X Window, X11 or "X," as it is known for short, provides the programming framework and the underlying runtime system for most Unix and Linux-based network-transparent windowing implementations. It runs on a huge number of Linux and Unix flavors, including Mac OS X and with a bit of help, on several Windows varieties. Without X11 , there is no KDE, no GNOME, and no Linux-based window manager, unless one is prepared to accept an X replacement. They do exist, and many carry a proprietary license, while X comes with a GPL-compatible license.

Technorati Profile

If one were to look at the world of networking as a layercake of virtual machines, you can probably see that the world of web applications has become surprisingly complicated. There is so much to know and so many interlocking specifications to pay attention to that we shouldn't be too surprised if web users slowly begin to feel overwhelmed.

The Question

I miss the somewhat more "mystical" side of technological progress at times. Who remembers the times when the Internet, Martian rovers and the Matrix seemed to herald a change in global consciousness, when technology seemed to converge with the human genome and body to produce new beings made of bytes and wires?

Instead, we get social networking software. I am not sure I find it as edifying to read about the statistics of networking and the global spread of musical trends. More later.

Gottfried Leibniz and the origins of computational theory

Many programmers and software engineers have an ambiguous relationship to mathematics. Richard Stallman read physics at Harvard, but Linus Torvalds was always known for his coding prowess and his leadership qualities, not his interest in mathematics.

The miniaturization of technology is slowly turning from promise into reality. The success of this trend has spawned perceptual difficulties for consumers: a few years ago it was still possible to impress a datacentre manager with the size and robustness of a Sun workstation. Today, an iPOD has more RAM, processor power and hard disk space than a server used to have in the year 2000.

Interaction with computers has pre-occupied many a psychologist since the earliest musings on the subject by the non-psychologist Alan Turing. Indeed, the very notion of a Turing test, and the philosophical controversies that arose in its aftermath, define a large portion of the discussion of what a successful interaction with a computer should be. The Turing test set standards that were a tad high: not being able to distinguish your computer from the man in the street or your friendly neighbourhood pharmacist is not what every user wants from their computer...

John von Neumann is a name to be conjured with. A US mathematician of Hungarian extraction, he is the closest modern mathematics and engineering has had to a magician. His influence stretched from theoretical biology to logic and proof theory; it extended to most of mathematics, physics and economics. He is also one of the founding fathers of modern computer science where his work spanned automata theory as well as the beginnings of computer architecture.