Chris Dawson says he prefers G+ to Facebook because of information quality. Facebook has become pure noise. The reason it is pure noise is that I was an inexperienced social media user when I first started using it. I added whoever to my friend list. Now I get random political messages from both sides, people [...]
It appears that Shuttleworth has noticed a lot of the hate about Unity. He also seems to have a good understanding of why it exists and he has a plan. We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of [...]
Dr. Dubik and Dr. Wood thought it necessary to make sure that ‘dead as a doornail’ was indeed an appropriate analogy. Since advanced life support technology has confused things somewhat and there are now laws concerning brain death, standards matter. So How Dead Is a Doornail? If the definition of death as expressed by the [...]
Bootstrapping is not a trivial task. A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering is a reminder about the bootstrapping phase of software development for personal computing. Here’s the situation: it’s 1984, and you’re assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have [...]
It was a long time ago that getting a computer to play chess at a human level was just a far off goal. Things have changed since then. It looks like there has been steady improvement until something changed in about 2004. The paradigm shift at that time in chess engines got David Post at [...]
Wireless Telegraphy in Australia is a history of early radio communications efforts between Australia and England. It makes me think of the opening of the movie Dr. No where the Bermuda agent is assassinated as his secretary opens the radio link to London. There were large installations involved in transcontinental communications, even up through the [...]
When Canonical decided to offer the Unity desktop with its Ubuntu distribution, it set off a firestorm. A lot of geeks went ballistic and are still spraying shrapnel all over the place. For instance, see Ubuntu 11.10 without Unity shell shock and its comments. What happened is that the Gnome menu driven interface was changed. [...]
If you were 18, what do you really need to know? Rightwing News has a list and it’s good for more than just the 18 year old crowd. There are at least six key areas of your life: health, career, romantic, social, money, and religion. If you neglect any one of those areas, it will [...]
The I’net is like a neighborhood with a bunch of teenagers constantly checking the doors and windows to see if they can get into houses and do something to brag about their successes. Seldom is it worse than just trespassing and graffiti but every now and then the behavior can have more important consequences such [...]
Gizmodo describes a stereo mic for your iphone with the idea that it’d make for a “sneaky bootlegging tool.” That’s really only the old way to do it. One of these days, a group of concert-goers, maybe tens or even hundreds strong, will team up. Each will record the concert on their personal communications device. [...]