The Real War 1939-1945 by Paul Fussell The Atlantic 1989
2 days ago by vdm
"On its fiftieth anniversary, how should we think of the Second World War? What is its contemporary meaning? One possible meaning, reflected in every line of what follows, is obscured by that oddly minimizing term "conventional war." With our fears focused on nuclear destruction, we tend to be less mindful of just what conventional war between modern industrial powers is like. This article describes such war, in a stark, unromantic manner"
history
war
wwii
2 days ago by vdm
an enterprising company in Holland immediately bought a single [USB] vendor ID and started reselling the PIDs for ~$20 each | Hacker News
24 days ago by vdm
The USB Implemeters' Forum hit the roof, revoked the VID, and threatened to sue, but because their agreement didn't explicitly disallow PID resale, there was nothing they could do. It wasn't as if they could ever reassign that VID to any paying customer.
usb
history
economics
disruption
24 days ago by vdm
The History of Visual Communication
january 2012 by vdm
the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication.
art
design
history
typography
information
writing
january 2012 by vdm
A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986 M. Douglas McIlroy
january 2012 by vdm
Selected pages from the nine research editions of the UNIX® Programmer’s Manual illustrate the development of the system. Accompanying commentary recounts some of the needs, events, and individual contributions that shaped this evolution.
unix
history
january 2012 by vdm
revisionist - Visualizing the evolution of software projects
may 2011 by vdm
The result is a depiction of the organic process in which even the smallest pieces of software code become mature through the course of its development, as they are passed between developers, revisited for later refinement, merged, removed, and simplified.
diff
visualization
text
code
history
may 2011 by vdm
history flow - visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors
may 2011 by vdm
In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of Wikipedia.
diff
visualization
wikipedia
history
text
may 2011 by vdm
Shady Characters » The Pilcrow, part 1
february 2011 by vdm
"The pilcrow is not just some typographic curiosity, useful only for livening up a coffee-table book on graphic design or pointing the way to a paragraph in a mortgage deed, but a living, breathing character with its roots in the earliest days of punctuation. Born in ancient Rome, refined in medieval scriptoria, appropriated by England’s most famous modern typographer and finally rehabilitated by the personal computer, the story of the pilcrow is intertwined with the evolution of modern writing. It is the quintessential shady character."
paragraph
character
history
unicode
punctuation
typography
february 2011 by vdm
InfoQ: Rob Pike on Parallelism and Concurrency in Programming Languages
february 2011 by vdm
"There is indeed some similarity with RESTful stuff and I think there may be some commonality that we could build on there."
plan9
rest
concurrency
multitasking
unix
history
graphics
parallelism
csp
erlang
february 2011 by vdm
Newspaper technology, 1970
february 2011 by vdm
Newspaper technology changed radically during the 1970s and 1980s after being relatively static for almost a century. These photos show traditional newspapering in transition as the digital revolution began to hit the newsroom and the "back shop."
history
printing
technology
journalism
february 2011 by vdm
What is Ruby&Rails’ secret of success?
february 2011 by vdm
@fogus The comments on this post from @jonathoda have some good analysis.
rails
history
success
programming
february 2011 by vdm
Radial Grid in Graphic Layout - Inspiration from Medieval Art & Challenges for Modern Design
january 2011 by vdm
"Grid is a well known and well studied tool in graphic design, especially in print media and typography. This paper will throw light on two pre-modern concepts, radial grid and oblique grid, from perspective of graphic layout."
grid
systems
design
history
graphics
art
january 2011 by vdm
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry < Wired 2008
january 2011 by vdm
"as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them."
apple
iphone
history
business
wired
cellular
mobile
networks
product_development
january 2011 by vdm
The School - Esquire
january 2011 by vdm
"On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism."
By C.J. Chivers
russia
chechnya
siege
hostages
history
terrorism
By C.J. Chivers
january 2011 by vdm
Early History of HTML - 1990 to 1992 < Sean Palmer
august 2010 by vdm
In fact, although HTML has changed relatively little since those early days, the history of HTML is rather cloudy. However, with a little detective work on the Web, it is possible to reconstruct most of the events that led to the creation and subsequent deployment and acception of HTML
html
history
www
hypertext
markup
web
august 2010 by vdm
Nikon | Technology | Total Station
may 2010 by vdm
Surveying is a technology that uses instruments to measure the position relationships between points on land and express shapes, areas and other aspects by figures or drawings.
totalstation
surveying
history
overview
may 2010 by vdm
RPC and its Offspring: Convenient, Yet Fundamentally Flawed < Steve Vinoski at QCon London 2009
december 2009 by vdm
"In this presentation from QCon London 2009, Steve Vinoski discusses what RPC means, the origin and history of RPC, RFC 707, the origins of Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), the growth of the Internet, standardization, distributed objects, CORBA, DCOM, Java, SOAP, WS-*, the fundamental flaws in RPC, REST properties and constraints, REST vs RPC philosophy, Erlang reliability and concurrency."
programming
rpc
rest
talk
video
soa
erlang
history
distributed
infoq
december 2009 by vdm
GUI Architectures < Martin Fowler
november 2009 by vdm
"There have been many different ways to organize the code for a rich client system. Here I discuss a selection of those that I feel have been the most influential and introduce how they relate to the patterns."
programming
ui
design
patterns
architecture
gui
history
mvc
november 2009 by vdm
The Last Ace - The Atlantic (March 2009)
november 2009 by vdm
"American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we’ve made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding—Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan all now fly fighter jets with capabilities equal or superior to those of the F-15, the backbone of American air power since the Carter era. Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F‑22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez."
us
history
technology
aviation
war
military
airforce
theatlantic
november 2009 by vdm
A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database « Jon Udell
october 2009 by vdm
I presumed that it was written Unix-style, in some kind of plain-text format, and that’s true. What I didn’t appreciate, is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two.
history
calendar
database
time
standards
geek
fun
timezone
datetime
october 2009 by vdm
English Unit System
september 2009 by vdm
Length: inch, hand, foot, yard, pace, fathom, rod, chain, furlong, mile, league. Mass: grain, scruple, pennyweight, dram, ounce, pound, stone, hundredweight, ton. Area: acre, rood, section, subdivision, township.
science
physics
measurement
standards
units
reference
history
september 2009 by vdm
FT - The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil
august 2009 by vdm
“it was an Iraqi guy who helped us set everything up in the first place. Without him we would just have let the American oil companies decide how to do things.”
norway
oil
business
history
government
corruption
august 2009 by vdm
A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]
august 2009 by vdm
In this article, we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of btrfs on many levels - technical, political, personal - and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system. Knowing the background and motivation for each step will help you understand why btrfs was started, how it works, and where it's going in the future. By the end, you should be able to hand-wave your way through a description of btrfs's on-disk format.
linux
filesystem
storage
btrfs
zfs
history
august 2009 by vdm
What does the history of the web tell us about its future? « Derivadow.com
june 2009 by vdm
Don’t think about HTML documents – think about the things and concepts that matter to people and give each it’s own identifier, it’s own URI and then put in place the technology to dereference that URI to the document appropriate to the device. Whether that be a desktop PC, a mobile device, an IPTV or third party app.
webdesign
history
html
web
uri
semweb
www
rdf
timbl
june 2009 by vdm
The History of Notes and Domino < IBM DeveloperWorks
may 2009 by vdm
This article briefly retraces the history of Lotus Notes and Domino, starting with the earliest conceptual and development stages and continuing through major feature releases. Along the way, it examines:
history
couchdb
groupware
replication
lotus
notes
domino
lotusnotes
may 2009 by vdm
The Atlantic | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart
april 2009 by vdm
"Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead"
management
history
theory
education
mba
business
theatlantic
april 2009 by vdm
prog21: A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
june 2008 by vdm
aka: On progress. A comparison between writing a spellchecker in Perl or Python today, and writing one for a word processor 30 years ago.
programming
technology
history
june 2008 by vdm
megalithomania.com - Catalogue of Irish Megaliths
march 2008 by vdm
With GPS co-ordinates!
ireland
history
archaeology
megaliths
travel
gis
march 2008 by vdm
Ryan Tomayko: So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
march 2008 by vdm
"I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?"
html
url
href
web
www
history
march 2008 by vdm
Alan Kay: "Hardware is really just software crystallized early"
february 2008 by vdm
"[Hardware] is there to make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused low-level techniques and excessive o
hardware
software
smalltalk
AlanKay
quote
history
february 2008 by vdm
Jock Kinneir + Margaret Calvert UK Road Signage Designers
january 2008 by vdm
One of the most ambitious and effective information design projects ever executed in Britain is the road and motorway signage system designed by JOCK KINNEIR (1917-1974) and MARGARET CALVERT (1936-) from 1957 to 1967. Intellectually rigorous yet inclusive
design
transport
uk
history
typography
signs
january 2008 by vdm
The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto | The New York Times
december 2007 by vdm
why I don't need TV news any more.
pakistan
photojournalism
interview
nytimes
assassination
news
history
photos
journalism
getty
december 2007 by vdm
How Google Works - June 2006
december 2007 by vdm
Lots of great information.
google
infrastructure
business
history
phenomenon
mapreduce
innovation
december 2007 by vdm
Wired 3.06: Xanadu
november 2007 by vdm
"It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid b
hypertext
history
xanadu
web
wired
classic
article
www
hyperlink
november 2007 by vdm
XML is not S-Expressions
september 2007 by vdm
"There exists a persistent meme that XML is just a new-fangled, verbose form of s-expressions. These people do not appreciate that s-expressions were simply not designed to solve the same problems XML was designed to solve"
xml
lisp
sexp
syntax
hypertext
history
markup
text
data
json
september 2007 by vdm
Al Gore and the Internet - By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
september 2007 by vdm
"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
internet
politics
history
september 2007 by vdm
a short history of the evolution of Microsoft Data Access APIs in four parts (so far…)
march 2007 by vdm
ODBC, DAO, RDO, ODBCDirect, OLE DB, ADO.NET, LINQ
microsoft
database
programming
api
history
odbc
march 2007 by vdm
Wiki Wiki Hyper Card
february 2007 by vdm
How Ward Cunningham (creator of the first Wiki) created a predecessor of it as a HyperCard stack.
wiki
hypercard
history
web
february 2007 by vdm
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