Month: June 2016

(credit: Michael Hicks)

This article originally appeared on the blog of author Ken Shirriff and is reprinted here with his permission.

Alan Kay recently gave his 1970s Xerox Alto to Y Combinator, and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system.

The Alto was the first computer designed around a graphical user interface, and it introduced both Ethernet and the laser printer to the world. The laser printer was invented at Xerox by Gary Starkweather, and networked laser printers were soon in use with the Alto. Y Combinator's Alto is an "Orbit" model with slots for the four boards that drive the laser printer, laboriously rendering 16 rows of pixels at a time.

This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago, when it would have been more conducive to life. (credit: ESO)

In the year 2016 one might be forgiven for thinking the world is going to hell. Across much of Europe and the United States a distressed and angry working class has begun wielding nationalism as a blunt weapon against the disconnected ruling class. Islamic radicals have stepped up attacks against the West as well as moderate practitioners of their own faith. Then there is humanity's untrammeled use of fossil fuels, worsening water shortages, and other environmental degradations of the planet—not to mention the proliferating threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Finally, we also haven't yet gotten around to tracking every asteroid that might wipe out humankind.

In short, Earth might need a backup plan.

Elon Musk certainly thinks so, having staked much of his fortune on SpaceX and its relentlessly pursued goal of colonizing Mars. But Mars is not the only place humans could go. There are other worlds in the Solar System where humans could walk without space suits, find ample energy, or even swim in subsurface oceans. None of these places are remotely as habitable as Earth, even at our planet's cold poles. But they also don't have Earth's political baggage, either. So here's our guide to the five-best options for DIY colonists:

Two hours or so of WWDC keynoting and Tim Cook didn't mention a new file system once? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

This article was originally published on Adam Leventhal's blog in multiple parts.

Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this point has been mostly breathless elongations of Apple's developer documentation. With a dearth of detail I decided to attend the presentation and Q&A with the APFS team at WWDC. Dominic Giampaolo and Eric Tamura, two members of the APFS team, gave an overview to a packed room; along with other members of the team, they patiently answered questions later in the day. With those data points and some first-hand usage I wanted to provide an overview and analysis both as a user of Apple-ecosystem products and as a long-time operating system and file system developer.

The overview is divided into several sections. I'd encourage you to jump around to topics of interest or skip right to the conclusion (or to the tweet summary). Highest praise goes to encryption; ire to data integrity.