If you have noticed over the past decade, the net has become far less diverse. Far less anarchistic. Far more concentrated, with a few sites like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and other big media ventures concentrating most of the traffic. Even worse, they provide their own pages for what were once independent offerings. Facebook has … Interview with Francis Irving of Redecentralize.org
Education gets talked up a lot. People are freaked out because we have too many college graduates, with too many loans, and a college education doesn’t magically open doors as much as it once did. Even more, it seems like graduates lack actual job skills. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data … The hacker approach to education
The original idea behind the internet was that it would be a place for everyone to interact. Sort of like society, but in a virtual world where distance was no barrier. However, that’s not what happened. More evidence suggests that online audiences reflect exactly zero of what’s going on in the world, and instead reflects … Is the internet a niche audience?
As documented on /., six months ago I de-installed the Adobe FlashTM player on all my browsers. This provoked some shock and incredulity from others. After all, Flash has been an essential content interpreter for over a decade. It filled the gap between an underdeveloped JavaScript and the need for media content like animation, video … Six months without Adobe Flash, and I feel fine
Bob Way has a great post up about his brainstorm for a file-sharing system that technically does not include the actual data it shares, but can reconstruct it from a relative measurement of it, which is stored. This is much like coming up with a mold for a part and using relative vectors to describe … Using relativity to encrypt data
Most programming is a variant of “cut and paste” programming. You find the archetype you’re looking for, adapt it, and then paste it into the program from a mixture of sample code and blog posts. It works; you move on. Some programmers are even more experienced. Their pattern recognition and Pavlovian syntax response is all … Architecture versus pattern recognition
Books are knowledge hacking. They are also social engineering. The very best writers invent philosophies that circumvent existing restrictions and get us closer to the mysteries of the universe, its order and our own minds. The Houston Indie Book Festival is hosted by Gulf Coast and the Menil Community Arts Festival through a collaboration with … Houston Indie Book Festival: Sunday, April 20, 2013
By popular demand, for Houston.pm‘s October meeting Erin Schönhals will be presenting some small examples from a bag of tricks useful for taking on a number of file manipulation tasks, more specifically those suited to manipulating human readable text. Such tricks include but are not limited to: Quick and easy recursive file operations Editing files … Houston Perl Mongers: Perl Bag of Tricks with Erin Schönhals
The Linux community is abuzz with lamentations about why it has failed to penetrate the desktop market. A historical shift has occurred. The prices of computers have fallen, which means that the price of the operating system is no longer an impediment. As a result, many Linux devs have moved over to using OS X … Why Linux failed to take over desktop computing
So I tried installing windows 8 in vmware. The first time I got to the windows logo, then a black screen with a mouse cursor and it would not go further. I deleted the VM ware image and started over, this time getting about half way into the install before I got a blue screen … Pre-review of Windows 8