I was startled to hear this morning that Jef Raskin had died. I saw Jef at a conference in November, and was pleased to see he was as enthusiastic as ever about his human-interface work. He didn’t seem ill at all. His current project was “THE” — The Humane Environment, which he’d recently renamed […]
One applauds Microsoft’s impulse to help potentially clueless parents figure out what their kids are saying online. But still it seems odd to contemplate the prospect of a Microsoft employee or contractor soberly writing up a glossary focusing on how to say one has “m4d sk1llz” at “h4x.”
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My experiment with BitTorrent found its way into a New York Times article today. The article’s not bad, but if I could change it I would have had the story distinguish more clearly between (a) downloading a TV show that originated as analog cable TV (and in reduced-resolution format) in six or seven hours and […]
It wasn’t exactly the message that the studios wanted to hear. At a Thursday panel at this year’s RSA Conference, John Worrall of RSA Security Inc. said something that I wish were obvious to everybody. Cryptography, Worrall said, is “good at some problems, such as
transmitting data so it can’t be eavesdropped or even authentication, […]
I meant to stay up and watch Charlie Rose’s installment in political bloggers, which starred Glenn Reynolds, Ana Marie Cox, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Trippi. Unfortunately, I fell asleep before 11 p.m. (when the show aired here in the DC area). Fortunately, Trey Jackson recorded the show and put together a greatest-hits excerpt. […]
I’m listening to the Blackstone Audio recording of Robert A. Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE
LAND on my iPod, and I’m finding much to like as well as to laugh at
in the book — it’s quite the mixture of creaky mid-20th-century archetypes and
perceptive social commentary. I’d read the book before, of course, […]
I spent much of last week out of town, so I didn’t follow the story of CNN news executive Eason Jordan’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Jordan said — or at least suggested — that U.S. forces had targeted journalists in Iraq. At the end of last week, under an […]
Just back from a stay in Knoxville, where I was a guest of the University of Tennessee. This visit was an opportunity to catch up with one of my old friends and professors, Dwight Teeter, whom I knew back at the University of Texas at Austin. It also gave me a chance to meet […]
My interview with Neal Stephenson, the author of the Baroque Cycle trilogy, is now up at the Reason magazine website. It’s in the February issue. I think the interview, which has been reduced from a much longer exchange, came out well.
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(Posted from Geneva on Sunday, 8:30 am)
In a followup to my weblog entry “BitTrickle,” computer scientist Ed Felten offers an interesting analysis that could explain why ordinary users’ experience of BitTorrent when downloading television is so often more disappointing than either BitTorrent’s boosters or the MPAA’s lawyers make it seem. Responding to the New […]