Month: February 2016

Earlier this week, Internet Archive software collector and historian Jason Scott answered our phone call to talk about one of his latest efforts: the Malware Museum, which offered online passersby a glimpse at how nearly 80 classic viruses worked once they infected an MS-DOS computer. We enjoyed picking his brain about the collection and told him so, at which point he stopped us from hanging up the phone.

"I have one more drop for you," Scott said. "On Thursday, we're going to put up a bunch of Windows 3.1 software. What we did for MS-DOS, we're doing for Windows 3.1."

We were immediately intrigued, remembering exactly what Scott and his slew of Archive.org volunteers did for MS-DOS and other computing and gaming platforms. Thanks to that team's efforts, thousands of seemingly lost pieces of software had found new life, all brought back to life with free downloads and a mighty fine web-browser emulation solution. From beloved classics like Oregon Trail to cult hits like Karateka, the collection's thousands of titles seemed to have it all.

(credit: Shawn Campbell)

Although Twitter posted revenue of $710.5 million (PDF) in the fourth quarter of 2015—a result that narrowly surpassed the company’s high-bar projection from the previous quarter—the social media company posted a net loss of $90 million for the fourth quarter.

Worse, however, were the company’s user base statistics. Twitter reported that its Monthly Average Users (MAU) essentially remained flat from Q3 to Q4, but if Twitter subtracted its SMS-only customers (who are largely based in India and Brazil, and don’t see ads the way mobile customers do), that MAU number fell to 305 million per year, down from 307 in the previous quarter.

Twitter executives were quick to point out, however, that the monthly active user base had increased in January to Q3 levels. On the call, a Twitter executive attributed the rebound to the first quarter being a historically strong quarter for Twitter given the number of live events like award shows, sporting events, and other big celebrations that fall in that time period.

Gordon Moore's original graph, showing projected transistor counts, long before the term "Moore's law" was coined. (credit: Intel)

Moore's law has died at the age of 51 after an extended illness.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so. Moreover, as this site wrote extensively about in 2003, that the number of transistors per chip that resulted in the lowest price per transistor was doubling every 12 months. In 1965, this meant that 50 transistors per chip offered the lowest per-transistor cost; Moore predicted that by 1970, this would rise to 1,000 components per chip, and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent.

With a little more data and some simplification, this observation became "Moore's law": the number of transistors per chip would double every 12 months.

Model 3 concept art.

On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla Motors posted a 4^th quarter net loss (PDF), but the company’s CEO Elon Musk assured investors that Tesla expects to see "positive cash flow starting next month" and to be profitable again by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards in Q4 2016. Although the company's stock was down 3 percent at close of market, after-hours trading favored the stock price by 9.5 percent.

The company also confirmed that it would officially announce the highly anticipated Model 3 on March 31. Tesla added that it was on track for production and delivery of the budget-oriented car by late 2017.

According to the company’s quarterly financial statement, it made $1.75 billion in revenue in Q4 2015 (or $1.21 billion according to GAAP standards, which treat leased vehicles differently), and $5.29 billion (or $405 billion, GAAP) for the 2015 year as a whole. Still, the company posted a net loss of $114 million in Q4 (or $320 million, GAAP).

Mississippi is the latest state to see a bill introduced that would protect teachers who injected bogus information into science classes. In that regard, there's nothing new; South Dakota beat it to the punch this year. The text of the bill is also unremarkable, fitting right in to the family tree of similar legislation that's been introduced over the years (see sidebar).

What is unusual in this case is that the lawmaker behind the bill is being very upfront about his purposes. “I just don’t want my teachers punished in any form or fashion for bringing creationism into the debate," Representative Mark Formby told The Clarion-Ledger. "Lots of us believe in creationism.” The bill he introduced would protect teachers from any disciplinary actions triggered by their discussion of it into the classroom.

In most cases, the people behind these bills avoid publicly admitting their intentions. In that way, they can pretend that the language of the bill (which ostensibly protects scientific information) has a purely secular purpose. By giving the game away—the language is a sham, and the bill is meant to allow proselytizing in the science classroom—Formby has created a record that will undoubtedly resurface should his bill pass and trigger a lawsuit.