Speaking of nonagenarian newspaper columnists, as I was last week, you should know if you don't know already that Arnold Beichman is still going strong. You can read his columns regularly in, among other places, the Washington Times. Beichman was born on May 17, 1913, some 16 days before W.F. Deedes, whom I mentioned last week. A recent Beichman column draws on his long historical experiencehe took the anti-Communist side in the fierce battles on the left between Communists and anti-Communists in the 1930s and 1940sto make the point that seemingly well-meaning people can be the accomplices of evil. Here's a wonderful profile by David Brooks in the Weekly Standard on Beichman turning 90. I can't improve on it, so please read it all. I can add that I was Arnold and his wife, Carroll's, guest for dinner at their apartment just off the Stanford campus, not far from his office at the Hoover Institution, several years ago, and remember the vividness of their memories of things that happened many years ago and discussion of things that were happening right then.
April 30th 2007
Sun Microsystems and IBM last week introduced specialized high-end server systems that provide fresh evidence of a new era in computing. The Sun machine -- an ultrafast video server designed by the company's cofounder, Andreas Bechtolsheim -- is potentially powerful enough to transmit different-standard video streams simultaneously to everyone watching TV in a city the size of New York. In contrast, IBM's new video game server blends a mainframe computer with the company's Cell microprocessors, which sit at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console.
