Cookie Dough Ice Cream
Ah…. I just found some weeks ago that we now have Ben and Jerry’s ice cream here in Portugal. And that there’s a store across the street from our new office location. Hello Cookie Dough Ice Cream!!
34 years ago
Watch this fascinating video. It’s a 1972 documentary entitled “Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing”. Putting it simply, it was those guys who invented most of the foundations that permit you to read this online, and shop, and e-mail, and VoIP… One interesting detail, the wideband connections interlinking the nodes back then were 50 Kilobit ones. The current fastest interconnections today are in the 1 Terabit range, a 2×10^7 increase, 20 million times faster.
Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.
Update: Google is apparently not hosting the video anymore (copyright issues?) If you managed to fish the .flv file from your cache please send it to me, I’ll transcode it and host it here Thanks to reader pSy for alerting that the video is again available. I’m going to download it and keep a copy around in case this piece of history disappears again.
DoS through DNS
A new type of DoS attack, using packets with spoofed return addresses to DNS servers, might yield a more efficient attacking machines vs. targeted servers ratio. Time to reconfigure your DNS machines!
Wil McCarthy – Hacking Matter
Via Charlie’s Diary, this very interesting book (available in dead trees or in free recyclable electrons) by Wil McCarthy. It deals with the possible applications of artificial atoms created on quantum dots. These range from programmable matter (within limits) to quantum computation. This field is developing very fast, lets see if it will go somewhere.
Iain M. Banks – The Player of Games
I’ve just finished re-reading (for the second or third time?) Iain M. Banks‘ The Player of Games. It tells the story of one of the best game players in the Culture, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, who travels all the way to the empire of Azad, where they play a game named after the empire. The game and the empire are one and only – the winner becomes the emperor. This is a story of deception, betrayal, violence, beauty, complexity – and of game playing (and why the book is called “The Player of Games” and not “The Game Player” – it works better in Marain).
Banks manages, without describing Azad completely, to make you get into the game, which is amazing. Another thing I like about Banks is that nothing is black and white, there are no completely evil or good characters or societies. You can relate to the choices of each side within their own set of values, which makes for a very believable story line, both in terms of logic and emotion.
And the acerbic humor always makes me laugh. The exchanges between Gurgeh and the Contact drone Flere-Imsaho are very funny. And of course the ships’ names are priceless – I find myself chuckling uncontrollably whenever a really funny one comes up.
Like all other books in Banks’ Culture universe, there’s no specific order you should read them in. If you never read any of them, this is a good a start as any (and it’s a small one at only 309 pages). You’ll probably find the writing style a bit difficult at first, just by the staggering amount of information, but trust me, once it “clicks”, you’ll be hooked for life.
