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What the Web used to look like: Silicon Graphics “SILICON SURF”
It was this webpage – SGI’s entry to the Web – which caused the Sun-internal Web-evangelists (including myself, to some extent) to go berserk and demand the creation of a Sun.COM website. I seem to remember Vasanthan being the eventual prime mover… ?
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What the Web used to look like: Dept of Computing, Imperial College
Note: All the WWW servers in the UK
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What the Web used to look like: Back when I wrote/ran search engines for Sun
Kiwi (FTP archive search to Sun internally) and Ben-Nevis (AltaVista ripoff) – two of Sun’s first-ever search engines, internally facing, lashed up in Perl and with (eventually) CGI interfaces; the graphics are from a public presentation on “What the Web Does” that I did, sometime around (I think?) 1995.
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Why I can no longer take British Nuclear Deterrence seriously … #trident
So occasionally – not often enough – I go for tea with the most excellent Dr Lorna Arnold: Lorna Arnold is a historian who has written a number of books connected with the British nuclear weapons programmes. As the second official historian of the British nuclear weapons programmes, she has had access to previously secret documents and personally knew…
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A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ /ht @shaver
1 Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine? The WebKit maintainers wouldn’t let us attack Apple directly, by changing WebKit in ways that would make it perform badly on OS X and iOS. Because they share a rendering engine, developer effort to ensure Chrome compatibility currently benefits Apple platforms for free. To prevent this,…
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Scarfolk Council: Thought-Detector Vans, 1973 / “Is your mummy who she says she is?” # oh my, this is perfect; /ht @jimfinnis
Thought-Detector vans, 1973 Many will remember the TV detector vans that stalked suburban Britain in the 1970s. Scarfolk was chosen to take part in a government scheme that tested the latest technology in thought detection, particularly because of the events surrounding “The Tim Seven” in 1972 (See here and here for more details). The scheme…
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Next time you see a plea for #cybersecurity spending on more #cyberwarriors …
…check some history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap The “bomber gap” was the unfounded belief in the Cold War-era United States that the Soviet Union had gained an advantage in deploying jet-powered strategic bombers. Widely accepted for several years, the gap was used as a political talking point in order to justify greatly increased defense spending. One result was a massive buildup of the United States Air Force bomber fleet, which…
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America’s Raisin Regime: De minimis curat lex # Gosplan’s Sour Grapes in the USA
Repeat after me: state regulation is always a sane and desirable thing… WHETHER the obscure statute that governs America’s raisin trade is constitutional, Elena Kagan is not sure. She and her fellow Supreme Court justices are pondering that question at the moment, and will rule shortly. But she sounds reasonably confident that the Agricultural Marketing…
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Appeals court upholds legality of Aereo’s “tiny antennas” scheme # Utterly Bonkers But Legally Fabulous
A federal appeals court has handed a big setback to broadcasters trying to stop Aereo, a startup that streams New York-area television content over the Internet. Broadcasters such as Fox and Univision argued that transmitting TV content without permission was copyright infringement. But Aereo countered that its service was analogous to a television and DVR…
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TadaoCern – Tadas Cerniauskas # I find the Van Gogh one to be scarily believable
TadaoCern – Tadas Cerniauskas.