A half-written draft of this piece has been living on my HDD for nearly half a year. Recent discussions re: the subject of “aging and death of PC irons” prompted me to dust it off and quickly post. Regularly-scheduled programming will resume shortly…
“The [...]
Linux. ( 1991 — 2018. )
No disrespect is intended for Stepan Mitrofanovich Gudimov (1913 – 1941), died heroically in aerial ramming maneuver… whose beautiful tomb I stole here. But IMHO a dead project of Linux’s stature deserves a tomb, even if only an imaginary and stolen one. Especially a stolen project…
The Seiko DPU414 is a small (110mm paper tape, ~90mm printable width) thermal printer, similar to the type used with cash registers everywhere, but slightly wider. It is quite unremarkable apart from the fact that no thermal printer of similar or greater width appears to be widely available; and also for the price (typically around [...]
Stay classy, YCombinator.
The WWW of Brian Krebs, perhaps the second-most-worshiped1 patron saint to all English-speaking “computer security” charlatans — is sitting sadly offline today on account of a ~TB/sec DDOS flood.2
His titanic bandwidth, it turns out, was provided gratis by Akamai – spamatronicists par excellence and industrial-scale enablers of everything that makes the modern-day WWW a rancid [...]
But, of course – it won’t.
But let’s imagine that it were in someone’s financial – hell, geopolitical! interest – to convince the public that it will. The New York Times editorial might go like this: ’you may have heard of tungsten, a metal, just like gallium; the latter, a favourite among stage magicians for melting at body temperature…’
Now, it [...]
From the ‘Dear Idiots, ‘1984′ is Not a How-To Guide’ department:
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What [...]
A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts.
I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, eager [...]
The following is a conversation I recently had with an alert and inquisitive reader. It has been redacted for brevity; handles/names/irrelevant things have been removed. Some text has been turned into links to relevant material.
Anyone still reading this page for reasons related to its original purpose is encouraged to read this; it may help to [...]
If you came here via a search engine, you were probably looking for Pierre Cartier’s wonderful mini-biography of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck – from which I shamelessly stole the title. Please go straight there. Otherwise…
“And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. …”
The abbot smiled. “No one should. [...]