Lynn Once More

I wrote about these 2 people before. Have read more about them lately.

Today everybody takes cheap hardware for granted, availability and cheapness a byproduct of science and capitalism. It is not that automatic! Brickwalls can deviate development a lot. Had not some people like these two used a liberal public science funding climate (mainly by US armed forces first and desparate corporations later) in due time, it could be very much different.

Some of us could still be programmers or digital designers or publishers, few in academia and most in large hierarchical companies hacking and typing away at large mainframes, cheap thinnest clients and expensive workstations and competing for more "processing" time. The personal desktop and mobile computing device could by far be not as ubiquitous or at least a lot more blackboxy.

These people bridged the gap between logic and solid state physics through their cooperation, mostly by writing a book called “Introduction to VLSI Systems”. Now computing is nearly everywhere. They made a difference and most of the time we forget how big it is. Open software can only grow on cheap hardware.

To quote from an article The Economist did on Mead because of his Foveon activities: On Ms Conway's urging, several of the early chapters were made available well before the book was finished, so that engineering schools could teach the principles of VLSI. The authors also devised a mechanism that enabled university laboratories to make prototype chips rapidly. This strategy was wildly successful.

Burton Bloom

Burton Bloom first described a method now commonly called Bloom Filters in a 1970 paper entitled "Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors". In those days of limited memory, Bloom filters were prized primarily for their compactness; in fact, one of their earliest applications was in spell checkers. However, there are less obvious features of the algorithm that make it especially well-suited to applications in social software.

A certain J. Marais and one K. Bahrat proposed Bloom Filters for use in the web for something called CommonKnowledge server.

On lists.canonical.org perl.com's Bloom Filters www.cs.wisc.edu google search on B.B.

Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller, and her research involving large amounts of uncertainty

Daphne Koller und ihr Ex-Student und Kollege Avi Pfeffer arbeiten in der Artificial Intelligence Forschung und beschäftigen sich mit research involving large amounts of uncertainty.

Einmal, 1998 ging es um die Verheiratung von Frame-based Representation Systems (FRS's) and Bayesian Networks (BNs), denn:

FRS's provide an excellent representation for the organizational structure of large complex domains, but their applicability is limited because of their inability to deal with uncertainty and noise.

In this paper, we provide a language that cleanly integrates these approaches, preserving the advantages of both.

Ignore this stuff at your own danger!

picked up the scent at lcom.

Philip Donald Estridge

This man started to work for IBM in 1959.

At the end of 1980, when VisiCalc rocketed Apple computers into the office, IBM decided to finally compete in the rapidly growing low-cost personal computer market. The company established what was then called the Entry Systems Division, located in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop the new system.

This small group consisted of 12 engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge; the team's chief designer was Lewis Eggebrecht. The division developed IBM's first real PC. This project was secret, hidden from the market and even more so from potential enemies inside IBM.

In that project Estridge did very uncommon and very important things: he decided on open specs, a published bus and easy programming, third party periphery and SW as well as more than one OS sources. He did so because they had analyzed the success of existing PCs and determined that the outstanding success of the Apple II was based on these advantages, mostly benefits that invenetor Steve Wozniak had designed into it.

To keep these things at the given point was historically even more crucial because Apple had already decided to put away with the crazy open ideas of Steve Wozniak and go for the closed architectures of Lisa and the Mac. So Don (together with his Boss Bill Lowe) saved the PC revolution.

He also turned down an offer Jobs made him to serve as president of Apple Computer, for US$1 million per year, US$1 million signing bonus, and US$2 million to buy a house.

He sadly died in a plane crash in 1985.

Wesley Clark and Charles Molnar

Builders of LINC. and lots other cool stuff.

Just google or yahoo them. You will be entertained, amused and educated.