“There are three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” (Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.) It is widely understood that early adopters of Bitcoin, who showed up on the scene in the days when mining difficulty was low, are sitting pretty, and will continue […]
This post is of interest only to those who study Bitcoin. If you have never heard of Bitcoin, read my previous post on the subject. Shitcoin is to be a distributed network for attaching “dirt” to particular bitcoins when certain conditions are met, in a manner which allows Bitcoin users to post bonds in order […]
The Mac Defender trojan scare confirmed what everyone has suspected all along: that Apple’s products are vulnerable to malware after all! But we can do better than that! My new Computer Defender trojan, working on the same proven principles as Mac Defender, will eagerly attack a Mac, a PC, Commodore, Lisp Machine, UNIVAC, arithmometer, and […]
How many of your waking hours have you wasted in babysitting machine processes which ought to be entirely hidden and automatic? In the use of “job-creating” technologies? Next time you find yourself doing so, consider this: “Improvements come in many ways, sometimes after much thought and after many experimental failures. Sometimes they flash upon clever […]
Ah, Clojure. The nice, clean replacement for Common Lisp — as some would have you believe. I haven’t forgotten about you. Clojure is a nice, clean replacement for Common Lisp only if thumbs are nice, clean replacements for cars. But wait, we’re dealing with something more than a mere lightweight hitchhiker on the JVM: “…Clojure’s […]
Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold “old wine in new bottles,” bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small. Why? Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers. Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively. The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from […]
Forget for a moment about the security of your computer. Instead ask yourself: how secure is your body? Don’t ask a computer security “professional.” Instead, ask an anatomist. Or better yet, a trauma surgeon. Or a prison medic. A weapon no deadlier than a pencil, driven through soft flesh into your abdominal cavity, brings a […]
Note: this post is obsolete. The now-infamous iPhone / iPad SDK Section 3.3.1 reads: “3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit […]
Yossi Kreinin throws down the gauntlet to all those who believe that a CPU ought to be designed specifically around the needs of high-level languages: Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren’t “brain-damaged”/”built to run C”/”a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)”? You do think so? […]
