Topics on my particular interests.
I don’t know whether this kind of thing will ever catch on. It’s neat and useful, and I’d buy it in a heartbeat — but so are dome houses, and most people look at them and say “that’s weird, Martha.” They might be a stepping-stone between today’s separate devices and neural-interface computers, but there would …
Continue reading ‘“Are you ready for a wrist-mounted computer?”’ »
I thought I was one of the few people who did this kind of thing. I didn’t realize that all geeks do it, or that there was a word for it (“kaizen”).
I was all braced for a Herculean effort to get Ubuntu 9.04 working on my system, earlier this week, but as mentioned, I was disappointed: the upgrade worked almost flawlessly. But I did have one remaining problem with it (other than the encrypted home directory problem), and I was concerned by all the “cruft” that …
“Warm ocean, hurricane increases down to clean skies,” according to the subtitle. Hm, I wonder what NASA’s climate experts would say about that?
On Sunday evening, after a hard day’s work on Project X, I decided to poke around the Ubuntu web site a bit. The new version wasn’t scheduled for release for another half-week, and I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to download it for several days after that, due to web site congestion. …
Continue reading ‘Ubuntu 9.04: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ »
Whenever I see unproven fear-based reports like this one, I’m reminded of all the fear-inducing reports in my childhood. Comic books were warping our fragile little minds, so when I was six, my mother threw away a huge collection of Bugs Bunny comic books that I’d been given by our neighbors before I could read …
Interesting idea. I can see how this would be a lot harder for hackers to work around, at least for the moment. But it won’t do anything against spambots that use other people to get around the problem, directly or by trickery.
Have you ever heard about MessagEase, the extremely fast and efficient text-entry method for small devices? Probably not, even though it’s been around for a long time. And why not? I firmly believe that it’s because of the learning curve — it takes at least a few hours of practice to see any real speed …
I found the “Gaming the Pirates” section of this software developer interview completely fascinating. Piracy is a major problem in nearly all commercial software pursuits, but especially in games; these guys accepted it, planned for it in advance, and turned it to their advantage.
(For the British-challenged in the audience, “boffin” seems to mean “scientist.”) Why, when I read this, do I get a mental picture of a modern-day Paul Revere, buzzing through the streets on a moped, yelling “The Singularity is coming!”? 🙂 Despite the rather alarmist tone of the article, I really don’t think it’s going to …
Continue reading ‘“Boffins invent automatic net-hookup roboffinry machines”’ »