I’ve written before about Alan Turing, what an outstanding pioneer of computer science he was, his huge influence on the outcome of the second world war, and how he was hounded to suicide because he was gay.
TIFF showed “The Imitation Game” this year.
TIFF 2014: The Imitation Game introduces world to Alan Turing | Toronto Star.
I was in Germany when this happened, working on a different part of the web, email. Hard to believe how far it’s come in such a short period of time, from a fledgling idea to the way so much of the world runs.
ON THIS date in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory, wrote a memo to his boss modestly entitled “Information Management: A Proposal”.
This, if it comes to pass, is great news for computer scientists, gay rights activists, historians, just about anyone, I guess.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/2013/jul/19/enigma-codebreaker-alan-turing-posthumous-pardon
Alan Turing, if you don’t know of him, is arguably one of the fathers of computer science. He was also gay, at a time when there were laws on the books in England against homosexuality. He was, after a brilliant career codebreaking and significantly contributing to the Allied war effort, convicted and “chemically castrated”. He subsequently took his own life.
One can only speculate how different computer science might have been had he lived longer and contributed more. He was 41 at his death.
This might have turned out differently. An earlier request for pardon, in early 2012, was denied.
Justice Minister Lord McNally dismissed the motion in the House of Lords.
“A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16919012
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software.
How sad is this?
Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.
Whatever happened to the profession of computer programmer/analyst? The guy who understood enough about computers, computability and algorithms to actually save you money by suggesting a better solution (better being faster, cheaper, less consuming of whatever resources cost you a lot of money, etc)?
How many are rolling in their graves today?
Dennis Ritchie obituary | Technology | The Guardian.
Ritchie was a huge influence on computers and computer science as I was entering the field. The Unix operating system, the language C, so much.
It’s quite interesting to visit Ritchies home page at Murray Hill. From that page, I love this old picture of Dennis & Ken Thompson
John McCarthy, AI pioneer, dies at 84 — Engadget.
Like Dennis Ritchie, I missed this when it happened. McCarthy pioneered LISP, a language I profoundly hated when I studied it, but it’s influences on computing and AI were profound.
Supreme Court stands up for the Internet – thestar.com.
The issue before the court was whether links to content should be viewed as republication of that content for the purposes of defamation law.
The decision, essentially, was no. Just linking to content is not republishing content.
There’s more …. liability could still be raised as an issue if the link repeated the defamatory content, included an endorsement of it, or was a deliberate act to make the information more readily available.
The last one sounds a bit weak to me, all links are a deliberate act, and they always make the information more readily available, so I’m a bit puzzled by that one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Firefox. Maybe that’s why I’m so disappointed with the latest release. Part of the attraction of Firefox is that so much good software is written for it or as an add-on or plug-in for it.
So recently, when it asked me to upgrade, I did. What a mistake.
None of my favorite plugins work with it. It disabled them all and as far as I can tell, there’s no update on the horizon for them. It looks for all the world like a beta-test version. Had I wanted to beta-test it (and there are some products I’ve done that for), I would have downloaded the beta test version. But this one looks raw and untested.
Why the rush to get it out the door?
This link was sent to me by a friend. It’s a wonderful, musical youtube example of TANSTAAFL. It’s a cross between folk singing and Riverdance with the topic being modern so-called “discounted” flights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyl2tOaKxM
Check out the subtitles.
Do you remember Professor Seymour Papert and his book Mindstorms? At a time when such things were expensive for adults, he put computers and a remote-control robotic turtle in kids classrooms. Armed with a simple robot programming language, these kids created amazing things and broke many educational paradigms. But have you heard anything of this recently?