Archive for December, 2006

Structures (or why things don’t fall down)

December 15, 2006

J.E. Gordon’s book is a great read. Did you know that arches are so popular because they have to break in 4 places before they will fall down? Amazing factoids and insights for the lay person abound in this book. The technical details occasionally got a bit heavy. The book comes to...
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Human-Built World

December 15, 2006

Thomas P. Hughes “Human-Build World – How to think about technology and culture” compares and contrasts current optimism about the Internet, gadgets and technology with human attitudes to earlier generations of technology. Technology has a much longer history than the popular mind may be aware! A great read for anyone responsible for implementing technology....
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The HyperText Computer (HTC) and seti@home

December 15, 2006

SETI@home is a computing project that analyzes radio telescope data using the spare computing power available in internet connected computers. Users who wish to offer their computers’ processor and storage to the project, download and install BOINC – the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC accepts units of computing work from the seti@home...
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The HyperText Computer (HTC) and the Windows Communication Foundation

December 12, 2006

As part of .NET 3.0 the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a unified programming model from Microsoft that delivers many of the benefits motivating the proposed HyperText Computer. Some of the key benefits of the WCF include: Replacing 7-8 different programming models with a single one, the programmer may interact with local and...
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The HTC does for programming what has already been done for information retrieval.

December 9, 2006

What has the web done for information? In short, the web has made the network invisible when retrieving information. The distance traveled and the technology employed to deliver a request from a browser and the response returned makes no difference to the user’s perspective. That is part of the magic of the web. The...
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The HyperText Computer (HTC) and IBM’s Infinity Project

December 9, 2006

This morning I found a recent report by Darryl K. Taft quoting Stefan Schoenauer of IBM titled “Future Net: Expanding the Web from Pages to Data Sources“. It appears that IBM’s Infinity middleware project may be a proto-HyperText Computer. While the details are sketchy, here is what we know… The HTC is a model computer...
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The HyperText Computer and the web information space

December 8, 2006

After reading the following quote from Tim Berners-Lee I have been reflecting on the appropriateness of my proposal of a HyperText Computer — a model computer built on top of HTTP: From the fact that the thing referenced by the URI is in some sense repeatably the same suggests that in a large number of...
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