This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief […]
For people who like to find faults, good news appeared in 1989, in this study: “Locating Faults in a Constant Number of Parallel Testing Rounds,” Richard Beigel, S. Rao Kosaraju [pictured here], and Gregory F. Sullivan, Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, March 1989, pp. 189–198. The authors, at […]
Steven Sinofsky wrote a good (and long) essay about why and how computers crash less often than they used to. Sinofsky says in part: … In the early days of PCs before Windows, crashes froze the computer—nothing worked, not even banging on the keyboard. The only recourse was to turn the computer off and start over, […]
In 1969 a publishing executive mused about whether and how computers had helped his industry: “Pitfalls to Computer Use in Publishing and Communication,” Daniel Melcher, Journal of Business Communication, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1969, pp. 47-51. The author, chairman of the R.R. Bowker Company, says: Most large publishers now have computers; many small ones […]
