Technology

Dan Bricklin reports on a JavaScript emulation of the original IBM PC that lets you run the original spreadsheet program he co-wrote. He notes the emulator is even designed to emulate the 4.77 MHz speed of original PCs.

Buy, use tickets on your smartphone, if your smartphone is an Android or iPhone. Versons for BlackBerry and South Station lines are planned.

The National Weather Service reports:

A cut fiberoptic line belonging to a commercial phone company has disrupted websites serving the Eastern Region. As this issue is being resolved, we are now operating our websites in backup mode.

Among the sites affected are our own NWS office in Taunton.

Dave Levy compares Uber and arriviste Hailo:

As an end-user, I'll likely go back and forth depending on wait times; the ability to choose and have multiple options only makes transportation around Boston better.

The Tech reports how MIT didn't wait for a subpoena to give federal investigators detailed network information in their probe of a guy charged with downloading millions of documents from a paid database after allegedly breaking into an MIT wiring closet.

Currently limited to Harvard students, but then again, that's how Facebook started, too.

Ned Bachelder, who organizes a local get-together of programmers who use Python, was getting tired of trying to figure out how to feed the herd. So he's written a script he calls pizza.py to give him an answer.

Luke Timmerman explains why Boston is poised to overtake the Bay Area as the biotech hub of the universe - and his reasons sound a lot like the reasons why the Bay Area overtook the Boston area as the high-tech center of the world:

Success begets success and companies and innovators are drawn here by the unique concentration of companies and innovators already here - and now we've got a unique concentration of start-ups, established Big Pharma, research hospitals, Harvard and MIT. Also, everybody's piled on top of each other, especially in Kendall Square, thanks to smart zoning decisions, which is what you want in a collaborative, cross-pollinating kind of field like biotech. Plus, the Bay Area's now become too expensive for start-ups and people just getting out of college (sound familiar?). Also:

People on the West Coast sometimes like to trot out stereotypes about the sharp-elbowed competitors in Boston, how they just can't collaborate as well as us laid-back West Coasters. That's just not consistent with the Boston I've experienced. If anything, there's more of a tight-knit collaborative community in Boston than in San Francisco. There's a can-do spirit, an energy in Boston that is palpable. It will endure. Boston is reaping what it has sown for decades.

Tammytantrum noticed that Maps doesn't realize that Boston has more than one Charles Street (three, actually); anybody who follows the map to the Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro is going to get just a bit confused.

Steve Garfield reports.

Occupy Apple Store.

The iPhone <LatestVersion> goes on sale today, no doubt bringing orgasmic joy to these people, whom Photographynatalia captured waiting outside the First Church of Apple on Boylston Street yesterday.

Ed. question: Who's the Giant Head?

Copyright Photographynatalia. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

Boston Business Journal reports a local company has come up with robots aimed at further dehumanizing the workforce helping factory workers with repetitive tasks. For some reason, the robot has googly eyes.

Xconomy has a video that basically shows the company's founder (formerly CTO at iRobot) taunting the robot - the video cuts off shortly before, we can only imagine, the robot finally gets tired enough of the guy moving around things the poor robot is trying to grasp with its pincer and rips his nose off.

In 1995, the House of Compassion opened its doors taking in people living with HIV and AIDS to live in a welcoming home environment. The House now faces closure, with a looming 30,000 in debt threatening the homes of their ten residents. Find out more about the House of Compassion!

Dude lives in a project in the South End and watches a lot of anime.

Stompymen with just one leg back in May. Photo by Chris Devers. Posted under this license.

So why would people want to build a propane-fueled, ten-foot high spider with seating for two? Because they frickin' can.

At-large Councilors Ayanna Pressley and Felix Arroyo say that rather than just let old payphones collect trash and rust, the city should use them to set up free wireless zones.

The councilors say Boston could use more places where people could get online for free:

There is a digital divide between different demographics and socioeconomic levels and such a program would expand access to the internet for more Boston residents.

The two will ask the full council tomorrow to approve a hearing on whether Boston could follow New York with a pilot of free, anonymous WiFi.

Think the mayor would WiFi this WiFi idea?

Nature reports on some interesting work done by a team of researchers at Harvard and Mass. General, who found inspiration at the jellyfish exhibit at the New England Aquarium.

"We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish," one of the researchers said. But don't worry - they're not all sitting around in a secret underground lair going "mwa-ha-ha!" as they build giant tanks to house their earth-conquering ratfish. We think. They say the work, in which rat heart cells were grown on a thin plastic layer, could aid in battling heart disease and developing drugs, by giving researchers a better understanding of the "fundamental laws of muscular pumps."

Ed. question: In a battle between Harvard rat jellyfish and MIT zombie moths, who would win?

Phill Hunt was thirsty today:

I wanna go for a drink at Higgs Boston.

Hillary, however, suggests it may be too late:

Higgs Boston - it's behind an unmarked door, down a staircase, next to a Dunkies. If you have to ask, you're not cool enough to go there.

And, in fact, there is a surprising number of Google results for the term Higgs Boston.

But what does it all mean? Technology reporter John Moe sums it up, in fewer than 140 characters, no less:

"I'm wicked hahd to find." - The Higgs-Boston Particle.

Chris Marstall adds:

Higgs Boston represent! Take that New York, lets see your Higgs!

To which Sean Frederick piles on:

"How do you like them atoms?" #higgsboston

ICANN, the group that decides on Internet domains (such as .com, .net, etc.) recently solicited bids for a whole new generation of "generic top-level domain names." Dan Rowinski notes that our very own Globe has applied to set up and run a domain of .boston (see all the applications).

If approved, the Globe would win the right to act as a domain-name registrar, doling out Internet addresses to anybody who wants a .boston address. Or as the Globe puts it in its application:

The Mayor's Office of Constituent Engagement reports it's working on a new version of Citizen's Connect, which will let you close out your own complaints, say, if you report a possum in your trash and then notice that somebody else has freed the critter. The city's aiming for a fall release date.

Only they didn't seem to be much reassured. The Daily Free Press reports on the latest meeting on BU's biolab, which wants to bring in the world's deadliest pathogens for study.

The Massachusetts Court of Appeals today upheld a jury's conviction of a bookkeeper at Bridgewater State College for embezzling more than $355,000 in a year.

Clare Werner argued the conviction should be appealed because her lawyer discovered two of the jurors had posted complaints about being selected for the jury on Facebook and because the trial judge dismissed her complaint about that online activity even before Facebook had responded to the judge's subpoena for records related to the post.

Over the past couple of months, companies that produce porn films have filed a series of lawsuits in US District Court in Boston against scores of unidentified BitTorrent users they claim are illegally distributing such classics as "Illegal Ass 2" and "Big Wet Brazilian Asses 7."

The copyright suits list the defendants only as Does, but say the plaintiffs have their IP numbers and will use that to seek their names and addresses from their ISPs. The suits seek an end to the file swapping, destruction of any copies of the films and, naturally, lots of money.

• Patrick Collins vs. Does 1-30 - Copy of one of the suits (they're all pretty much the same, save for the name of the plaintiff, the number of Does and the film details).
• How BitTorrent is used to distribute files illegally - 5M PDF by the plaintiffs' consultant.
• Sample listing of IP addresses

Inventor of e-mail inducted into new Internet Hall of Fame; he also gave the world the @ sign for addresses.

The Crimson reports on debates over the future of the school's libraries in this digital age, provides one professor's reason for preferring having to scoot around the university to do research:

Some of the books Staehli uses measure more than six feet in height, and the experience of handling these unique, highly-detailed books cannot be replicated on a computer screen, he says.

While it takes only a second to flip a page, it can sometimes take up to several hours to download a high-quality file, he noted.