studyo

This week has been hectic, and trut­h­fully I only finished this three articles this week, the last one a couple of minu­tes ago. Although it would be super nice to always have this list pos­ted on Fridays, I feel that as long as I have it up wit­hin the correct week I’m on top of things.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles, as I have.

• Lockdown
  Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

  And, if you think of pro­tocols and web­si­tes as fea­tu­res of the network, then say­ing “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resol­ves,” sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals,” […]

• How did molecu­lar machi­nes evolve?
  John Timmer, Ars Technica

  If a molecu­lar machine requires so many pre­ci­sely posi­tio­ned parts to fun­c­tion, how could it pos­sibly evolve? That ques­tion has been part of a popu­list attack on evo­lu­tion but, cont­rary to its pro­po­nents, sci­en­tists have a num­ber of ideas about the evo­lu­tion of this machinery.

• A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
  James Hague

  Here’s the situ­a­tion: it’s 1984, and you’re assig­ned to write the spell­chec­ker for a new MS-DOS word pro­ces­sor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to sup­port systems with as little as 256K. That a quar­ter mega­byte to con­tain the word pro­ces­sor, the docu­ment being edi­ted, and the memory nee­ded by the ope­ra­ting system. Oh, and the spellchecker.