http://coollabssoft.com/blog A Systems Analyst's thoughts on science, technology, programming, business, and occasionally politics. Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:23:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been bugged for years over this problem of inventing things that already exist. For example, I may spend a great deal of time working on a concept, and arrive at an inventive solution, only to discover, when telling someone else about it, that it's already been invented. I myself have done ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2009/11/08/education-or-ineducation/ I'm going to propose a new CPU instruction. Purely theoretical for now, but interesting to talk about. At least I hope so. My new CPU instruction is going to load into EAX the value of EAX from 10 seconds in the future. Crazy talk, I know. But I'm going to ignore the ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2009/04/28/new-cpu-instruction/ I've been wondering lately about what the steady state of the American dream is. What are the unavoidable outcomes if every player in the game is following that strategy? Seems to me that there's a finite number of lawns to mow. There are economies of scale, and it's well known that ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2009/04/14/steady-state-economy/ I've lately begun to realize that when a common problem shows up, it's often the symptom of something else. Such as when customers complain about the amount of rBGH in their food, manufacturers can decide to avoid it, not avoid it, or, and more intelligently, create two products and sell ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2009/03/18/on-applications-oses-and-vms/ I was reading about yet another zero day exploit for IE and Windows, on the heels of a security update for same because of an existing unpatched vulnerability that's been causing pain to many over the past few weeks. Honestly, you could write the above two lines any time over the ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/12/29/on-security-of-operating-systems/ I took an online civic literacy quiz not too long ago, it asked a lot of mainly trivia questions, but also some very interesting policy and mechanics of government questions. Seems to me there should have been a few questions on that civic literacy quiz about why it's good to be ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/12/11/civic-literacy/ There's been a lot of talk about "It Just Works" lately, probably due to the renewed popularity of the Mac platforms. I recall quite a few "just works" promises in the past. Plug and Play was supposed to be that. Heck, the very meaning of the phrase is almost identical. The ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/11/07/it-just-works/ Imperative languages like C and java and just about everything else I use are very demanding. You use the languages to say things like "do that", and it does. Deeply fulfilling for a type A personality, I'm sure. But it lacks something. Other languages, like lisp, prolog, etc.. have different concepts. ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/10/24/active-and-reactive-programming/ Purple is an odd concept. We see it as a combination of red and blue... because we have roughly RGB retinas... but then we see 50%R 50%G as yellow, when there's a real yellow that just triggers 50%R 50%G.. We can't see the difference though. But there's no frequency of light that ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/09/30/colors/ This weekend, I learned about closures. Part of this has to do with the fact that I seem to be obsessed with StackOverflow.com; it was there that I found a question on closures with a link to an answer, and prompted my fire of discovery to go learn about them. Closures ... http://coollabssoft.com/blog/2008/09/25/closures/