The Zeitgeist

Here we go again… yet another Patent Troll is going after someone — in this case Apple — for something that so obvious and in fact generic, you’d have to have to be from some other planet not to see that it’s not patentable.
At issue is something known as the “783″ patent, US Patent #7,321,783, [...]

Paul Saffo predicts the end of the US as we know it “by the middle of this century.” In this short YouTube snippet he briefly explains why the rise of City States (think: “Singapore” but hopefully with civil liberties) that are independent socio-economic zones are the future. It’s an interesting outtake from a clearly longer [...]

I am sure that they’re just within the bounds of the the law, but APC really disappointed me today with what I consider to be a rather deceptive marketing program. I have a couple of APC UPSes whose batteries need replacing. So, I went over to the APC web site to see what [...]

Like just about everyone I was hitting the refresh button on my browser as today’s Apple Special Event unfolded. The refresh of the iPod line was a “given,” but i didn’t actually expect them to intro a WiFi-based iPod based on OSX today (even though it’s been rumoured for weeks).
I think this is [...]

Ross Mayfield blogs today about privacy and the whole problem of meta-data in Social Networks. He’s got a good point about what amounts to the law of unintended consequences when we freely give out our personal details to these so-called networks. Beyond the obvious opt-in (or lack of in many cases) spamming [...]

We were on vacation for a couple of weeks in the San Francisco bay area, and I, along with ~10 others, got courtesy of HP and led by HP’s Archivist Anna Mancini, a private tour during BarCampBlock of the Birthplace of Silicon Valley at the garage where Hewlett and Packard started HP in [...]

About 2 years ago I decided that CVS was old and decrepit enough to be just too hard to use, too brittle and I decided to get with the times and migrate all my various source archives to what all the cool kids were using, Subversion, or “svn.” And for about 2 years it’s [...]

I have often wondered how a lot of my friends who run startups manage to do it. They code all day and night, and somehow manage to hang out at parties and go to conferences. Part of it comes, for many of them, from being single. It’s a lot harder [...]

Wow… Great article, and, sadly, pretty much correct when it comes to the delivery of Infrastructure.

…via Xkcd