Tag Archives: tech

The Tragedy Of the Communal

At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in “collective intelligence” will begin to manifest itself. Blogger Nicholas Carr, talking about the badly written and frequently inaccurate Wikipedia in his skeptical article about the community-driven “Web … Continue reading

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Maps and Legends

I’ve loved maps since I was a little kid, and there are three fascinating new tools to play with: Amazon’s A9 Yellow Pages service now lets you walk around the neighborhood. They drove GPS-enabled trucks around Manhattan and other cities … Continue reading

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Panix Panic

Panix, perhaps New York City’s oldest Internet service provider (meaning that I don’t think any other company was selling dialup Internet access in NYC in 1991) was largely knocked offline this weekend by a domain-name hijacking. The hijacking meant that … Continue reading

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Journal Live Again

LiveJournal’s outage yesterday seems to have been fixed, but not before prompting an avalanche of adolescent snottiness from the Slashdot crowd. Perhaps the funniest comment was one that could have applied to the gamers and geeks on Slashdot as well: … Continue reading

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Programming Uphill Both Ways

Those of us who believe that programming has gotten too easy with all these sissy icons and windows (yes, you know who you are) might be pleased at the release of Hercules, an emulator for IBM mainframes. For my first … Continue reading

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The Time When Reason Triumphed Over Unreason

Having just finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, Confusion, and The System Of the World), I finally picked up James Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton.

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Scary Haircut Sold Separately

Now for sale: a waterproof MP3 player that works via bone conduction. Bone-conducting cell phones are also available. Does anyone else remember the BoneFone? You can get one on eBay if you like.

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They’ve Been Going In and Out Of Style

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Apple published a big insert in Newsweek magazine touting the new Macintosh. My Dad bought one early the following year, and I’ll never forget the singing disk drive (the 400K floppy drives in the very … Continue reading

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NY Times redefines “offshore”

In a scare story in today’s New York Times, we’re told that even high-end software jobs are vulnerable to “migrating abroad”: In the debate over high-technology work migrating abroad, there has been widespread agreement on at least one thing: the … Continue reading

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The End of the iPod

I suspect that in a few years, people will identify Apple’s rebuff of Real Networks as the beginning of the end for its dominance in online music. It’s sad that Apple still has not learned that closed platforms always lose … Continue reading

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