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Monday Links from Off the Bench Vol. LXXXI

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    Monday Links from Off the Bench Vol. LXXXI

    Little lorry tried to kick big lorry's arse. Little lorry lost and ended up spread out in bits over two lanes of the M1. This made me very late for ClientCo this morning, which in turn made me very late getting home this evening; which is why you've had to wait until now for this lot:
    • DosMan Drivel - "From the original author of DOS." Tim Paterson, original author of what we now know as MS-DOS, blogs about CP/M's influence, floppy disk formats, and the first IBM PC.

    • Responding to Criticism - Some thoughts from Robby Grossman.

    • What Happens When We “Dangerize” Childhood - "...as a society, we have decided to focus on the least likely, most horrific, most TV ratings-garnering child deaths and base a lot of our parenting decisions on them... We decide, irrationally, which dangers are worth obsessing over and which we will shrug off as small, unavoidable risks." Lenore Skenazy argues that children are, if anything, safer being let of the leash nowadays than when their parents were young.

    • The man who hunted Osama bin Laden - Profile of the anonymous CIA analyst who devoted nearly ten years to gathering and examining every single scrap of intelligence he could find, and whose persistence finally paid off last May.

    • You Are Solving The Wrong Problem - "There is some problem you are trying to solve. In your life, at work, in a design. You are probably solving the wrong problem. Paul MacCready, considered to be one of the best mechanical engineers of the 20th century, said it best: 'The problem is we don’t understand the problem.'" Aza Raskin tells a tale of achievement through rethinking the issues.

    • Gameboy Emulation in JavaScript - Imran Nazar goes into great detail about this cool programming project in a ten-part series of articles. "With the recent introduction of the <canvas> tag to HTML, the question arises as to whether a JavaScript program is capable of emulating a system, much like desktop applications are available to emulate the Commodore 64, GameBoy Advance and other gaming consoles. The simplest way of checking whether this is viable is, of course, to write such an emulator in JavaScript." Of course

    • Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs” - "Back in 2004, Edward Tufte defined and developed the concept of a “sparkline”... What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well." A detailed look at this technique by Charlie Park.

    • The Menace Within - "What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?" Romesh Ratnesar interviews some of the participants in the infamous experiment.

    • The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle - "Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL." Amanda Hess feels the shame.

    • 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich - Lots of pictures of the USA's VP eating. "Inspired by our Vice President and http://xkcd.com/915/:"



      "Our goal: collect all the Biden pictures we can find and let the connoisseurs argue about them."


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Keep up the Good Work Nic!!

    You are solving the wrong problem was my fav- hmmm - you know I think - he;s got a point there... as he surmises

    What’s the take-away? When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.
    Last edited by AlfredJPruffock; 18 July 2011, 22:54.

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
      • DosMan Drivel - "From the original author of DOS." Tim Paterson, original author of what we now know as MS-DOS, blogs about CP/M's influence, floppy disk formats, and the first IBM PC.


      Happy invoicing!
      Microsoft took full advantage of the SCP system capability. In 1988, years after SCP had shut down, they were still using the SCP system for one task only it could perform ("linking the linker"). Their machine was equipped with the full 1 MB of RAM – 16 of the 64 KB cards. That machine could not be retired until 32-bit software tools were developed for Intel's 386 microprocessor.

      I remember sommat like that at another place I worked.

      The only thing that could burn a new FORTH eprom was a system that they'd nicked from a previous employer.

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