April 5, 2011
Recently someone on Stack Exchange asked Why are there no alternatives to TeX, or, why is TeX still used? Here are some reasons. It works. It sounds trite, but TeX has a robustness and reliability that other software lacks. Recently, there was a discussion of a bug in LuaTeX triggered when a document hits 3,987 [...]
Filed under: Business, Standards | Comments (0)
April 1, 2011
Yesterday I ran into a familiar SSL problem. I learned that a Sun engineer named Andreas Sterbenz had written a handy utility to solve the problem, and posted it on his Sun blog. I looked to see what else he had posted. The last entry mentioned that he had jumped ship to Google, and pointed [...]
Filed under: Business, Culture | Comments (0)
January 18, 2011
Every year, IBM has all its employees read through its Business Conduct Guidelines, certify that they have read them and will live by them, and take a quick quiz. It sometimes feels like an unnecessary chore, but there are usually a couple of sections that I find cheer me up when I read them. The [...]
Filed under: Business, Career | Comments (0)
September 24, 2010
So farewell then, Blockbuster. Theirs is a cautionary tale of what can happen to a business if it fails to pay attention to technological trends. When I bought my first DVD player in 1998 (as soon as all the major studios had signed on to support the format), I would periodically go in to my [...]
Filed under: Business | Comments (0)
August 16, 2010
The music industry may not have predicted what the Internet would do to their business model, but the owners of FM radio stations can see what it’s doing to theirs. Given that I have Pandora and Slacker available on my phone, providing me with an endless stream of music tailored to my individual tastes, why [...]
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August 5, 2010
So, farewell then, Google Wave, perhaps the ultimate example (for now) of what happens when you let a bunch of software engineers design a product. Good product design starts with a single problem. The product becomes a way to solve that problem. Technologies are developed and added strictly as needed to solve the core problem. Keeping [...]
Filed under: Business, Uncategorized | Comments (0)
March 2, 2010
As I’ve written before, date and time calculations are surprisingly difficult. What’s more, even the bits that aren’t difficult often get messed up. Sony have just demonstrated this. Apparently, a firmware bug in the real time clock in some models of PS3 lead the RTC to think that 2010 is a leap year. This confused [...]
Filed under: Business, Programming | Comments (0)
February 13, 2010
Reflections on the Google Buzz fiasco, a few days on.
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August 31, 2009
WIRED magazine has finally noticed that the long term trend for technology is cheap, simple and ubiquitous. Back in the 1990s everyone was excited about “cyberspace”. We were going to build a whole new world in virtual reality, with virtual banks, virtual shopping malls, and virtual libraries. We would drive around in virtual cars and [...]
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March 25, 2009
Is OnLive going to kill the video game console and the gaming PC?
Filed under: Business | Comments (0)