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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Viewtron was an online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T from 1983 to 1986. Patterned after the British Post Office's Prestel system, it started as a videotex service requiring users to have a special terminal, the AT&T Sceptre. As home computers became important in the marketplace, the development focus shifted to IBM, Apple, Commodore and other personal computers.

Viewtron differed from contemporary services like CompuServe and The Source by emphasizing news from The Miami Herald and Associated Press and e-commerce services from JCPenney and other merchants over computer-oriented services such as file downloads or online chat. Intended to be "the McDonald's of videotex," Viewtron was specifically targeted toward users who would be apprehensive about using a computer.

Viewtron also offered airline schedules from the Official Airline Guide (OAG), real estate research from Century 21, e-cards from Hallmark, product information from Consumer Reports, educational software from Scott Foresman, online auctions, financial services from American Express and EF Hutton, as well as limited online banking services as part of a research program into the uses and costs of banking online that included 20 US and Canadian banks.

At its height, Viewtron was operated in at least 15 cities by various newspaper companies. After six years of research and an investment reportedly in excess of $50 million, Viewtron never turned a profit, and, despite its developer's forecasts of breaking even in two years, Knight Ridder did not expect it ever would be profitable. AT&T had invested over $100 million in the project, but was forced to write off that investment as part of its court-ordered breakup. Viewtron closed on March 31, 1986, after an attempt by the Independent Commodore Users Group to buy the service failed.

A feature tying Viewtron to local newspapers was envisioned, with printed text instructing users how to access further information online, but it was never implemented.

In 2008, PCWorld magazine named Viewtron to a list of the biggest project failures in information technology (IT) history.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

This is a list of notable lexer generators and parser generators for various language classes.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) is an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol, specifically designed to work around existing patents.

Like all PAKE protocols, an eavesdropper or man in the middle cannot obtain enough information to be able to brute force guess a password without further interactions with the parties for each guess. Furthermore, being an augmented PAKE protocol, the server does not store password-equivalent data. This means that an attacker who steals the server data cannot masquerade as the client unless they first perform a brute force search for the password.

In layman's terms, during SRP (or any other PAKE protocol) authentication, one party (the "client" or "user") demonstrates to another party (the "server") that they know the password, without sending the password itself nor any other information from which the password can be derived. The password never leaves the client and is unknown to the server.

Furthermore, the server also needs to know about the password (but not the password itself) in order to instigate the secure connection. This means that the server also authenticates itself to the client, without reliance on the user parsing complex URLs. This prevents Phishing.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Books 🔗 Computing/Software

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (abbreviated CatB) is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as part of the book in 1999.

The illustration on the cover of the book is a 1913 painting by Liubov Popova titled Composition with Figures and belongs to the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. The book was released under the Open Publication License v2.0 around 1999.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Media 🔗 Music theory

Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients. While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shutdown. Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and BitTorrent.

Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store commonly known as Napster 2.0. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody streaming service on December 1, 2011. In 2016, the original branding was restored when Rhapsody was renamed Napster.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Literature

Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, was a website that attempted to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests. It was active from April 1, 2004 until May 18, 2007.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Hugin () is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms along with a preview window so the user can see whether the panorama is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Television 🔗 Electronics

A surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) is a display technology for flat panel displays developed by a number of companies. SEDs use nanoscopic-scale electron emitters to energize colored phosphors and produce an image. In a general sense, an SED consists of a matrix of tiny cathode ray tubes, each "tube" forming a single sub-pixel on the screen, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. SEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast ratios, wide viewing angles and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat panel displays. They also use much less power than an LCD television of the same size.

After considerable time and effort in the early and mid-2000s, SED efforts started winding down in 2009 as LCD became the dominant technology. In August 2010, Canon announced they were shutting down their joint effort to develop SEDs commercially, signalling the end of development efforts. SEDs are closely related to another developing display technology, the field emission display, or FED, differing primarily in the details of the electron emitters. Sony, the main backer of FED, has similarly backed off from their development efforts.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Open 🔗 Mozilla

The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."

A MozillaZine article explained:

The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in.