It was a long time ago that getting a computer to play chess at a human level was just a far off goal. Things have changed since then. It looks like there has been steady improvement until something changed in about 2004. The paradigm shift at that time in chess engines got David Post at [...]
Wireless Telegraphy in Australia is a history of early radio communications efforts between Australia and England. It makes me think of the opening of the movie Dr. No where the Bermuda agent is assassinated as his secretary opens the radio link to London. There were large installations involved in transcontinental communications, even up through the [...]
When Canonical decided to offer the Unity desktop with its Ubuntu distribution, it set off a firestorm. A lot of geeks went ballistic and are still spraying shrapnel all over the place. For instance, see Ubuntu 11.10 without Unity shell shock and its comments. What happened is that the Gnome menu driven interface was changed. [...]
If you were 18, what do you really need to know? Rightwing News has a list and it’s good for more than just the 18 year old crowd. There are at least six key areas of your life: health, career, romantic, social, money, and religion. If you neglect any one of those areas, it will [...]
The I’net is like a neighborhood with a bunch of teenagers constantly checking the doors and windows to see if they can get into houses and do something to brag about their successes. Seldom is it worse than just trespassing and graffiti but every now and then the behavior can have more important consequences such [...]
Gizmodo describes a stereo mic for your iphone with the idea that it’d make for a “sneaky bootlegging tool.” That’s really only the old way to do it. One of these days, a group of concert-goers, maybe tens or even hundreds strong, will team up. Each will record the concert on their personal communications device. [...]
The media is full of obits on Steve Jobs and many don’t provide any real insight into his actual role as an entrepreneur. There are a few stories appearing that get past the idolatry and into the reality. Ryan Whitwam describes How Steve Jobs killed the stylus and made smartphones usable. While most of the [...]
Perhaps the premier computing effort these days is at the search engines. On one side is the folks trying to game the system to drive people to their website. On the other is the search engine companies trying to provide the service their users demand. Michael Martinez describes Why you cannot reverse engineer Google’s algorithm. [...]
Ideas to Integrated Circuits links to a number of interesting, first person, stories about the development of modern electronic devices such as the GFI. “The Characterization process of first silicon was an attempt to feel out how an IC would run in production. Things like beta and resistance would vary month to month. So a [...]
The ‘net neutrality’ thing was about billing and bundling. I’net access is something usually bundled. The cable companies bundle it as an add-on to their traditional media delivery. Telephone companies added it to their land line voice services. Cell phone companies bundle it in with their voice, and now, text services. When it comes to [...]