Speeds and Feeds

There's a website out there that presents itself as the textual equivalent of Flickr-- that is, users can upload any kind of text document, and the site provides public access to all these documents.

But unlike Flickr, it's pretty obvious that the primary attraction of this site in practical terms is that it's full of copyrighted documents, and the operators apparently don't much care. Much of the content there isn't pirated, but it's still a pirate site as far as I'm concerned, and so… Read more

Remember how I said that Moore's Law is "the full-employment act for computer pundits"?

In the smaller niche of microprocessor journalism, there used to be another topic that was always good for a column: RISC vs. CISC.

In the early days of computing, a CPU (central processing unit) was a series of refrigerator-size cabinets in the computer room. Memory capacity was very limited. Computer scientists would analyze how programs executed on these machines and look for ways to shorten and speed up their programs by defining… Read more

After my Monday-morning blog post reporting on some preliminary battery-life testing for the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project, I was contacted by Jim Gettys, vice president software for OLPC.

This early testing showed that the current Beta 4 development systems achieve only a little over 5 hours of operation from a… Read more

(Before I get started with this review, a note of caution about one of my other gizmos. My Sony PRS-500 eBook reader has developed some kind of display problem; the leftmost inch of the screen no longer updates. I checked around online and the going price for this repair appears to be about $250. That's on a gizmo that sells for $279 on Amazon right now. Not a good deal. I'll check with Sony and update this information if I get a better price.)

I've been carrying around a cheap nylon briefcase I bought at the Apple Company Store about ten years ago. I bought it because it had a front pocket the perfect size for my… Read more

A friend sent me a link to the transcript of a talk that author Peter Wayner gave at Google last year.

It's basically about how Google could provide an incentive for newspapers and bloggers to do more original reporting rather than just rehashing previously published reports. (Yes, I know that's what I'm doing here-- but I've done a lot of genuine on-site reporting here lately, from Hot Chips, Zonbu headquarters, and Siggraph-- so I can see both sides of the issue.)

Wayner presents some interesting figures. He says… Read more

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes reran a segment on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project originally broadcast in May. I missed it the first time and never got around to watching it online (in Windows video format here, for example; there's a full transcript on olpctalks.com).

Hearing OLPC representative Walter Bender repeat the claim of "10 or 12 hours" of battery life "with heavy use" reminded me of… Read more

I've been reading blogs since before the term "blog" came into popular use. Pioneers of the format such as Jerry Pournelle (jerrypournelle.com) and Robert Bruce Thompson (ttgnet.com) just called their sites "day books" or "journals," terms carried over from the world of paper and pen.

As a reader, all I really cared about was… Read more

In July, in Kansas City, Missouri, there was a convention commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert A. Heinlein: the Heinlein Centennial.

Heinlein, who lived from 7 July 1907 to 8 May 1988, was the most accomplished and influential science-fiction writer of the 20th century. I suppose some people might disagree, but… Read more

A few days before Apple started selling the iPhone, I decided I wasn't going to buy one, and I said… Read more