The Libertarian Power Grid of the 1890s New York City

Published at: 12:03 am - Wednesday March 18 2009

The image on the left is the original 1890s NYC grid of power and telegraph cables, built by a hodgepodge of competing wire-running firms. A blizzard blew all of it down, causing chaos. After this, the city decreed that all cables are to be buried and passed regulations governing how it is to be done. […]

Posted in: Hot Air, Memory, SoftwareSucks by Stanislav 19 Comments

The Hardware Culture, or: What They Build, Works! Can We Say the Same?

Published at: 01:03 am - Sunday March 08 2009

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? […]

Posted in: Hardware, Hot Air, ModestProposal, NonLoper, SoftwareSucks by Stanislav 14 Comments

Simplicity: The Lost Virtue.

Published at: 08:03 pm - Monday March 02 2009

The author of LoseTheOS comments on the lost treasure of simplicity in computing: “When I was a kid, you could put a line on the screen in two lines of BASIC code.  I had a book which literally told what everything… in my computer did. … Average people typed-in programs from magazines and, typically, knew […]

Posted in: NonLoper, ShouldersGiants by Stanislav 1 Comment