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The history of the computer industry is filled with fascinating tales of riches that appear to practically fall from the sky. Along with stories of riches won, there are stories of opportunities missed. Take that of Ronald Wayne, who cofounded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs but sold his shares for just US $2300. And John Atanasoff, who proudly showed his digital computer design to John Mauchly”who later codesigned the Eniac, often defined as the first electronic computer, without credit to Atanasoff. ...

I’ve had too many personal experiences get messed up just because companies change things on the cloud. I’ve come to a depressed state of feeling that I own nothing on the cloud and have no ability to keep things working the way they do. Features change and get dropped, things you depend on disappear, etc. And no company will ever take responsibility. It’s rare to ever get told what really happened. ...

Wi-Fi radio signals are found in 61 percent of homes in the U.S. and 25 percent worldwide, so Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, researchers at University College London, designed their detector to use these ubiquitous signals. When a radio wave reflects off a moving object, its frequency changes”a phenomenon called the Doppler effect. Their radar prototype identifies frequency changes to detect moving objects. It’s about the size of a suitcase and contains a radio receiver composed of two antennas ;íand a signal-processing unit. In tests, they have used it to determine a person’s location, speed and direction”even through a one-foot-thick brick wall. Because the device itself doesn’t emit any radio waves, it can’t be detected. ...

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate. The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links. The first examples were developed on NeXT computers. ...

Helping Companies, and Hackers to get things done. Companies test their servers or Web Apps covered by anonymity and confidentiality, while Hackers get paid for what they love to do most: Hacking Servers » hackaserver.com

Uno de los peores hábitos, en cuanto a seguridad en informática se refiere, es utilizar la cuenta de administrador de forma compulsiva para todo, sin importar que la tarea que estemos haciendo requiera privilegios de administrador o no. Esto se puede aplicar tanto a la cuenta de root en un sistema GNU/Linux como al usuario administrador en WordPress. Lo ideal sería utilizar una cuenta con el mínimo nivel de privilegios posible que nos permita llevar a cabo nuestra tarea. ...

While transistors have many uses, one of the less known uses by amateurs is the ability for bipolar transistors to turn things on and off. While there are limitations as to what we can switch on and off, transistor switches offer lower cost and substantial reliability over conventional mechanical relays. In this article, we will review the basic principles for transistor switches using common bipolar transistors. The most commonly used transistor switch is the PNP variety shown in Figure 1. The secret to making a transistor switch work properly is to get the transistor in a saturation state. For this to happen we need to know the maximum load current for the device to be turned on and the minimum HFE of the transistor. ...

La Escuela Superior de Informática de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha ha liberado el material de la primera edición del Curso de Experto en Desarrollo de Videojuegos. El material, compuesto por 4 libros de más de 1.200 páginas en total y múltiples ejemplos de código fuente, se basa principalmente en tecnologías y estándares libres. Casi la totalidad de los ejemplos del curso han sido desarrollados en GNU/Linux. Puedes descargar los libros gratuitamente en la web del curso (formato PDF), en EPUB o comprar los libros en papel. Los ejemplos del libro se distribuye con licencia GPLv3 y el libro con licencia Creative Commons BY NC ND ...

A basic tenets of UNIX philosophy is to create programs (or processes) that do one thing, and do that one thing well. It is a philosophy demanding careful thought about interfaces and ways of joining these smaller (hopefully more simple) processes together to create useful results. Normally textual data flows between these interfaces. Over time, more and more advanced text processing tools and languages have been developed. For languages, earlier on there was perl, later came python, and ruby. While these and other languages are very capable text processors, such tools are not always available, especially in a production environment. In this article, a number of basic UNIX text processing commands are demonstrated and may be used individually or in conjunction with each other to solve problems which may also be addressed with newer languages. For many people, an example provides more information than long winded explanations. Please note because of the variety of UNIX and UNIX-like systems available, command flags, program behavior, and output differs between implementations. ...

You want to teach yourself vim (the best text editor known to human kind) in the fastest way possible. This my way of doing it. You start by learning the minimal to survive, then you integrate all the tricks slowly. Vim the Six Billion Dollar editor Better, Stronger, Faster. Learn vim and it will be your last text editor. There isn’t any better text editor that I know of. It is hard to learn, but incredible to use. ...