Robert A. Uhl

iTunes forbids weapons development?!?

Is this discussion of the iTunes license agreement correct? Does it really forbid ‘the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons’? Does this mean that one cannot listen to music on iTunes whilst working on missiles, or that one cannot play audio files about nukes on iTunes? It’s in a section about not violating US law, but the phrasing would seem to indicate that it applies no matter what. Read more →

Mac Office users Microsoft’s guinea pigs

MacWorld UK reports that Microsoft used Macintosh Office users as guinea pigs for Office features; the company also considered killing the product entirely in order to damage Apple. This is what happens when one is beholden to proprietary software. After all, Apple can test features out on its users, too. The only way to be free is to use free software. Read more →

Homeslyce

Discovered Homeslyce today. They’re a shopping site with a twist: you pick a gift for a friend, then email your other friends. Everyone chips in, and if enough money is given, then the gift is shipped to the friend; if not, noöne pays a cent. Not a bad little idea, although I don’t know how their prices compare to just buying the item. A small uplift might be worth taking the hassle out of gift purchasing. Read more →

Why I love emacs

A great blog entry explains why emacs is so incredibly cool. Imagine an operating system where you can switch from writing code to browsing the web or chatting without leaving a consistent environment, with the same set of commands and shortcuts. Imagine a set of integrated applications where data is seamlessly shared, where any single functionality can be tweaked, extended and adapted to your particular needs. Where everything is easily scriptable. Read more →

The problems of driver-downloaded firmware

Jem Matzan has an article regarding driver-downloaded firmware and the issues this causes for free operating systems. The root of the problem is that hardware vendors don’t just deal in hardware: they also write software for their products, and they don’t make this software free — this is a little absurd, since you’d think they’d want their products used as widely as possible. 06 February 2018: updated URL Read more →

Goodbye root canals

It appears that many root canals will be avoidable, as a new technique can be used to regrow dentin. Anything which prevents dental pain is good in my book. Read more →

Hedy Lamarr

I’d just like to point out that this is the woman who invented frequency-hopping spread-spectrum radio: Now she’s a geek’s dream girl! 3 February 2018: reformatted, linked to Wikipedia Read more →

The Parable of the Two Programmers

Presenting a short parable: The Parable of the two Programmers Neil W. Rickert Dept. of Math, Stat., and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago. Once upon a time, unbeknownst to each other, the ‘Automated Accounting Applications Association’ and the ‘Consolidated Computerized Capital Corporation’ decided that they needed the identical program to perform a certain service. Automated hired a programmer-analyst, Alan, to solve their problem. Meanwhile, Consolidated decided to ask a newly hired entry-level programmer, Charles, to tackle the job, to see if he was as good as he pretended. Read more →

emacs vs. vi; vi vs. emacs

Found a great list of reasons to prefer either emacs over vi, or vi over emacs. Note that recent releases of vim have added quite a few features (but of course, that begins to prove the whole point of emacs …), and it’s not nearly the primitive editor it was once; now it’s the primitive editor it is now. Emacs, of course, is not standing still: version 22 will soon be out. Read more →