Tootfinder

"What has not changed in 50 years is the fact we are still using centralized architectures, prone to government intrusion and privacy leaks. Maybe it is time to think about a “Post Cloud” era where information is distributed instead of centralized. Of course this raises questions of trust, cryptography, security and collaboration, but the technology to build such systems already exists. It is more of a question of policy and education than of technology."

Somebody Else's Computer As A Service
On November 12, 1990, a 35 year-old Bill Gates introduced his "Information at your Fingertips" concept during his keynote at COMDEX. The PC, he said, would become "more personal," integrating "fax, voice and electronic mail," and providing "easy access to a broad range of information." More or less at the same time, Tim Berners-Lee was giving the final touches to the first web browser and web server software ever put in production. Bill Gates was right; as any Internet user can easily confirm 3…

My new year resolution is simple:
1. Working,
2. Sleeping,
3. Commuting with bycycle.
Well, sleeping and commuting with bycycle are seemingly very simple, but cycling is very life changing to me.
Anxiety and depression are coming now and then. But compared to before, my mental, social and physical health are top-notch now.
My depression and anxiety are at the lowest. And I insist to focus on bycycle and sleeping to make my life even more stable.

Matt Murray saying that WaPo will no longer write for "one slice of the audience" demonizes the strategy of fiercely reporting on Trump that made it successful (Derek Thompson/@dkthomp)
https://x.com/dkthomp/status/2019351378603155700

Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) on X
This part of the Matt Murray email to WaPo staffers makes me most depressed about the paper's future. What you've got here is a media company where the owner has not only overhauled strategy but also required that new leadership pursue a Bad Strategy and demonize the very

This piece by @… just hits different. So good.
“The "problem" was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. [……

"Retrocomputing emerges not only as a fun, recreational activity, but also as one with widely applicable skills, particularly for those working in sustainable computing, and those spreading its use in regions of the world where it has not yet reached peak maturity, and where refurbishing old hardware is an effective way to raise standards of living through computer tech. In this age of rising temperatures and rising oceans, reusing old computers is a very valuable skill."

Return to Innocence
The pages of this magazine have often orbited around the subject of retrocomputing. Take, for example, the editions about sustainability, computer museums, hardware, hobbies, gaming, operating systems, or the one about BASIC published last summer. If you pay attention, you most probably have realized how much retrocomputing has grown in popularity in the past few decades, with more and more people learning on YouTube or TikTok how to replace the batteries or leaking capacitors from the motherbo…

Different Corners III ▶️
不同的角落 III ▶️
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Fujifilm NEOPAN SS, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

"This single task of managing memory has proven to be one of the most difficult, let alone to grasp and understand, but most importantly, to get right.
Because not getting this right meant crashes, security issues, resource shortages, unhappy customers, and lots of white hair. To make things worse, pretty much every programming language comes these days with their own ideas of how to keep track of things on the heap."

Souvenir
On Monday, June 6th, 2011, after Steve Jobs' last public appearance as a keynote speaker, took place the "Developer Tools Kickoff" session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC. That day, Chris Lattner, creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language, introduced a new feature of the Objective-C language to thunderous applause. This feature, still present in Swift, is known as "Automatic Reference Counting", or ARC.

"One workload I now support would cost an estimated £6000 per month to run on one of the large cloud providers, which would allow me to purchase the actual hardware in use four times over every year. But “spinning up an instance” today using free credits means you can worry about that cost later, whereas ordering a box from Dell means waiting two to three business days by which time the hackathon is over."

Five Computers
There is no direct evidence that Thomas Watson, Sr. predicted in 1943 that there would be "a world market for five computers". First, he probably didn't know about computers back then: in the 1940s computers were classified research projects at the UK Government Code and Cipher School and the US Army, while Watson's IBM were famously involved with the other side during the war.

"For others, the exploration of old computer magazines brings the possibility of running old software. Many computer magazines, and not only the programming kind, used to bundle reams of source code listings across their pages, and many an enthusiast would painstakingly type those code bits by hand, in order to have a new utility, to learn a new programming language, or to enjoy a new game."

Retro Gaming Museum
Reviewing old computers magazines of yore is a pastime most often associated to retrocomputing enthusiasts. It is part of that feeling of bliss that comes with the realization that there used to be a different world, when software was simpler, when corporations did not have that much power, and when programming languages were more approachable; in short, a more innocent time.

"Perhaps the biggest difference between the two novels is that Goldratt’s protagonist gets promoted after demonstrating the success of his techniques, while Kim’s is promoted while it’s still clear to him and his manager that he has no clue what he’s doing. This ass-backwards career progression is necessary to make the book realistic in a software development context."

Play It Again, Sam
While the phrase "Play it again, Sam" never occurs in the film Casablanca, the sentiment does. Sam is asked to play "As time goes by", a song about how some things remain the same despite the passage of time. The song was originally part of a 1931 Broadway musical, and perhaps ironically due to a musician's union strike when Casablanca was released, the studio were unable to release a new version of the song as a record. Instead, they re-issued the original version, recorded over a decade earli…