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• Almost Perfect - The story of the rise and fall of WordPerfect Corporation by W. E. Pete Peterson. Has chapters in html format or one big PDF file.
• The Baleful effect of Computer Benchmarks upon Applied Math, Physics and Chemistry - floating point numbers accuracy discussion. [PDF]
• Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies - By Joseph A. Tainter, 1996 from Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, Island Press, 1996; ISBN 1-55963-503-7 . Historical knowledge is essential to practical applications of ecological economics. Systems of problem solving develop greater complexity and higher costs over long periods. In time such systems either require increasing energy subsidies or they collapse. Diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving limited the abilities of earlier societies to respond sustainably to challenges, and will shape contemporary responses to global change. To confront this dilemma we must understand both the role of energy in sustaining problem solving, and our historical position in systems of increasing complexity.
• Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market - Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts. 2006 [PDF]
• Great Hackers - The variation between programmers is so great that it becomes a difference in kind.
• Illegal Engineering - An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking by Tim Hunkin.
• The Limbo Programming Language - It's a plan 9 type thing.
• Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface - Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. Software can infer the context in which its data is needed, winnow the data to exclude the irrelevant, and generate a graphic which directly addresses the present needs. There are many sources from which software can infer context: time, location, environment, email and documents opened, history of interaction, and current interaction.
• Mixing Games and Applications - [PDF]
• Ontological Smenatics - An automated system of semantic processing. It takes a text, then runs it through a parser, which looks up meanings in a lexicon, then reduces whatever translation it comes up with to a text-meaning representation (TMR), by pushing the concepts from the lexicon through an ontology / onomasticon / world-knowledge library. The TMR is basically the "pulp" of the semantics of the article, web page, book, or whatever it's been fed. It just contains the ideas, the things involved, and other relevant concepts, stripped of all other linguistic information.
• Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites' - Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, is frequently quoted by creationists as having said that there are no transitional fossils. But did he really say that? And if so, what did he mean?
• A P3P Assurance Signature Profile - This document specifies a P3P Assurance Signature Profile: the intended meaning (assures) of the key holder is bound to the signature via a SignatureProperty. XML Signature is a method of associating a key with referenced data (octets); it does not normatively specify how keys are associated with persons or institutions, nor the meaning of the data being referenced and signed. Consequently, while this specification is an important component of secure XML applications, it itself is not sufficient to address all application security/trust concerns, particularly with respect to using signed XML (or other data formats) as a basis of human-to-human communication and agreement. Such an application must specify additional key, algorithm, processing and rendering requirements.
• Programming Language Popularity - Some statistics that can be gathered from the internet regarding programming languages.
• The Python Paradox - If a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it.
• Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments - Journal article published in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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