[Yearly Archives] 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003-02-01
[mad hacker] Computing Bits
Learning about computing a bit at a time.
{created 14 September 2001} 		[mad hacker]

table of contents
Facebook is Going Public
I'll take a peek at Facebook's IPO filing, but just a peek. Nutshell: Facebook is making money and hundreds of its employees will probably end 02012 as millionaires. the S-1 starts with: 845M monthly active users; 2.7B Likes & Comments per day; 250M photo uploads per day; 100B "friendships."

SEC.gov::Registration Statement on Form S-1

[02 February 2012, top]

Dan Bricklin's Why Johnny Can't Program
Via CodingHorror.com... 
   "Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic 
    computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the 
    same. In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% 
    and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail 
    the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never 
    oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old 
    ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; 
    and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject 
    began in the 1960s." -- Dan Bricklin in Why Johnny Can't Program

Bricklin.com::Why Johnny can't program

[30 January 2012, top]

1 Billion IOPS; 100 Core Processor
While working on the HPC portion of my "Learning About the Future" talk, I was interrupted with the following two news items: 
   (1) Fusion-io announced they reached the one billion IOPS milestone. 
   (2) Tilera will be releasing a 100 core processor later this year.

Fusion-io employs Steve Wozniak as a Chief Scientist.

Tilera is a spinoff of MIT professor Anant Agarwa who is the director of MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).

[23 January 2012, top]

Name Dropping During Day 1 of CSC100
I introduced the following computing gurus to the students who were present in the first day of "Introduction to Computer Science (C++)" on 18 January 2012. 
   Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, Jerry Yang, Vinton Cerf, 
   Donald Knuth, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Dennis Ritchie

[18 January 2012, top]

English Wikipedia Shutdown To Protest SOPA

Google's logo on 18 January 2012...

O'Reilly went black on 18 January 2012 to protest SOPA and PIPA...

[18 January 2012, top]

Programming Dates Can Be Tricky
Programming dates can be tricky. A few years ago I wrote this C program that takes a year as input and prints the Friday the 13th dates for that year.

About Friday the 13th... Every year has at least one Friday the 13th. No year has had (or will have) more than three Friday the 13ths.

[13 January 2012, top]

About Computing Bits
The Computing Bits blog was created on 14 September 2001 and it started 2012 with 510 postings. Computing Bits is a blog that supports "learning about computing a bit at a time." It is a great time to live in the computing world and I am looking forward to creating some fun bits this year.

Computing Bits Archives: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003-02-01

[01 January 2012, top]

Creator: Gerald Thurman [gdt@deru.com]
Last Modified: Thursday, 02-Feb-2012 06:09:22 MST