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Transition
I’ll read anything which Iain Banks writes, but, frankly, his recent novel Transition was rather weak. I think he was a bit low on the idea bank for this one. This is one of the novels where he sets up surprises, but unfortunately they were not surprising. The ideas which were meant to be challenging…
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The Argent Age
The dramatic growth of income inequality in the U.S. over the last 30 to 40 years may mark the end of a long experiment in U.S. society, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and ending with Richard Nixon (things were already changing under Jimmy Carter). Teddy Roosevelt was the first of the progressive presidents, and was a…
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Version Scripts
I recently spent some time sorting through linker version script issues, so I’m going to document what I discovered. Linker symbol versioning was invented at Sun. The Solaris linker lets you use a version script when you create a shared library. This script assigns versions to specific named symbols, and defines a version hierarchy. When…
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AOL Time Warner
The merger between AOL and Time Warner, the biggest merger in U.S. history, happened ten years ago. It is now generally considered to have been the worst merger of all time. Hindsight is 20/20, but I clearly remember that when I first read it I thought it was a joke. I was working in Silicon…
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Climate Change
Enough about programming for a moment. Here are some questions I have about climate change 1. Temperature measurements clearly show that the Arctic regions are warming up. Atmosphere measurements clearly show that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is increasing. The physics showing that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can lead to…