Category: Sci/Tech
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Winning marketshare by giving away your intellectual property
Suppose you start a small tech startup and invent a revolutionary device with tremendous potential. What would you expect to be most profitable – to make the device yourself, to license it to large manufacturers, or to give away licenses royalty free to anyone who wanted them? The first two choices might seem reasonable, but…
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Support Tor: fight Internet censorship
Unless you are utterly ignorant of the outside world, you have heard that the government of China actively monitors and censors its citizen’s access to the Internet. Its tight grip on Internet services is part of an overall policy of brutal suppression of free expression and human rights in China, including organ harvesting, mass murder,…
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FCC rewards piracy in the name of "net neutrality"
According to Ars Technica, yesterday the FCC ordered Comcast to stop slowing down the Internet traffic of users who use excessive file-sharing (P2P) software. Instead, Comcast will slow down the Internet service of all users who use a lot of traffic, regardless of the content. Other ISP’s will probably follow Comcast’s lead. Basically, this order…
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The digital revolution transforms art history
The world is full of great art the vast majority of people will never see. Even the world traveler who tours Chicago, New York, Paris, and St Petersburg several times over, will not see all the collections in great detail, much less a single painting. Any visitor to the Louvre will undoubtedly want to see…
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CD-Recordable discs unreadable in less than two years
Long before I got my first CD-RW drive, I had friends make CD’s for me and stayed up late in the school’s computer lab to transfer my files by ftp and back up my stuff on the ancient 2X burners. Because CDR’s store data digitally and CDROM drives do not touch the surface when reading…
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Sun Microsystems is a Hypocrite
I’ve spent the last two days installing and playing with Windows Server 2003. It ads some much-needed features and improvements to IIS that make it a much better server OS than the Windows 2000 line. Aside from some unnecessary hardware and software compatibility issues, I have one complaint: it’s missing Microsoft’s own optimized version of…
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NEWCARD
The following article on the upcoming NEWCARD standard to replace the old PC Cards is an interesting look at the issues that must be considered when impementing a hardware standard.
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Men everywhere should mark this day. Women…well, they have one less excuse.
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So I'm learning Visual Basic.Net
So I’m learning Visual Basic.Net and I’d like to focus my learning efforts on making a program that’s actually useful to help me stay motivated. Can you think of a simple GUI program that you might like to use? If so, please leave me a comment!
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Open-Source Socialism?
When I first announced ObjectivismOnline, I got an email from a college CS major who warned me against using Open Source software because (a) the leader of the movement is a dirty marxist, and (b) free software in general is anti-profit, and this anti-capitalism. After doing some (very little) research, I indeed found out that…