Book Report: The Intel Trinity
It's a biography of Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, and the early days of Intel. Though Moore's Law (chip processing power you get from a chip per size per cost doubles every ~18mos.) comes ...
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Puzzle Hunts and Real Life are Everywhere, even Washington DC
It's my Washington DC travelog. DASH enthusiasts might want to skip to DASH photos or not depending on how eager you are to read about art museums, technology museums, and people I know but you (stat...
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Book Report: The Innovators
It's a book of mini-biographies and mini-histories from the history of computing. The angle: it's about people worked together to make things happen. I wish I'd read this book a while ago. Mostly, I...
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Book Report: What the Dormouse Said
When I blogged about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Daniel Fennelly (@danielfennelly) replied @lahosken I've heard good things about Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said" if you wan...
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Book Report: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails
How the electric telegraph affected the course of the USA's Civil War. Historically, generals had a lot of leeway: whoever was in command out in the field made decisions out in the field. You wouldn'...
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Overloaded Name
If you say Gordon Moore, as in "Moore's Law" …now we have to ask if you mean the Intel co-founder's rule of thumb about computer hardware advances or the San Francisco beat cop. ...
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Book Report: The Evolution of Cooperation
It's a book by Robert Axelrod, who set up some groundbreaking game theory experiment/contests back in the day. He set up a computer program that would run other computer programs. Specifically, it ra...
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Book Report: The Theory that would Not Die
It's a book on the history of Bayes' Theorem. Bayes' Theorem is, roughly, a handy tool for practical probability problems. Suppose you are an email system's spam filter. You see a new email message t...
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Book Report: Brain Storm
This novel is by Richard Dooling, the same guy who wrote Bet Your Life, one of my favorite books of 2003. This book was pretty good, too. It's a legal thriller—hey, come back! It's a legal th...
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Book Report: Hackers
It's another Steven Levy book about the history of technology. As with other Levy books, I keep spotting things that I know are wrong, so it makes me not trust Levy to tell me things I don't know. ...
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Book Report: The Mythical Man-Month (a Study Guide)
If this book report seems a little heavy on the questions? It's because it's the first draft of a study guide? For people reading the book? Oh man it's way too long? But hey give me a break, it's...
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Book Report: Pattern Recognition
I'd heard that William Gibson had written Pattern Recognition, this book that wasn't science fiction. So I didn't read it. That was years ago. More recently, I read Spook Country that wasn't exactl...
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Book Report: Applied Cryptography
This is an old textbook about applying cryptography; that is, it's about computer security. It's the textbook by Bruce Schneier, the book he later said wasn't so important--you can get this stuff ri...
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Book Report: The Psychology of Computer Programming
How to get programmers to get along together. Attempts to use psychology to design easier-to-use computer language features. Discussion of which is better for your organization's culture: batch proc...
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Book Report: The Man Who Loved China
Back in 2002, I went to the British Museum where an old illustration maybe showed a punch-card controlled loom from ancient China--long before such were invented in the West. Bookish fellow that I a...
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Book Report: iWoz
It is Steve Wozniak's autobiography, as told to Gina Smith. It's a fun read. Keep your wits about you as you read--they didn't fact-check all of this material. So when Wozniak tells you what was g...
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Book Report: Anathem
Yesterday, I watched a co-worker give a "practice" thesis defense. My workplace has plenty of grad students who are just, uhm, taking a little break from school. He's one of them. I, on the other h...
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Book Report: On the Edge
I posted that link to that "Another Bubble" video. Computer nostalgia is easy, you don't have to look back, the past just keeps coming back. That viper Wade Randlett who spread lies about the "New...
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Book Report: In Search of Stupidity
I'm not working on gPhone the Open Handset Alliance. There were various internal recruiting drives for the project; I slunk away from those, kept my head down. I've worked on some mobile phone plat...
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Book Report: Core Memory
I like old computers. This is a book of photos from the Computer History Museum. The photographer, Mark Richards, gave a talk at work a while back. When people asked him how he chose which things ...
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Book Report: The Man Behind the Microchip
Lea W. is in town, visiting from Cincinnati. Several folks gathered at Yancy's Saloon on Irving to kick it with Lea. Michael asked the question: "What do you love to do? There are a bunch of things...
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Book Report: Dealers of Lightning
Sometimes, it's good to be wrong. For example, I claim to be pretty jaded. But when I saw a little dog, a Yorkshire terrier-style dog, walking along this morning carrying a rubber chicken, I was fil...
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