The Command Line

Thanks to Daring Fireball I saw this post over on one of the Sun blogs, yesterday.
There is a good bit of detail around Adam Leventhal’s investigation from mere curiosity to morbid fascination. His findings seem pretty definitive. While Apple is not advertising that they are conditionally disabling the new DTrace port in Leopard, [...]

The article Slashdot references is from a journal on software engineering for the defense industry. Provably correct software is a big deal for hackers in that trade and probably colors the editorial a bit.
It is important to not that this is not a lambasting as Java in education, but its selection as a first [...]

I read another piece by Jeff Atwood that I found infuriating this week. This confirms my impression that while Jeff may be a UI or HCI professional of some quality and even a tech geek to some degree, he is no hacker.
First and foremost, I don’t necessarily disagree with his main point. Code [...]

I just read an article that, among other things, provides a nice primer on spintronics in the October SciAm. Unfortunately to get even the online version, you need to be a subscriber. But if you are, this article gives some nice background on spintronics, with the usual helpful graphics that SciAm produces so [...]

In Jonathan Erickson’s editorial for the September Dr. Dobb’s, he dropped this link to a Berkely page dedicate to the landscape of general parallel computing. I’ve seen stories similar to his editorial for a few years, now, and I think that both multicore and “manycore” computing are more than likely the near to mid-term [...]

We already have Symbian, embedded flavors of Java and Mameo, none of which are compatible with each other. Into this mix, Google has announced their own contribution, Android. The Register’s article even points out that the open coalition approach is nothing new.
I’ll give Google credit for taking an open approach and even managing [...]

You cannot read too much into stories of early investment. Despite the insanities of the first internet bubble, venture capitalists still often show questionable judgment in choosing which endeavors to fund.
Regardless, seeing significant investment in a Rails oriented startup can be interpreted as a sign of the framework being taken seriously as a business [...]

Daring Fireball pointed out John Siracusa’s review of Leopard. Like Gruber, I haven’t spent much time with the land slide of reviews. I’d prefer to experience the upgrade, myself, once my 5-pack arrives from Amazon rather than succumb to other people’s preferences and biases.
Siracusa, though, has done a phenomenally in-depth tour of Leopard. [...]

This is a meme that will not die. Just because Joe Average, the business analyst, cannot write his own software, we are in a software dark age. I don’t buy it and I think it is an entirely fallacious argument. To me it is like saying medicine is in a dark age [...]

This is actually an interesting suggestion. Not sure it is interesting enough to me to purchase the book, but still interesting. Of course the Slashdot article that pointed me to it distorts the authors claims, but not as much as I would have thought. I do wonder if the notion of “process [...]