Nov 10th, 2008 · While reading the two and a half year old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and …
Oct 28th, 2008 · API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to …
Sep 22nd, 2008 · Wietse Venema started out as a physicist, but became interested in the security of the programs he wrote to control his physics experiments. He went on to create several well-known network and security tools, including the Security Administrator's Tool …
Sep 19th, 2008 · Techworld has an in-depth chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell and his philosophy of do one thing, and do it well. Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing …
Sep 14th, 2008 · The Reverend Professor Michael Reiss, a biologist and Anglican priest, is the education director for the Royal Society, the venerable British science institution. He recently called for creationism to be discussed in science classes, not just in religion …
Aug 30th, 2008 · Anti-Globalism suggests an article at Science News on the passing of Henri Cartan, one of the founding members of a strange and influential group of French mathematicians in the twentieth century. "In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians …
Jul 9th, 2008 · Reader Chemisor advances a theory in his journal that a linguistic misunderstanding is at the root of many disagreements over different licensing philosophies, in particular BSD vs. GPL. The argument is that GPL adherents desire the freedom of their code, …
Jun 25th, 2008 · A two-count lawsuit filed by Chicago company LimitNone alleges that Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws when it developed "Google Email Uploader" which competes with LimitNone's "gMove" application. Google claims …
Jun 13th, 2008 · superglaze writes in to note that according to Nokia's software chief, its plans for open source include getting developers to accept things like DRM, commercial IP rights, and SIM locks. "Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these 'go against the open-source …
May 26th, 2008 · While the administrator is away the managers will play. A custom Web server went missing at an unnamed public university, but who was the culprit? The department manager. Thinking that the Linux Web server (which used a Microsoft XBOX for its hardware) …
Apr 10th, 2008 · Google presents a big fat target for would-be hackers and attackers. At the RSA conference Google offered security professionals a look at its internal security systems. Scott Petry, director of Google's Enterprise and founder of security firm Postini, …
Jan 31st, 2008 · Today in a speech the pope denounced human cloning, embryonic stem cell research and artificial insemination, citing them as a violation of 'human dignity.' That said, the pope did 'appreciate and encourage' research on stem cells from non-embryonic cells …
Jan 28th, 2008 · Schneier points out an interesting (and long, 117-pages) paper on the ethical implications of robots in war [PDF]. "This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, …
Dec 18th, 2007 · The NYTimes science section has up an interesting article discussing the nature of scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to …
Nov 12th, 2007 · Brian Aker is Director of Architecture for MySQL AB. He has also worked on the code (and database) that runs Slashdot, and is well-known in both Apache and Perl circles. Outside of the arcane world of open source "back-end" programming, though, hardly …
Oct 19th, 2007 · At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Microsoft 'will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products,' suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would 'take us out of the acquisition market quite …
Sep 19th, 2007 · According to Symantec, 'Internet security is headed toward a major reversal in philosophy, where a 'white list' which allows only benevolent programs to run on a computer will replace the current 'black list' system' as described an article on the CBC's …
May 30th, 2007 · Paul Vixie of Internet Systems Consortium guides us on a journey into the sublime details of the domain name system. Although it contains just a few simple rules, DNS has grown into a system of enormous complexity. This article explores the supposed and …
Apr 25th, 2007 · CNN has a report on the Wii's success in the games marketplace right now, referring to their sales dominance as 'creaming the competition'. The article tries to break down exactly why Nintendo's console has sold so successfully, discussing the system's …
Apr 4th, 2007 · The DV Rebel's Guide is broken down into chapters that follow the basic timeline of a film's production. The first chapter covering the overall philosophy of the authors approach and the rest focused on the making of your film: Pre-production, Production …
