After six months of grueling unpaid labor, Greg couldn't explain to his parents what he had done. They didn't use computers, and the only periodical they read was the New York Times. So as the project was winding down, I asked Greg if he wanted his photo in the Times so his parents would know what he was up to. He gave the only possible response: "Yeah, right." We made a bet for dinner at Le Mouton Noir, a fine French restaurant in Saratoga. To be honest, I expected to lose, but I made a phone call. Greg doesn't bet against me any more: On March 11, 1994, the front page of the Times business section contained an article on the alliance among Apple, IBM, and Motorola, picturing Greg and me in my front yard with a view of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It begins:

RISC or CISC? This seemingly esoteric computer industry debate, on which every techie will opine, has boiled over into a theological dispute that has turned Silicon into a Valley divided.

In the article, Markoff describes Wired as "the digital world's theological arbiter", which said that PowerPC is "the light side of the force."

An Intel manager said, "If this is a religious war, we've already won."

The photo caption read: "Crusaders for the Power PC Macintosh include Ron Avitzur, foreground, an independent programmer in Los Altos Hills, Calif., who, with Greg Robbins and Steve Newman, rear, has written a new kind of calculator software that will be included with the new Macintoshes."

We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.

Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

The niche cities reflect China's ability to form "lump" economies, where clusters or networks of businesses feed off each other, building technologies and enjoying the benefits of concentrated support centers -- like the button capital nearby, which furnishes most of the buttons on the world's shirts, pants and jackets.

Just wait until they focus on software. You'll have AntiVirus Village, Middleware Mountain, Browserborough, and more. (Microsoft Research already has a major presence in China.) Or, even more specialized ... a city for device drivers, one for user interfaces, another for kernel hackers, and still another for databases.

In the next few years, once all the limits are lifted, China's share of the US apparel market could soar to 50 percent to 70 percent.

With those numbers, you can't blame it all on Wal-Mart.

Sweaters Are West of Socks City

This is not "news", but the download is worth waiting for, and the video is worth the time.

It's a Flash presentation of selected images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If you liked the images of the Ultra Deep Field that were published back in March (and cited widely, including here), you'll probably like this, too. Whereas the UDF was a panoramic view, these are more like "close-ups", although the term takes on a rather new meaning when the scale is on the order of one light year to every four inches.

The Best of Hubble

The Iranian revolution caught us by surprise in 1979 and so could a Saudi Arabian uprising now. And Osama may be betting on it.

On Sunday, NYT ran a Week in Review article about bin Laden. This is basically that same story, after having been run through the "NY Post"-ify filter. (For more on that sort of thing, see the Robert Lucky article, "Engineering Expressiveness", that I memed yesterday.)

Osama's Plan B

First of all, this NYT is well worth reading. You might actually be interested in buying the product!

k wrote:
] My interest in the politics of the word hacker has reached
] an all time low.

An all-time low, perhaps, but it hasn't bottomed out yet.

Who cares? Why not focus on something Important, like wordsmithing the GPL?

] sidetrack asisde, the story's interesting because it shows
] what a motivated individual can do, without the generally
] presumed benefits of a formal degree.

Her motivation is admirable, but strong motivation is not a substitute for the college experience, any more than good looks are a substitute for kindness.

When you use a phrase like "generally presumed benefits of a formal degree", it certainly sounds like a disparaging remark about classrooms, or books, or the System, or the Shaft, or somesuch.

While most college students do encounter all of these things, they also encounter each other, in an environment that promotes scientific exploration and open collaboration. If you go to the best college you can get into, and seek out the best students there, you are likely to learn as much from them as from the professors.

Working alone, Jeri has accomplished something impressive. If she had finished high school and gone on to MIT, Stanford, or any of several other schools with a rich spirit of entrepreneurship, she might well have become a legendary Internet billionaire extraordinaire, instead of a gadget guru hawking her warez on QVC. She may still get there, and I wish her all the best.

A Toy With a Story

The Washington act, with its all-party consent requirement, contains no such parental exception and no Washington court has ever implied such an exception. We decline to do so now.

State of Washington v. Oliver C. Christensen

"The Washington statute ... tips the balance in favor of individual privacy at the expense of law enforcement's ability to gather evidence without a warrant," Justice Tom Chambers wrote in the unanimous opinion.

Mom's eavesdropping violates Privacy Act, Supreme Court rules

In particular, he shows how public protocols, ease of entry, very fast network expansion, connections by the same Internet Service Provider (“ISP”) to multiple backbones (ISP multi-homing), and connections by the same large web site to multiple ISPs (customer multi-homing) enhance price competition and make it very unlikely that any firm providing Internet backbone connectivity would find it profitable to degrade or sever interconnection with other backbones in an attempt to monopolize the Internet backbone.

The Economics of the Internet Backbone

In this lecture, Professor Rabin confronts the failure of present-day computer systems to provide minimal network security. As a solution, Professor Rabin presents the theory of hyper-encryption and attempts to prove its security against an adversary possessing unlimited computer power. This hyper-encryption method provides secure data exchange even if the adversary mounts an adaptive attack and obtains the secret decryption key. This program offers over an hour of video content and slides from the presentation.

Hyper-Encryption by Virtual Satellite