It is now about fourteen months since, after receiving my second death threat, I started carrying a firearm almost constantly. This experience has taught me a few truths, some merely amusing but others with larger implications. The major lesson: people are amazingly oblivious to what they don’t expect to see. When I carry using a… Continue reading Fourteen months of carrying
Terry Pratchett ascends to the pantheon, alive!
Some years ago, in The Delusion of Expertise, I wrote about the memorable occasion in 2003 on which some friends and I were able to bestow on author Terry Pratchett the accolade of hacker, recognizing him as what he had always been: one of us. Now comes the news that as part of his preparations… Continue reading Terry Pratchett ascends to the pantheon, alive!
Needling Haystack
In mid-2009, just after Neda Soltan was shot down on a Tehran street, I was working with a group of hackers attempting to provide covert communications support to the Iranian dissident movement. I blogged about it at the time, received my second death threat as a result, and had a couple of interesting conversations with… Continue reading Needling Haystack
Pessimistic anarchism
I received email recently asking me to respond to an article in the Huffington Post, No Safe Harbor on Gulf Coast; Human Blood Tests Show Dangerous Levels of Toxic Exposure. Questioner’s English wasn’t very good, but the question he was trying to pose was how market anarchists like myself can oppose government action to mitigate… Continue reading Pessimistic anarchism
The smartphone wars: What Gassée has to say
This is interesting. Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Be Inc. and now a venture capitalist, has spotted what may be another prong of Google’s strategy; break the carriers’ term-contract system by driving the price of smartphones so far down that customers don’t need or want a carrier subsidy.
The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce
A few days ago, I observed that Google is not pushing back against cell carriers’ lockdown of Android phones as vigorously as I had expected in the wake of the Android 2.2 announcement. If this Twitter rumor is true, Google locked horns with the carriers and lost that confrontation, leading to the semi-discontinuance of the… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce
Engineering history
On a mailing list I frequent, a regular expressed doubt about the possibility that very small subgroups of a society (less than 5% of its population) can cause large changes in the overall direction of its evolution without long historical timespans to work in. But I know from experience that this can happen, because I’ve… Continue reading Engineering history
Eminent Domains: The First Time I Changed History
In a day or two I plan to do a blog post on the way engineering decisions can be critically important at cusp points in the history of society. In order for part of the argument in that post to make sense, my readers need to hear a story I’ve been hinting at in comments… Continue reading Eminent Domains: The First Time I Changed History
The smartphone wars: a cautious cheer for T-Mobile
T-Mobile announced the G-2 yesterday. They were, of course, the first carrier to ship an Android phone when they released the G-1 back in 2008. I think this announcement signals yet another phase change in the smartphone wars, in which carriers begin to back off the proprietary skins that have disfigured recent Android releases.
The social utility of hacker humor
I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on an ancient project of mine, C-INTERCAL, that’s an implementation of the longest-running joke in the history of computer languages. It’s an implementation, begun in 1990, of a language conceived in 1972 as a parody of programming languages of the 1960s. Now it’s nearly 40 years later,… Continue reading The social utility of hacker humor
The smartphone wars: a global perspective
While doing some research to check an assertion made by a commenter on More dispatches from the smartphone front I ran across excerpts from a very interesting report from investment analysts at Piper Jaffray on global smartphone market share and how they expect it to change in the next few years. I can’t get at… Continue reading The smartphone wars: a global perspective
More dispatches from the smartphone front
Four days ago I blogged about upgrading my old G-1 to CyanogenMOD and complained that the mod’s home site contained no high-level overview of the modding process to help pepople understand all the details in the modding instructions for individual devices. It took some days of research, but I have now fixed that problem. I… Continue reading More dispatches from the smartphone front
CyanogenMOD rocks my old G-1
I spent some time today rooting and reflashing my old G-1 so it’s jumped from stock Android 1.6 to Android 2.2. CyanogenMod is a truly impressive piece of work, with both snazzy surface polish and a lot of nice little hackerly touches like including a root console in the standard apps panel and easy access… Continue reading CyanogenMOD rocks my old G-1
Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree
This is the story of the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree, an essay in risk versus skepticism and verification in software development with a nod in the general direction of Arlo Guthrie. About three hours ago as I began to write, I delivered on a promise to probably my most distinguished customer ever – Dr. Donald Knuth.… Continue reading Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree
Three kinds of teleology
Some comments on my last post sidetracked into a discussion of evolution, teleology and design and under what circumstances the language of “purpose” or “intention” can reasonably applied to a natural system. I’ve had a new insight while thinking about that discussion, so I’m going to write about it a bit more. And yes, I… Continue reading Three kinds of teleology
Organic guilt
I have a confession to make. I buy “organic” food, and I feel rather guilty about it. My wife and I were in the local Wegman’s the other day (Wegman’s is worth a rant by itself; I’ll get back to Wegman’s) poking around in the “Nature’s Market” section where they keep the organic food. “Aha!”… Continue reading Organic guilt
Expended
I saw The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s I-want-to-be-a-blockbuster action flick, just after it opened. I found it a curiously listless affair, considering all the star power and special-effects money lavished on it, but it’s taken me a week to realize why. Stallone, who wrote and directed and stars in the film, misses his target by a… Continue reading Expended
I cast a wish into the air
Being admired by lots of open-source geeks can be useful in unexpected ways. Probably the most extreme example I can recall is the Linux user group that once asked me to speak at a conference in Kansas City and rewarded me by paying for the ammunition at a local gun range where I got to… Continue reading I cast a wish into the air
Oracle sues Google over Java implementation methods.
Oracle has just sued Google over implementation methods used in the Dalvik virtual machine at the heart of the Android operating system. The complaint alleges knowing and willful infringement of seven patents originally issued to Sun Microsystems. Oracle has retained Boies, Schiller & Flexner. One wonders if they’ll be any more competent than they were… Continue reading Oracle sues Google over Java implementation methods.
A world without “ESR”
One of my commenters speculated as follows: Perhaps I overestimate him, but I suspect that without Eric our choice would be Richard Stallman or Bill Gates without much in between. That isn’t a pretty picture. Maybe Linus Torvalds would have help fill the vacuum, or perhaps someone else would have stepped up. Because I think… Continue reading A world without “ESR”