One of the many famous Steve Jobs quotes involves something that is clearly a fundamental part of how Apple works, and by extension why their products have been so successful. Steve Jobs said this: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” I think there is great truth to this, but the idea is apparently quite controversial Read More

Why do I have a feeling that Ray Ozzie's vision of a "Post-PC" world is nothing new. I've read it expecting something different, and all I got was an inspirational speech about how "continuous services" and cloud computing instead of device-centered computing is the future. It's a bit baffling to see some people treat this as if it was some great new vision, when it's something that various techie "visionaries" have been talking about for over a year. It's also somewhat baffling to see people look at these visions in Read More

Robert Strohmeyer has recently proclaimed the death of the dream of Desktop Linux, after himself being an author of one of those infamous “This is The Year of Linux Desktop” articles in 2008. Frankly, I would not quite say that the dream is dead, since many people probably keep on dreaming about it. As far as the reality goes however, it probably is dead, and I would not argue otherwise. The trouble is, this does not really mean much as far as the overall success of Linux as an operating Read More

Steve Jobs died about three weeks ago, but the web is still very much buzzing about him. It’s hard to read tech news without running into literally dozens of stories about him, and in recent days much of it is fueled by the just released biography by Walter Isaacson. However, I would like to go back to something Richard Stallman said about him within days of his death, and which caused a fair bit of ruckus in the Linux and FOSS communities. The reason I feel compelled to comment, albeit Read More

Anonymous has recently been conducting what they call an "Operation Payback", a series of DDOS, defacement and other attacks at web sites of anti-piracy organizations including some content industry organizations such as MPAA and RIAA. Three of such attacks have been conducted just in the last week including DDOS and defacement of MPAA's CopyProtected.com which promotes DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology on DVDs and Blu-ray, DDOS on UK's Intellectual Property Office web site, and the latest, a DDOS attack and defacement of Portuguese Movie Rental Outfit ACAPOR. In this latest Read More

Google silently released Panda 2.5 this week, and the smell has polluted the web.  This latest revision of Google’s much-maligned machine learning algorithm has identified and punished such evil spammers as Technorati, GamerPro, and MotorTrend. According to SearchMetrics, Technorati lost 73% of it’s search engine visibility in Google, GamePro lost 65%, and MotorTrend lost 31%.  Obviously these sites are not spammers.  Google’s little machine is seriously broken and no one inside the GooglePlex seems serious about fixing it. Panda 1.0 rolled out in February with serious bugs, notably decimating quality Read More

When I first read about the Google Verizon deal, in this highly hyperbolical article, I had to laugh at all the outcry about Google betraying the net neutrality cause to follow its own corporate interests. The naiveté of some people is just extraordinary, and perhaps deserves to be laughed at. Who would've thought that a big corporation would betray a "goodie" cause the first time their interests demand it? I would think everybody would think that, but we're apparently not living in a very sane world. It reminds somewhat of Read More

Here are three great reasons to buy a new laptop now. These don’t even include the fourth great reason — you want one! The Great Recession The “Great” Recession has pushed so many buyers out of the marketplace that manufacturers, distributors, and resellers are all pushing their margins to razor thin levels — or even operating below margin just to keep the doors open. Unless you are one of the 9.2% of Americans, who are currently unemployed, this can actually be to your advantage. Not only are the store aisles Read More

A recently released TED Talk given by Kevin Slavin of Area/Code, a company that makes “cross-media games and entertainment”, demonstrates the extent to which our world is being shaped by algorithms. He uses an example of financial markets 70% of which are apparently ran by so called “black box trading” or “algo trading” where algorithms decide on what to buy or sell, when, and for how much. He mentions the “flash crash of 2:45”, a sudden 5 minute dip in the markets the cause of which is still being debated. Read More

It is interesting how luddite the world of DJing can sometimes seem considering how electronic their music is. When optical discs (or CDs) were emerging on the scene we had many DJs resisting the trend believing that CD technology makes things too easy compared to what is required to physically manipulate a vinyl record. They also romanticized about CDs removing the ability to “touch the music” that is playing like they with vinyl. I suppose they were oblivious to the fact that they weren’t quite touching the music given that Read More