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POPSInventor of Fortran, John W. Backus, Dies Not only did Backus give the world the first high-level (and highly-successful) programming language, but he had the genius in 1959 to develop Backus–Naur form , the meta-language used to define all possible programming languages, past, present and future. Our digital world wouldn't be the same without him. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display. When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score. He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”
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POPSWhatever Happened to Online Etiquette? Maybe as the Internet becomes as predominant as air, somebody will realize that online behavior isn’t just an afterthought. Maybe, along with HTML and how to gauge a Web site’s credibility, schools and colleges will one day realize that there’s something else to teach about the Internet: Civility 101. Also see: Why are we so nasty (online)?
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POPSYouTube gives up user data in media lawsuit Music company lawyers first warned and then sued individual users who downloaded their songs. Now it looks like piracy hunters for the movie studios are using the same technique against YouTube users. YouTube's decision to help Paramount track down Moukarbel stands in stark contrast to the philosophy of Google, which has fought the U.S. Justice Department over attempts to access data about consumers who use its search services.
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POPSGood Agile, Bad Agile (or Why Google is Unstoppable) Steve Yegge on the benefits and mostly drawbacks of agile programming. Probably the most interesting portion is his insider's look into the development atmosphere at Google, where a controlled type of agile programming runs rampant, with huge results. Oh and did he menion the perks? And there are still other incentives; the list goes on and ON and ON ; the perks are over the top, and the rewards are over the top, and everything there is so comically over the top that you have no choice, as an outsider, but to assume that everything the recruiter is telling you is a baldfaced lie, because there's no possible way a company could be that generous to all of its employees, all of them, I mean even the contractors who clean the micro-kitchens, they get these totally awesome "Google Micro-Kitchen Staff" shirts and fleeces.
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POPS"Spore": The Long Zoom Great article about what looks to be an incredible online, massively-multiplayer game (from the creator of the Sims and SimCity series) where "players" master the entire phenomenon of life; from ecology, to atmospheric science, to anatomy, to evolution, to civilization, to planetary politics, and on to galactic diplomacy. If anyone can pull it off, it’s Will Wright. This is the guy who made the urban planning simulation SimCity into one of the all-time top-selling games in history. There is probably no one alive who has a comparable track record of combining arcane scientific theories and compulsively addictive entertainment.
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POPSGoogle to Acquire YouTube for $1.6 Billion? Based on experience with these sort of rumors, I’d put this at 40% likely to be at least partially true. Really? That high? I haven't been keeping up with the rumors, but I have a lot of trouble envisioning a Google-ized YouTube....
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POPSWord wrap bookmarklet for Firefox I keep losing this superb bookmarklet, but now it's clipped for eternity! If you've never used bookmarklets in Firefox before, copy the code above into a new bookmark, and save it to some place handy like the toolbar. Then the next time you come across a page whose text extends off the right side ( like this one ), just click the bookmarklet, and voilà ...it's reformatted on the fly. No more sidescrolling. (I tried to create a one-click install link in the comments but I couldn't get around the bullet-proof defenses of coder EricW. Curses! :) )
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POPSVisualizing Coordinates With Google Phil Lensenn has come up with some novel ways of visualizing the occurences of different types of coordinates in the Google database. I love projects like these and I especially like how the individual chess peices match up in meaningful ways with the highest frequency board positions. It would be interesting to do a similar projection of area code or zip code frequency onto a map of the USA, say.
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POPSVirtual, 3D World Cup Replays I'm still trying to wrap my head around this incredible Danish flash application. It lets you replay virtual, 3D animations of goals from every recent World cup game (?). You can go back-and-forth, adjust the speed, and switch the camera between multiple perspectives during play, including that of any player, a virtual fly-around camera ( Flyvende kamera ), or even the ball's POV ( Bold-kamera )! How is all this data collected?! Link: http://bgi.dr.dk/sporten/index.php
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POPSFemale Android Debuts in S. Korea EveR-1 is designed to resemble a Korean female in her early 20s, according to a KITECH press release. Fifteen motors underneath her silicon skin allow her to express a limited range of emotions, and a 400-word vocabulary enables her to hold a simple conversation.
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POPSMulti-Touch Screen See the incredible movie to see how revolutionary this technology is: MPG: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/multitouchreel.mpg QT: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/multitouchreel.mp4
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