after clever and insightful comments and thoughts from my peers. Many have been playing with windows 7, and the rather heavy duty and slow Vista is finally being batted down. We are all excited about the semantic web developments, and there’s been a whole load of noise around real-time search (not such a new idea since you’ll find papers going back to ’94 at least on that). Google releasing an OS has also caused much noise and what a nice thing that is. I wrote a post a while back calling Google my “backend system“, I see it becoming that more and more and more…I hope you’re all well after this week and that you are happily awaiting the weekend to do some fun stuff.
(Remember to check out TGIF for more Geekiness)
Without further ado…
Cult stuff:
Unix conspiracy /n./
[ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix’s growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T’s competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T’s control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry.
In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus) — but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this `Unix virus’ theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation “Unix is snake oil” was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.)
[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its UNIX operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-UNIX distributions were beginning to make noise. --ESR]
Please send:
Sony Vaio P WiMAX Edition – It has broadband incorporated and it’s all small and tiny too.
Google OS – oh yes. I do want to try this out and I’m looking forward to it.
Wave Chaise - They say it’s for teenagers, but I say rubbish. I want one. How cool can a computing environment get?
Microsoft Surface – pop it flat on your table and use it as a touchy screen thing
Pixel sofa – it looks wonderful and it is full of colourful pixels
Lexeme of the week:
total disconnect: An extremely low-bandwidth human interaction. “It was a total disconnect. I spent half an hour explaining how this stuff worked, and he just didn’t get it.” (mainframe.org)
Code of the week:
my $depth = 16; # generate 16 Gray codes, 4 bits wide each
my @gray_codes = ( ’0′, ’1′ );
while(scalar(@gray_codes)<$depth)
{
my @forward_half=map{’0′.$_} @gray_codes;
my @reverse_half=map{’1′.$_} reverse @gray_codes);
@gray_codes=(@forward_half,@reverse_half);
}
(Frome here)
Geek tweet of the week:
“Life is a series of “if-then” clauses where you can now issue “print” statements like this for debugging purposes”. (@johnmaeda)
Time-sink of the week:
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