I’m one of those seemingly few people who thought they had a real purpose for an iPad. I have a laptop and various old computers at home, but hate hauling my laptop around the apartment just to check email or look up something on wikipedia. So I splurged and bought one, which arrived Friday. While [...]

Are you a Bastard Operator From Hell? The original bastard writes for the Register.

When I was a kid there was a lot of hype about human habitats on and under the sea. The sea was touted as the next frontier (space having already been conquered, symbolically at least, by the Apollo missions.) Decades later– off-shore drilling platforms notwithstanding–the oceans are still mostly a mystery and cities in the [...]

With the widespread current interest in loosely coordinated distributed computation and resource-sharing grids, I’m surprised that Miller and Drexler’s papers on agoric computing from 1988 (specifically: “Markets and Computation: Agoric Open Systems” and “Incentive Engineering for Computational Resource Management”) haven’t received much attention in these contexts. For my taste, Web Services and SOA architecture puts [...]