Topics on businesses, good and bad.
I’ve often wondered what the future would look like if someone did create a true artificial intelligence, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it once they knew how. I’ve often thought that most of today’s intellectual jobs would just vanish, the way that so many blue-collar jobs did when automation started replacing …
Continue reading ‘“I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future”’ »
It is with great sadness that I have to agree with this article. When I was growing up, we were taught that the US was the greatest nation on Earth. There was even some evidence that objectively supported it — the Manhattan project (and the fact that we were so collectively horrified at the fates …
Continue reading ‘“NSA Prism: Why I’m boycotting US cloud tech – and you should too”’ »
As some of the readers of this blog may have noticed, we posted the Linux version of our product yesterday, joining the Windows version we originally released. The product was originally developed under Linux, so it would have made sense to post that one first — except that we had no experience packaging things for …
Ever heard of Elsevier? Unless you’re a scientist, probably not. It’s a scientific and medical publishing company, which takes science research — done by scientists it does not employ, often with public funds — and sells it at exorbitant prices to universities and libraries. The money they make at this, they keep; the original researchers …
Continue reading ‘“Elsevier’s backpedalling not stopping scientist strike”’ »
As you may have noticed, I’ve been too busy this last week or so to keep up on my blog posts. That’s because we’re getting ready to release our new software product, and I’ve been working on a new website, among other things. After some initial teething troubles, I’m happy to report that it’s now …
We’re gearing up to release our first program for the general public in quite some time, so we’re going to need a real website again, rather than the one-page placeholder that I put up several years ago. The last time I had to design a website was before the turn of the century. I started …
Continue reading ‘Git makes website maintenance easy too!’ »
I did this (thanks for the early heads-up, Ploni), though I had a few problems getting to the history page. Once I managed it, I was appalled to see how much stuff they’d managed to associate with me… nothing damning, just massive amounts of it. If someone wanted to cause me problems, or wanted to …
Continue reading ‘“How to remove your Google Web History”’ »
Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, I’ve been wondering what would happen when anyone could download a set of plans and print their own, for example, Star Wars toys. And more to the point, what would happen when those plans could be pirated. Anything digital can easily be copied; the Internet is …
Continue reading ‘“The Pirate Bay torrents printable 3D objects”’ »
Good God… someone actually advocating an intelligent solution to movie piracy, in a mainstream business magazine?! Unbelievable! Listen up, Hollywood. As an independent software developer, I’ve been dealing with Internet piracy for longer than you — without a single lawyer, let alone an army of them, and often on a shoestring budget. The facts in …
Continue reading ‘“You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”’ »
Now why hasn’t anyone thought of something like this before? Practically everyone uses earphones these days, and I for one always have to look at the blasted things to figure out which one is supposed to go in which ear. Maybe most people just don’t bother? Of course, from the consumer’s end this will probably …
Continue reading ‘“Earphones know left from right even when you don’t”’ »