Page 75 of 141 (2810 total posts)
05/06 Sinking in a sea of documents — Lately because of one of my projects I am having to work my way through a bunch of long, semi structured documents containing things such as requests for proposals, government program reports, threat models and all kinds of things like that. They are in techno-legalese as I would call them: highly s...
05/02 The funny thing about iPhone apps — So a friend of mine told me of his iPhone app, called Etude. He sung the praises, it sounds really cool to me. So I whipped out my iPhone and went to download the app. Wouldn’t you know it costs $4.99. I turned to him and I said, hey, “it’s not free!”. Yeah silly reaction, given how I’ve ranted myself about free and not-free. And here’s the funnier part still. He said, Oh, yes, it’s $3.00. I said, “No it’s more like $5.00”. He said, “Oh yes, we just raised the price.” I gave him a blank look. Here’s the kicker. He said, “What if I give you $5.00 right now?”. I still didn’t want to buy it… How does that make any sense?
04/30 The “T Word” – Trust — I am not sure exactly what this article about Trust means exactly, but it’s thought provoking, don’t you think? “Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular measure is zero. When trust is non-zero (which is better, believe me) it is based on one of two methodologies — empiricism or transparency (the other T-word).” (from I, Cringely)
04/28 Bring me different rocks — Scott Kirsner summarizes a new book “Mastering the VC game” and re-tells a funny VC scenario: “He also talks about an exercise called the “rock fetch,” when VCs ask an entrepreneur to spend time finding other investors willing to join them on the investment (bringing them “rocks”), but then decline to collaborate on a deal with those investors (“bring us a different rock.”)” (from Scott Kirsner) Ok, not really funny. More sad depressing poignant familiar…
04/26 CAPTCHA’s cracked — CAPTCHA is the nickname of the venerable (ok only a few years of veneration) technique of verifying if the person on the other side of the screen is actually a person not a computer. We’ve all seen them a million times: a very hard to read bit of text in a small box, with a request that you decipher...
04/23 Security by obscurity and other slogans — If you’ve been in computing for any time you may have been hit over the head by the slogan “Security by Obscurity is No Security”. As I have understood the argument it has a few components: - If your security relies on secret tricks, trap doors, and a hope that no one will be able to find out or gu...
04/19 [GEEKY] iPhone earphones revisited — The earphone/microphone that came with my iPhone is acting odd. First I thought it was a problem with my ear, then with my iPhone, but it seems to be a problem with the earphones, which I never thought of as something that could actually fail, except if I broke it physically. The sound quality is ju...
03/16 Health Care Letdown — I stopped posting thoughts about the mess that all of congress has made of health care reform. There are daily articles in the news to confirm the dysfunction in government today. Here are key quotes two from today which again hit home. I recommend that you read both articles in full:[Health Care Le...
02/23 Everything is getting more complicated not simpler — Following on on my post yesterday about “What we don’t understand.” As I was writing it, I was trying to use examples of simple things that just work without handholding, like an old dial telephone. Oh there’s an example. But did you notice how all the old examples are slowly falling away because th...