PCs, vulnerability, and melding with the other

The relationship between users and PCs is similar to that between lovers or close friends. An intimate relationship with others involves ambivalence: fear as well as pleasure. As we do with people we feel are close to us, we invest part  of ourselves in PCs. We struggle with the pleasures and fears of dependency: to trust is to reap the rewards of security, but it is also to render ourselves  vulnerable to risk. Blurring the boundaries between self and other calls up  abjection, the fear and horror of the unknown, the indefinable. . . . Computer users, therefore, are both attracted towards the promises of cyberspace, in the utopian freedom from the flesh, its denial of the body, the opportunity to  achieve a cyborgian seamlessness and to “connect” with others, but are also threatened by its potential to engulf the self and expose one’s vulnerability to  the penetration of enemy others. (Lupton 2000, p. 487)

Star Wars ASCII Terminal Fun

This is incredible. In the Linux terminal, telnet to the following address using this command:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Now sit back and watch the entire Star Wars IV movie in beautiful ASCII in your terminal.

Infinite Solutions

Lubuntu

I just revived my 7 year old laptop by installing Linux Lubuntu.

The laptop has gone from this:

to this:

lubuntu.net

The Real Reason Arrays Start at 0

So: the technical reason we start counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960′s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

There are a few points I want to make here.

The first thing is that as far as I can tell nobody has ever actually looked this up.

Whatever programmers think about themselves and these towering logic-engines we’ve erected, we’re a lot more superstitious than we realize. We tell and retell this collection of unsourced, inaccurate stories about the nature of the world without ever doing the research ourselves, and there’s no other word for that but “mythology”. Worse, by obscuring the technical and social conditions that led humans to make these technical and social decisions, by talking about the nature of computing as we find it today as though it’s an inevitable consequence of an immutable set of physical laws, we’re effectively denying any responsibility for how we got here. And worse than that, by refusing to dig into our history and understand the social and technical motivations for those choices, by steadfastly refusing to investigate the difference between a motive and a justification, we’re disavowing any agency we might have over the shape of the future.

... http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/

Halloween Problem

In computing, the Halloween Problem refers to a phenomenon in databases in which an update operation causes a change in the physical location of a row, potentially allowing the row to be visited more than once during the operation. This could even cause an infinite loop in some cases where updates continually place the updated record ahead of the scan performing the update operation.

... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Problem

Halloween