It’s called Project 10 to the 100, and it’s like an open X-Prize for any idea that can help lots and lots of people. A few posts ago, I identified what may be the root cause of our society’s ubiquitous problems. Reader jonathan quite rightly commented: “Flawless description of a problem…but no solution?” Now, with [...]
I’m short on time this week, so in lieu of a post, I give you Christopher Wright explaining the essence of End User License Agreements (through his mouthpiece, Viktor Schreck, the Vampire-lawyer). Click the pic for a larger version.
The obsession with architecture in software development is straining credibility to the extent of absurdity. There are serious problems with the notion of architecture as used in the software development community. 1. The Architecture Layer is Arbitrary. The software design is the totality of design choices that have been made, where a design choice assigns [...]
Bell insists that throttling Internet services is necessary. More specifically, Bell engages in “deep packet inspection,” which means they figure out what kind of data your downloading, and slow down the stuff they don’t like, i.e., peer-2-peer traffic. They argue that this is all for their customers: before traffic throttling, 5% of users ate 33% [...]
I have been around business schools a fair bit and have noticed a few disturbing trends. For one, it seems that the majority of undergraduate business programs include at least one core course involving Microsoft Access. Sometimes Access is taught in labs or tutorials outside regular class, but the question remains, why? I have received [...]
iListen is bullshit. There, I said it. The accuracy rate isn’t nearly as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. So, I was determined to get Dragon working under OSx, and not just in virtualization. I wanted Dragon to dictate into Camino, Pages, Adium, etc. This how-to explains how I did it. Please bear with me, this is [...]
I don’t blog for the money, but for those who do, purported online marketing gurus provide a proliferation of epistemically baseless, if not bogus, advice. I prefer recommendations with some data behind them. Recent research presented at the International Conference on Information Systems may be of interest. Researchers June Zhu and Bernard Tan of the [...]
It turns out that Facebook’s idea of security is bullshit. Besides all the recent problems with 3rd party apps, you can also bypass photo security be simply deleting one of the URL parameters. Basically, if you look at a picture in an album, and you want to see the other pics in that album, but [...]
I’ve often read lists like this one, that suggest the skills IT employers want. Well, today at the Agile Vancouver conference, a room full of agile development employers was asked what they look for. I was expecting “machine learning,” “security,” “mobile applications,” and maybe “artificial intelligence.” Nope. Here is the list they gave: Understanding principles [...]
A Software License Agreement is a contract between a software producer and a software user that grants the user a license; an End-User License Agreement (EULA) is a Software License Agreement that indicates terms of use. EULAs are fine in principle, but the way many EULAs are written makes them legally meaningless, unenforceable nonsense. This [...]