Regular TomA continues a hot streak by asking, in response to my post on Holding Up The Sky, “Is the hacker support system robust?” That is: having noticed that open-source volunteers now have a large and increasing role in maintaining critical shared infrastructure like the Internet, is there a sustainability issue here? Once the old… Continue reading The infrastructure gnomes of tomorrow
On becoming a machine
A regular, TomA, asks: “If you could replace your organic body (in its entirety) with a machine, would you do it?” This is one of those questions where examining the implied premises is the most interesting thing about answering it…
Holding up the sky
During the last few years I’ve noticed a change in the meaning of my life – well, my life as a hacker, anyway. I had an exchange on a mailing list last night that made me think it’s not just me, that the same change has been sneaking up on a lot of us. It’s… Continue reading Holding up the sky
The moral equivalent of witchcraft
The New York Times is carrying an unusually in-depth story “What Happened to the Girls in Leroy? on an epidemic of twitching, stuttering, and tics among the high-school girls of a small town in upstate New York. The reporter didn’t go there, but I couldn’t help noticing strong parallels to what we know about the… Continue reading The moral equivalent of witchcraft
John Carter: the movie
I was pretty dubious about John Carter. It was one of those movies which, as a serious SF fan and historian, I have to see even given a quite high likelihood that it was going to offend me with aggressively stupid handling of its source material. Therefore I am surprised and pleased to report that… Continue reading John Carter: the movie
Return of the hacker ribbons
Penguicon (venue of the upcoming Friends of Armed & Dangerous party) is a combination science-fiction convention and Linux/open-source conference, two geek tastes that taste great together. One of Penguicon’s customs is that people wander around handing out affinity-group badge ribbons to those they deem worthy (or simply to be funny). In many past years I… Continue reading Return of the hacker ribbons
The Smartphone Wars: Back to the Old Normal
It begins to look like the 2012 holiday-season was an anomaly. comScore’s new numbers (for Jan 2012) are out; Android is resuming its long-term growth rate after a temporary slowdown, and Apple’s market share actually dropped slightly.
Penguicon 2012 party for friends of the blog
For those of you who will be in or near the metro Detroit area in late April of 2012, announcing…the Penguicon Friends of Armed & Dangerous party!
A civil rights victory
Today we scored what may be the most important civil-rights victory since the Heller ruling in 2008. Woollard v. Sheridan was found for the plaintiffs, and Maryland’s law requiring concealed-carry applicants to show “good and substantial reason” for their permit applications has been found unconstitutional.
Calling all open-source hardware engineers
How would you like to help fix the Internet? One of the efforts I’ve been contributing to during the last year is the Bufferbloat project, a group of experienced Internet engineers who believe that excessive buffering and poor queue-management strategies may be the real villains behind a lot of network problems commonly attributed to undercapacity.… Continue reading Calling all open-source hardware engineers
Ignoring the 5%
A thoughtful commenter objected in a procedural way to my open letter to Chris Dodd. He praised the letter and affirmed that I spoke for him in it, but said:
From Dave in my basement
Dave Taht is in my basement trying to use GPSD to set up NTP-independent time service on an WNDR3700 router, and having some problems. I’m upstairs teaching GPSD to emit a clock-drift message – both projects are because we’re trying to build a monitoring framework for accuracy-checking NTP. The following IRC exchange ensues: [11:31] dtaht2… Continue reading From Dave in my basement
An Open Letter to Chris Dodd
Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand… Continue reading An Open Letter to Chris Dodd
The Grey Lady weeps for Peter Gleick
So, all last week on one of my favorite mailing lists I was hearing various climate alarmists crowing about a document leak from the Heartland Institute that supposedly prooooved that it (and by extension all other anthropogenic-global-warming skeptics) was engaging in a nefarious campaign to suppress its opponents and trash the teaching of science in… Continue reading The Grey Lady weeps for Peter Gleick
Super Star Trek 2.1
I guess it’s paleo-game theme week. For your retrocomputing pleasure, here’s my Python forward-port of the 1973 University of Texas FORTRAN Trek game: Super Star Trek. Anybody old enough to remember TTYs probably played this on one. While it has accreted some features over time, it’s still functionally pretty close to the original FORTRAN Star… Continue reading Super Star Trek 2.1
VMS Empire 1.9 released
Recent discussion of the 4X game Eclipse reminded me of a responsibility. I’ve just shipped VMS Empire 1.9. This is a close descendent of the original solitaire Empire computer game that was the ur-ancestor of all 4X computer games, including Civilization and Master of Orion.
Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game
I’m a big fan of the game genre called “4X” – “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”. I’ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, Empire, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. Civilization is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear… Continue reading Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game
Generative science
I’m thinking about writing another book. I won’t disclose the title or topic yet, but there’s a bit of research for it I think can be usefully crowdsourced, and may also give a clue about the book for those of you interested. I’ve written before about the difference between descriptive and generative theories. To recap… Continue reading Generative science
I’ve settled on “Admired”
I’ve settled on Brad Thomas’s “Admired” with the light white skin as the new theme for this blog. It’s a relatively new theme and is being actively maintained with a support forum. which relieves my main worry about my old Live Steam theme – it’s not going to fall out of sync with the WordPress… Continue reading I’ve settled on “Admired”
Admire this?
Regulars: If you’re seeing the blog’s main page with a blue bar across the top, directly below the title, then you’re probably seeing the “Admire” theme. It’s an improvement over TwentyEleven, and I’ve figured out how to disable comment nesting. Let me know what you think: is this an improvement over the old Live Steam… Continue reading Admire this?