Reading on the net today about a blog entry from a Microsoft employee about the importance of backward compatibility, I was struck by how absurd the assertion was. The premise was that an IT department had showed up in Redmond and had indicated they had over 9000 install scripts for …

Apparently Apple Japan thinks that what's good for the US is good for Japan. Check out the "Get a Mac" ads. You probably won't be able to understand exactly what they're saying, but you'll get the drift. Does anyone else feel a "1.1" aspect to these with the PC …

CNet has published an article rating senators and representatives based on how they voted for and against technology issues. It leads to some interesting conclusions, including high marks for George Allen (R-VA)--whose stance on net neutrality is up for grabs, but who's definitely in the camp of not calling …

Lawrence Lessig comments on the Value of the Public Domain (a paper from the Institute for Public Policy Research) reminding people that Copyright is intended to encourage authors, not to discourage new work. Some good points in both his summary and the paper on which he's commenting.

An enterprising web author has put up an very cool dynamic web site that contains tag clouds of US presidential speeches from 1776 to the State of the Union this spring. For those unfamiliar with tag clouds, they're basically lists of words that vary in size and color based on …

The first pictures from our trip to China are up on the new Gallery 2-based website, Fong's China. The Fong refers to Irene Fong, our tour director with Pacific Delights Tours who ran our trip in China. The experience was amazing. We traveled from Tibet to Beijing, Xi'an (home …

WIth less than a week before the mid-term elections here in the US, it seems reasonable to reread and think about George Orwell's excellent essay, Politics and the English Language. If you've only read 1984 and/or Animal Farm, it's worth noting that Orwell wrote prolifically as a journalist, commentator …

Reading the responses of one of my sitting Senators, George Allen, to a local newspaper's candidate survey, I found the following comment by the Senator: "I voted for the Internet Consumer Bill of Rights Act, which addresses the issue of Net Neutrality in a way that promotes Internet freedom by …

Carol, my folks, and I are all back from China, after over three weeks traveling from Tibet to Hong Kong. Many great stories to tell, and Carol & I managed to shoot nearly 4000 photos, so we'll be trimming that down and putting some up relatively soon. For now, we're just …

Researchers at Princeton have released findings from their study of the Diebold AccuVote-DS (which the EFF claims is Diebold's most widely used voting product) and have concluded that there were major flaws in the system that they tested. Diebold, for their part, answered with a press release, accusing the researchers …

This is very good news for those of us in the Mac community that have been pining after some of the high-performance RAID systems available on other platforms. For a long time, 3ware has been a vendor of choice for hardware RAID in both the SATA and ATA arenas due …

Well, Microsoft has announced Zune, it's answer to Apple's venerable iPod franchise. Let's see what it has to offer. The "killer feature" of Zune is the Zune Marketplace that supports Zune-to- Zune sharing of "full-length sample tracks" of songs, pictures, or playlists. According to the press release, you'll be able …

An article from PC Pro talks about a Xerox effort to create paper that automatically erases itself 16 hours after it has been printed upon. The process, called "transient documents", was demonstrated at a product unveiling in the UK. Not a lot of details, except some comments about the process …

Yesterday, the Paulsen household had one of those annoying, all-day, computer problems. On Wednesday, I'd upgraded the RAM in Carol's PowerBook from 768MB to 1.25GB in order to increase performance. The change was supposed to have no negative effects... unfortunately, a disk drive fault left Carol without a functional …

A very interesting article appeared on Aaron Swartz's blog (thanks to Daring Fireball for a pointer) where he talks about the breakdown of those creating content on Wikipedia and about how (contrary to comments by Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales) the site appears to be constructed by a very large number …

For those of you with Intel Macs, a need to run Windows-requiring software, and a disgust for having Windows actually running on your Mac, this might be your lucky day. CodeWeavers has announced the beta of their Crossover software for the Mac. What is it? This goes one step further …

Despite an email from Apple yesterday indicating that my Mac Pro would be shipping next week, it launched last night and is expected in house later today. More details as they come... now to find some tasty RAM.

I won't guarantee the results for you, but speedtest.net is the first speed test that I have seen that has come close to reality for testing my connections. Plus, they test against multiple locations, and it looks REALLY cool!

Many of you know that I was at Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference last week in San Francisco. According to the rules, I can't say much in detail about what happened at the conference, but it was a good time. For those who missed the Stevenote address (you can view …

One of the continuing discussions about Wikipedia is whether it is useful as a real source of information or not (as you would expect, say, the Encyclopedia Britanica or the World Book Encyclopedia to be). Another recent piece has emerged from the blog of Keith Stattenfield that describes the back-and-forth …