Apparently an offshoot of SETI is getting tired of waiting – they want to send, not receive. Quite a lot of their pals disagree. The result is a hell of a thread. Curiously, it’s the Russians who are keenest on howling into the void to see if anyone howls back. The questions are spectacular, not…
Read More This is cool. Very coolAccording to IEEE Spectrum, the Holmdel Laboratory, the centre of Bell Labs in their heroic age, is probably going to be knocked down. The structure was once home to the world’s best privately-run research organisation, with some 6,000 scientists and engineers and a library second to none. The work carried out there included the development…
Read More Creative destruction and the Holmdel LabSoldiers in Iraq, dissatisfied with the limited and censored Internet service available officially, build their own. It’s impressive, even though the main demand is to download filthy pictures and order foodstuffs forbidden by the chain of command – which, I suppose, gives it a sort of charm. As one of Robert Graves’ comrades said, marching…
Read More The trench art of networkingI’ve expected a lot of good things from Nokia’s decision to open up to software developers. They’ve been putting more and more stuff in open source, up to and including chunks of the Series 60 OS itself, and have provided a lot of tools, APIs, etc, not to mention a version of Python for S60.…
Read More Mobile Web ServersJoshua Bloch, of Google Labs, reports on his chance discovery of a software bug that affects practically every binary search and mergesort function in the world. The problem came to light when a Java application failed, and the failure was traced to part of the Java kernel Bloch originally programmed. The bug was reported to…
Read More The world’s oldest bugNot so long ago I posted regarding the LEO computer and the question of what a British-dominated geek culture would look like. This post was picked up by a certain high-traffic blog, with the result that it saw shack rocking levels of page requests all week. Some answers from readers included a recommendation of Francis…
Read More More on alternate geek history