Democracy and the Internet
Noam Chomsky (portait on the right), an MIT professor emeritus, renowned linguist and political activist, gave an interview to Andrew Marr on media censorship and propaganda. It is available on YouTube:
About six and a half minutes into the third part, the Internet is mentioned. Chomsky says there is a struggle going on about whether Internet will be a democratising media or not. And I think there are a lot of interesting things to discuss about this matter.
Read more
Goodbye, World
Dennis Ritchie, one of the greatest pioneers in the history of Computer Science, has passed away. Ritchie created the C programming language, perhaps the most important programming language in history. Ritchie then used C to write the Unix operating system together with Ken Thompson. Linux, Mac OS X and a multitude of other modern operating systems are all based on or heavily influenced by Unix. Herb Sutter has written a great blog post describing Ritchie’s great contributions to Computer Science.
While or For? A Comment On Code Entropy
I just saw Olve Maudal‘s talk from JavaZone 2011. The topic for the talk is Code Entropy and the Physics of Software. (Note: The talk is in Norwegian.) In the talk, Olve discusses how likely two semantically identical pieces of code are to be changed into each other. For example, say you have the following snippet:
if (!isValid()) {
// Handle the invalid state
} else {
// Handle the valid state
}
How likely is that to change into this one:
if (isValid()) {
// Handle the valid state
} else {
// Handle the invalid state
}
… and vice versa? Olve defines that the higher probability a piece of code has to change into a semantically identical piece of code, the higher its entropy is. In this post I will share a couple of thoughts about this. Read more
