buttons-and-bits
Hey Big Companies, Data Are Actual Things That Take Up Space
“Digital sprawl” is guaranteed to lead to our doom.
This Is What Pi Looks Like
Last year, a programmer from Japan and a 23- year old student from Northwestern "continued humanity's obsession":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/10/26/occu-%CF%80-the-strange-history-of-counting-to-pi-3-14159265301 with _pi_ when they successfully...
How the First Digital Computer Didn't Really Change Anything and Died In Obscurity
Contrary to popular belief, the first computer wasn't Philadelphia's ENIAC. It was the desk-size machine built by "John Vincent Atanasoff":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in the basement of the physics building at...
Requiem for the HTML Frameset, 1996-2011
_by "Tobias Leingruber":https://twitter.com/tbx._ HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the basic code structure that create websites, and it consists of elements called tags. For example "<p>" defines a new paragraph or "<img src=“image...
Faded: Life On the Cusp of Obsolescence
As a civilization speeding headlong into uncharted terrains, we get our kicks staring out the window at all the outmoded stuff going out of focus in our collective rearview. We obsess over the newly obsolete, the antiques of recent history. We...
MBTV: Electric Independence: Marching Into the Future With Devo
Even including the weirdly-accessorized New Wave heyday, was there ever a band as assuredly from the future as Devo? It's doubtful. Between their attire, occasional on-stage antics and endless reel of synth-heavy astro jams, Devo has a loving place in...
1-710-NCS-GETS: Hi, This Is Your Government Calling
Sometime yesterday afternoon, a colleague of mine, who’s based in Baltimore, had an incoming call from a number he didn’t recognize. Like many of us, Michael didn’t pick up. The area code, 710, looked strange. That’s because it is. Of the roughly...
The Capacitor Plague: Like Too Much Bad Acid For Your Motherboard
…To get back to the "warning that I received":http://www.hark.com/clips/ygmhswwswk-brown-acid-warning. You may take it with however many grains of salt you wish. The brown capacitors that are circulating around us aren’t, specifically, too good. It is...
Reimagining Moore's Law As An Energy Consumption Black Hole
My computer, a decent-enough 2011 Lenovo laptop, sucks up about 20 watts of electricty during average use, about half the amount of electricty as my weak bedside lamp. ENIAC, born in 1946 and considered the first-ever general purpose computer, used...
Like those old see-through iMac keyboards from about 5 years ago except more disgusting and strangely more soothing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a tidy person, I vacuum my house and of course keep myself clean, so and so forth. 'Brush your hands and wash your teeth' (is that how it goes?) and all that.
A Tale of Two Computers: When Atari & Commodore Fought For The 80s
In 1985, personal computers were gearing up for another major throwdown. In response to the release of the Macintosh just a year prior, many systems were finally beginning to approach reasonable price points, causing an immense spike in home computer...
The Bitcoin Beef Jerky Test
In our post-debt-ceiling-debate era, is this the definitive proof we need of the reality of new currencies? By the way, the slogan for "BitJerky":http://bitjerky.com/? "Eat it with your face." h3. Connections: * "How to Get Rich on Bitcoin, By...