Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM: From the blog: DRM just flat out sucks. Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, …
Category Archives: tech
a woz interview
The Cardinal Inquirer interviewed Steve Wozniak: Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they’re doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don’t know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones …
writing great email
Like many people, I get a lot of email. Maybe not as many as Cory or Steve, but a few hundred a day, fairly easily. I manage to read and respond to most of it pretty quickly. Last March, boingboing pointed out Stever Robbins’ article at the Harvard Business School, Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload. …
on originality
Wil Shipley on ideas: Delicious Library was not an original idea. It was a new approach to an idea that’s been around for as long as computers. Hell, longer. I think the first cavemen carved on rocks when they lent out their, uh, sticks to other cavemen. Which wasn’t efficient, but still worked better than …
Cory Doctorow: Canada doesn’t need craptacular copyright law
Cory Doctorow has a great op-ed in The Toronto Star about the harm done by bad copyright laws. There’s sizzle with this steak, too: Musicians want to be remembered as “the guy who wrote the song you lost your virginity to,” not “the guy who wrote the song you lost your hard drive to.”
redefining “podcast”
From 37signals: Creative tries to redefine “Podcast”: Can you hear it? Can you hear that whirring sound? That’s the spin over at Creative ZENcast. According to them… Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. A for effort, F for give me a fucking …
Bill Gates’ predictions about speech recognition
Bill Gates’ predictions about speech recognition: a historical review Bill Gates, 1 October 1997: “In this 10-year time frame, I believe that we’ll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard …
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bay area usability and design organizations
Silicon Valley SIGGRAPH BayDUX Interaction Design Association Society for Technical Communication San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, ACM The Information Architecture Institute and quasi-related: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
enjoying your hotel stay
over at signal 15, we hear: So, I’m in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it’s been suckin’ all night, like I couldn’t even do anything on it. I suspected someone running a p2p program and taking up all of the bandwidth, so I fired up …
Jason on software
More smart writing frm 37signals: Jason Fried on why good software is simple software: Less as a competitive advantage and why functional specs aren’t helpful.