Software History

An uroboros program with 100+ programming languages

FizzBuzz is not the basic, sanity-check interview question that many presume it to be. Use it and you might just end up filtering out some of your good candidates who, unfortunately, suffer from the Smart Person's Mirage.

Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency  bands  (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us...

On the Z80 CPU there are so few registers and instructions that you can easily know and use them all and wish there were more of them. However, half of the time it feels like the only on you really use is ld. I imagine that if ld took half the number of clock cycles, average code would run twice as fast.

Adam "Major Malfunction" Laurie & Zac FrankenAugust 1st--4th, 2013Rio Hotel & Casino • Las Vegas, Nevada

If we send a square waveform through an antenna, will we get square electromagnetic waves with electric and magnetic fields looking like squares? Also, since there is an abrupt/almost jump in ampl...

What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess: Print to a postscript file. Observe the line: %%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009) Change "Tue" to anything else: %%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009) Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "Cr...

In this timeless feature from the March 2010 issue of Game Developer Magazine, we revisit the mighty kludges and well-meaning hacks that are sometimes required

Using various Super Mario World glitches, I injected the code for Flappy Bird (code written by p4plus2). This is the first time a human has ever completed th...

It doesn’t seem like much of a place to visit. Granted, I’ve never actually been there, but I think I can imagine it: the vastness of ocean, overcast skies, a heavy humidity in the air. No land in sight, with the only distinguishing feature being a lonely buoy, bobbing up and down in the water. …