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Monday, August 30th, 2010Every now and then, someone stumbles across my blog and asks me how they, too, can work in development. I try to be supportive, but usually find myself actively discouraging them, at least at first.
You’d better be strong, flexible, resourceful, good with languages and have more than the normal allotment of patience.
I’ve been stuck in [...]
You Are All Driving Pintos And I Want You To Stop
Thursday, August 26th, 2010I’ve lived with it for a while now, but really, it’s getting intolerable. The vast majority of you are using the computer equivalent of a Ford Pinto. Poorly built, underpowered and yet inefficient, lacking both in style and substance. And unsafe at any speed.
Worse still, you’re not even driving it.
Back in 2007, Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, stood up at the Davos Forum and announced that, out of about 600 million personal computers worldwide, about 150 million are remotely controlled by criminals. These ‘zombies’ or ‘bots’ as they’re commonly known, are formed into legions of compromised machines called ‘botnets’.
Let’s put this in perspective: If your own PC is not infected, then odds are very high that one of your immediate neighbours is. When you factor in the strict security and controls that many enterprises maintain on their corporate resources, the odds that your home PC (and your neighbour’s) is a bot increase significantly.
Cheap Shots
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Aspiring photographer? Trying to make an impression on an online world with your nascent mastery of a century-old craft? Allow me to offer a few words of advice…
Science & Virtue
Friday, July 2nd, 2010The reason scientists are not believed now is because there is a deliberate campaign in place to discredit them by any means. Because they know most people can’t or won’t read the actual journals, the same cynical geniuses who bald-faced lied about the effects of smoking are teaching a new generation that scientists as a class are motivated by the same venality, mendacity and say-anything-to-get-approval motivations as are the rest of the world.
It’s pretty easy for people to believe this, because we recognise that there’s some of this in all of us. Indeed, it’s trivially easy to find individual examples of greed, jealousy, laziness and other human weaknesses in any field. But it’s a lie, of course, because it’s not true of scientists as a class, and therefore not true of Science. Science, by definition, is the removal of these weaknesses from the pursuit of knowledge.
Tonga Declaration
Friday, June 25th, 2010There’s been lots of discussion in the region recently of the recent ICT Ministers’ meeting in Tonga. In order to help things along, here’s link to the actual Tonga Declaration 2010 document.
Update:
Here’s the OCR’ed text below the cut. Any errors are mine….
Wikileaks – Who Cares?
Saturday, June 19th, 2010Glenn Greenwald builds the case that bad boy hacker Adrian Lamo deliberately duped and betrayed Spc Bradley Manning, the young soldier notorious for having leaked the ‘Collateral Murder‘ video depicting an Apache helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians as they tried to aid a wounded journalist in Baghdad.
In the discussion on Slashdot, someone asks if this isn’t just a distraction from the real story?
That’s what’s bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released? The important thing is WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians.
I do. I care a lot. Why does someone have to face a lifetime in prison just to allow us to discuss ‘WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians’?
Stuck in the Middle with Neil
Friday, June 18th, 2010Oy. Neil McAllister is at it again, saving the online world by describing how Mom & Pop shops can compete with the Amazons of the world. With retail giants like Tesco and even Sears building out programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow people to buy mattresses and microwave ovens with their mobile phones (srsly. ed.) , he claims that small businesses are more vulnerable than ever.
(You know, I once thought Fatal Exception was a quirky title for a column, but now I realise it’s just an accurate description of the cognitive processes of its author.)
Disaster? What Disaster?
Friday, May 28th, 2010I’m afraid that Data Disasters don’t exist, because we don’t want to believe they exist. It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.
Plus ca change…
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010There are people in Seoul – and countless other places in the world – who have more bandwidth at their personal disposal than a quarter of a million people here in the Pacific.
Invention
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010People invent because it’s an innate part of human nature. So is jealousy, of course, so it’s more natural for us to talk about ‘my’ idea than it is to talk about ‘an’ idea. Like three-year-olds, we exchange ideas, insights and other intellectual tidbits in exchange for social advancement. But when that advancement is not forthcoming, we try harder, not less. We change our conception of reward. We change our audience.
We do everything except stop inventing.
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