From the category archives:

Web/Tech

If you want to know the core of the Twitter API changes, this is it

March 12, 2011

That clever Matthew Somerville character has done a handy page visually showing the differences between the old and new Twitter API terms. There are lots of them, but I think the most important one is short: “We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build valuable businesses tools around the information flowing through Twitter.” Twitter [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Why “evil” is the most over-used word in tech

March 2, 2011

One of the things which you often hear reading tech blogs, and particularly the comments, is that such-and-such a company is “evil”. What this usually means isn’t that they’re deliberately employing children or forcing workers to work in polluted factories which damage their health. Instead, the cry of “evil” is used to describe companies that [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

The Nokia/Microsoft Elephant Tango

February 11, 2011

Alan Patrick ponders if Nokia and Microsoft ever be Mobile?: “The reason the JV is happening is that the assets being brought to the table are not so much incredible but non-credible. The two companies have completeley dropped the ball in mobile over the last 5 years, from positions of strength, due to a combination of [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

Why free software will remain a niche, in a nutshell

February 7, 2011

Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on The new Debian Linux: Irrelevant? | ZDNet: “For example, the default Debian distributions won’t include any proprietary firmware binary files… If, as is likely if you’re using a laptop or a PC with high-end graphics and you find you’re running into hardware problems, the Debian installation program should alert you the problem. That’s [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

What the Goldman Sachs Facebook investment really means

January 4, 2011

Alan Patrick sees through the hype around Facebook being “worth $50 billion”: “The one sure thing you can tell from this is that Facebook clearly can’t self fund itself enough for what it needs, even on $2bn turnover a year.” To put it another way: A web site which has 500 million users, 1/8th of [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

Nerd supremacy

December 19, 2010

Jaron Lanier gets it: “What I’m seeing in my nerd brethren is an increasing combativeness, a loss of empathy, and creepiness,” said Jaron Lanier, a critic of digital culture and a pioneering computer scientist who helped develop virtual reality. “It’s just another supremacy movement, ultimately. It just happens to be nerd supremacy.” (via ‘Hactivists’ fight [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Ubuntu changes its desktop from GNOME to Unity – Computerworld Blogs

October 25, 2010

Ubuntu changes its desktop from GNOME to Unity – Computerworld Blogs: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the company behind it, Canonical, surprised the hundreds of Ubuntu programmers at the Ubuntu Developers Summit when he announced that in the next release of the popular Linux operating system, Ubuntu 11.04, Unity would become the default desktop [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

The blog, as we knew it, is dying

October 11, 2010

From an excellent New York piece on Nick Denton, Gawker Media, and journalism’s future: “At the time of his public posturing, however, Denton was conceiving a comprehensive redesign of his blog network that signalled his steady march toward mainstream respectability. Gawker recently published a series of Fall Previews of books, music, television, and movies, such [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

My one comment on the Google/Verizon net neutrality announcement

August 10, 2010

I don’t have enough time to do a long post on Google and Verizon, but I will say this: claiming you’re preserving network neutrality on the Internet by redefining what “Internet” means isn’t going to wash. If “Internet” can be defined as “wired-only” and “not including any random ‘Premium’ services we might think of”, then [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Why Andy Ihnatko is my favourite tech writer

August 6, 2010

Because he writes stuff as good as this: “As for Google? Well, the death of Wave doesn’t matter to Google. They still have their ad business, and their search, and their maps, and their mail, and their mobile OS, and a hundred other projects going on at once. Is that their problem? Has Google become [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →