It's a little past 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, but I'm still wide awake
(thanks to a cup of Orange Cappuccino). As the hot, misty drink invigorates
me, my mind begins pondering the state of Linux as both an operating system
and desktop environment for modern day computers.
Linux took the world by storm sometime in the late 1990s; of that, I am
vaguely aware. Because I didn't officially migrate to Linux from Windows
until 2003, you must excuse me for lacking a bit in its history.
Although Microsoft practically brainwashed me into buying a copy of Windows
95 during my early college years, I was still keenly aware of Unix (System V,
to be exact). I knew about "pine," "elm," "tin," "pico," "chmod," and a host
of other Unix commands and applications. In fact, I wrote my first... (more)
My aunt and I were having an e-mail discussion about which is the easiest to
use: a real photo album with pictures or a computer photo album, as on a
CD-ROM. I suggested that we put all the family photos into an album rather
than having them strewn all over the place in photo folders. She suggested
scanning them into the computer and building a photo album that way. I tend
to agree with ... (more)
Human memory and Random Access Memory (RAM) share one thing in common: they
are both very volatile. This basically means that once the power sources
feeding the memories are terminated, the memories disappear forever (at least
in the case of human short-term memory; more on that in a bit).
Human brains and computers share rather curious connections between data
(stored memories) and acces... (more)
Sometime between the years 1995 and 2004, Linux reached the mainstream of
computer users the world over. No longer was it all about Microsoft or the
Mac. Now there was a new sheriff in town, and it was a penguin packing some
serious heat.
The average user indoctrinated into the Linux way of computing will no doubt
find themselves climbing a mountain at first. Like any new operating system... (more)
I often wonder what happens to data when it gets erased. Just where does it
go? What happens to it? Does it "vanish" completely, or does it still exist
somewhere, perhaps in the memory bank of the expanding universe?
My theory is this: everything that is erased has been recorded by time and,
given enough technology to go backwards, we should be able to recover lost
data (if we are able to... (more)
Paul Panks is the author of "HLA Adventure," an adventure game written in Randall Hyde's HLA (High Level Assembly) language. His ultimate intention was for others to eventually contribute to this project, so in May 2003 he released it into public domain, including the source
Keith Bergelt
Gaurav Mantri
Aditya Banerjee
John Karamitsos
Kaj van de Loo
Bob Little
Alois Reitbauer
Chris Schin
Richard Gordon
Anil Parambath
