April 30th, 2006
This posting isn’t about computers or technology, so feel free to skip it…
We drove from NYC down to rural Virginia this weekend, to visit some friends on their farm (hence the lack of blog entries on April 28th and 29th). I was curious to see if there were any signs of a stagnant economy, or [...]
April 28th, 2006
I’ve long been a believer in H. L. Mencken’s famous adage, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” It’s amazing how gullible, short-sighted, and downright wrong we can be on any number of issues. And yet … and yet: it’s amazing to see the degree of common sense exhibited by [...]
April 27th, 2006
Most of us are familiar with the “consumer confidence” reports that tell us, at approximately monthly intervals, whether we’re collectively feeling more or less optimistic about the state of the world. One of the most widely reported metrics of such confidence is the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index; it recently told us that, while we [...]
April 26th, 2006
I’ll be speaking at the Princeton venue of the 2007 “Software Best Practices” conference, organized by the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute. For more details, click here.
April 26th, 2006
Everyone chortled and guffawed at the story in yesterday’s New York Times article (see “One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand“) about a proposal by Airbus to introduce a “standing-room only” section to their planes, in which passengers would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a [...]
April 25th, 2006
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away — the summer of 1987, to be precise, in the little village of Water Mill, New York, where I was spending the summer — I somehow found out about a small company called Forethought, which had a Mac-only product bearing the name “Powerpoint.” For someone [...]
April 24th, 2006
I stumbled across a wonderful article by Judith Belkin in the April 23rd issue of the New York Times, entitled “Coming to Terms With a Wired Age, Part 2.” Ms. Belkin has collected, with help from a number of clever, witty readers, a list of new buzzwords and acronyms to describe the quirky behavior we’re [...]
April 23rd, 2006
In earlier postings here and here, I’ve written about SETI@home and the D2OL avian-flu project, which take advantage of the idle CPU cycles on desktop and laptop computers around the world, for interesting and potentially important research. Here’s another interesting application: what if we could use distributed computing to pool our idle CPU cycles to [...]
April 22nd, 2006
Bill Gates is roughly 50 billion times richer than me; so maybe he’s 50 billion times smarter, too. But I can’t help wondering if his crystal ball is any less murky than mine, especially when I see him rhapsodizing about the tablet PC. For some reason, he loves to do this in Tokyo: at a [...]
April 21st, 2006
Notwithstanding the urban-folklore legend that Al Gore invented the Internet (which has been debunked, as noted here), most of us are willing to give the credit to the U.S. Department of Defense, whose funding of Arpanet in the 1960s eventually gave us the freely available, worldwide network we depend on so much today (see History [...]
