After going through a bunch of OS X Mountain Lion reviews I have to say I can’t wait to get it onto my Mac. For the most part the devil’s in the details; all the little things that accrue to form what I expect to be a better user experience. Besides all of the little things, however, there is something that increasingly defines what OS X is about: the iCloud. As Tim Cook said, Apple doubled down on iCloud with Mountain Lion, and it shows. Using Mountain Lion it will Read More

The internet may be the most significant invention of mankind yet it is the most invisible one. You see computers, tablets, phones, various kinds of screens and data centers, but none of them quite capture the significance of the whole thing. All of them are just individual components which on their own don’t exactly mean as much, but as a network create something that’s in a colloquial sense becoming downright “magical”. This is becoming ever more evident with the increased ubiquity of wireless networking, mobile devices, and cloud computing. These Read More

Firefox was a revolutionary browser. It rose out of the ashes of Netscape’s legacy to strike a decisive blow at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer monopoly. It was a market that begged for a disruption, and Firefox delivered, most notably by introducing a now ubiquitous tabbed browsing paradigm. Fast forward to today, and things are quite a bit different. While Internet Explorer’s market share is just about at an all time low it is not Firefox that is at the limelight. Instead Google stole the show with Chrome, while Firefox struggles to Read More

Amid Apple winning an injunction against Samsung Galaxy S2 in US some pundits have predictably upped the ante in their somewhat rightful chastising of Apple, and we are hearing more and more about Apple changing from a company that innovated their way to success into a company that is just trying to crush competition through litigation. I think this kind of content has little value beyond the predictably high number of page views it can generate (not that this realization just dawned on me). Media likes to focus on the Read More

Long time ago I argued that Linux is not an OS the way many people think. Most people, when they say “Linux”, think of a singular operating system like Windows and Mac OS X when it in fact refers to a multitude of distributions each of which practically qualifies as its own OS. I argued that a better way to present “Linux” is as a brand representing a rather sizable family of operating systems with a common core: the Linux kernel. Back then I actually called it a “market of Read More

After the fight against bills such as SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, and the just defeated ACTA treaty, all of which would allow government greater power to regulate the internet in a way that introduces forms of censorship and chills innovation, a broad coalition of internet activists, companies and organizations drafted the “Internet Freedom Declaration”. The draftees and signers already involve a number of high profile organizations including FreePress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, Amnesty International, Mozilla, TechDirt, SEOMoz and many others. The FreePress hosted declaration page contains nearly 28 thousand signees as Read More

My initial impression of the Microsoft Surface tablet had me pretty upbeat about what Microsoft is doing with it and Windows 8, but after watching a few videos such as the one below, showing common users trying to find their way around Windows 8 on a standard desktop computer, I’m seriously beginning to doubt Microsoft’s approach. In fact, that’s an understatement. Seeing people literally unable to do something even so basic as getting back to a start screen to launch a new application has me thinking that Windows 8 in Read More

The idea of replacing a PC with a tablet is making more and more sense. The two main driving factors of this is the continued relentless increase of available processing power in mobile devices, and the availability of ports, accessories or peripherals which give these devices the input and output options typically associated with full blown PCs. It is even easier to imagine this when we look at what smartphones are becoming capable of. Modern smartphones are as powerful as average PCs were not so long ago, and there are Read More

The United States drone program has seen rapid growth since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Although the predominant missions for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS), is intelligence and surveillance, armed employment of the drones has steadily risen since the first documented use in Afghanistan in 2002. Although armed drone employment is disparaged by many friends, foes, and those in-between of the United States, the program’s employment has proven highly successful in degrading the leadership and combat capability of the al Qaeda and associated Read More

Apple just came out with what they call the best computer they’ve ever created; the MacBook Pro with a Retina display. It’s certainly quite a high end computer; in design, capability, and price. It’s hard not to be impressed. We are offered a super powerful computer, with generous IO options, super fast all-flash architecture, and the screen with the greatest pixel density in the industry, all in a design that’s almost as thin as the MacBook Air, and as stylish as anything we’ve come to expect from Apple. Unfortunately, it Read More