As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?Worldwide Internet users in 1995Today there are almost 2 billion Internet users worldwide. In 2000, there were 361 million worldwide. But go back even farther in time and you’ll find out that back in 1995, the Internet had a worldwide user base of less t...

As a systems administrator, I tend to think about source code and computing platform in large numbers. Computers however are getting smaller and more powerful, and the reality of computers that we put in or on our body as a normal daily routine is coming closer, and for many is already here. When our safety, our liberty, and our sense of humanity are tied to programmable devices, should we not only hope, but expect that we should have the right to examine how these devices function? Last August Karen Sandler, the executive directory of the GNOME foundation gave a short talk about her implante...

Summary: “The tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations,” says HP’s CEO. The TouchPad was quickly becoming a money pit. HP CEO Leo Apotheker wasn’t shy about outlining the company’s challenges. He noted that the “tablet effect is real” and dinged HP’s PC business. In addition, the TouchPad failure was about to become a money pit.That reality led HP to move forward on plans to discontinue WebOS devices and plan a spin-off of the PC business. A spin off and evaluatio...

In his Beyond Mobile presentation at TL;DR Conference in San Francisco CA, Scott Jenson made the case for moving beyond mobile applications and illustrated what a future without apps could be. Here’s my notes from his talk:The history of mobile phones has been copying the desktop and then realizing it just doesn’t work right.Apps are a holdover from the desktop.There are a number of trends that highlight how we can move beyond apps on mobile.App Glut: are we going to have an app for every store, product, or Web site we use? It’s not sustainable. What happens when you have ...

Peter Thiel says the United States no longer cares much about science or technology(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)ASPEN, Colo.--One of the Internet's most influential investors and entrepreneurs is offering a dire prediction: the pace of technological change is stagnating.Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, warned that--despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields over the last few decades--technological progress overall is actually "stalled out.""There's been insane progress in computers, Internet, and all things related to it," Thiel told a conferen...

This term I've happened to have Friday off, but I'm suppose to teach on Saturday. I might sound slightly frustrating for 9to6 folks, but It's not uncommon for University teachers, when you have a lot of holes in your teaching schedule. However, i do a lot of research without weekends, but this is only because i do love it.Nevertheless, This simple shift of working days has made me way happier and relaxed. I don't know the reasons, but here are my observations about it: You can sleep more and do some fresh papers reading (i do read fresh issue of Time magazine on Friday) in your bed and no...

What should a ‘cache’ be? It means a lot of things, but to my mind the default programming type should be:“keep around expensive-to-generate bits of read-only data in case we need them again, or until the computer really needs that RAM for something else”I was writing a custom video editing program in Python (interesting choice of language for that problem) and I wanted to cache decoded frames; but I just wasn’t happy with the memory management of explicit caches.  It means making a decision about how much RAM to ring-fence for something without having g...

Looking for a smart way to protect your range of electronic devices? Most of us access tons of websites and it could be difficult to store our passwords. It is important to not reuse store passwords that are easily identifiable.Keeping your information secure is more important than ever. Data breaches can occur anytime and sometimes takes months to discover. Sometimes, maybe, they aren’t. Target is a data breach, for instance, took months to discover. Information was leaked online from celebrities cloud accounts which raised serious questions as to how secure the cloud system really is? ...