#flagrant geekery

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The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

Richard P. Gabriel, Lucid, Inc

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“People think it’s gimmicky having Legos around the house. I actually do this shit bruh. It’s fun for me, I do this shit all the time.”

- Myles Turner

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the project is meant as a case study of how code can create diverse and infinite art through basic techniques of procedural generation. 

(via Little Planet Procedural)

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I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile. In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks. Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to “support” the leaks. Since the missile will explode when it hits it’s target or at the end of it’s flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention. – Kent Mitchell | One possible reason that things aren’t Technical Consultant | going according to plan is ….. Rational Software Corporation | that there never *was* a plan!

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This is "DOODLE.EXE", a simple CGA drawing program.

(via Microsoft Mouse - 1983)

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Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago. This chip, Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancestor of the x86 processor family that you may be using right now. I couldn't find good die photos of the 8008, so I opened one up and took some detailed photographs.

(via Die photos and analysis of the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor, 45 years old)

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So here we are, then, in a trial about video games. As near as I can tell, the video games in question were created by taking game films from various NCAA football and basketball games and then transferring them technologically until actual players found themselves with NCAA-licensed avatars that live forever. It was seeing his avatar that prompted Ed O’Bannon to launch his lawsuit in the first place and, having done so, he opened up a number of interesting questions about who he is, both in real life and in virtual reality.

Is Ed O’Bannon’s avatar really Ed O’Bannon, or is it an Ed O’Bannon made by someone else so that a lot of someone elses could make a whole lot of money? Isn’t that a fundamental looting of one’s fundamental identity? Doesn’t the real Ed O’Bannon have a say in the use of his name, his image, and his likeness? After all, that’s him in that game. The avatar runs the court like he did. It shoots the way he did. It passes the ball the way he did. There doesn’t seem to be any moral basis for an argument that Ed O’Bannon doesn’t have the right to control — let alone profit from — all the Ed O’Bannons that have been created out of the work that the real Ed O’Bannon did as an athlete. How can an actual person find himself an indentured servant in virtual reality?

- Grantland: Dispatches From the NCAA’s Deathbed