Digital Zen

FOX News Doctors NY Times Photos

Bill Webb — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:11:51 +0000

I suppose FOX News’ lack of integrity will come as a surprise to no one else, but it still occasionally surprises me — not the lack of it, as much as the poor job of demonstrating it. It’s not even good ’shopping. Apparently they have no more respect for themselves or their viewers [...]

Note to Phone Manufacturers

Bill Webb — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:23:49 +0000

I want a phone with no external buttons. If you have to put external buttons on it, at least recess the bloody things! Perhaps two: one to shut the alarm clock off, and one to snooze it. The same two could answer the speakerphone and reject it. Other than that, forget [...]

What’s so wrong with a pregnancy pact?

Bill Webb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:42:09 +0000

A former teen mom rings in with commentary about the teen pregnancy pact… June 27, 2008 | In 1992, the closest thing my daughter had to a father was my best friend, Alice Moore. Alice and I met as 15-year-old debate partners in Boise, Idaho. When we were both 18, we moved 3,000 miles across the [...]

Marsh Pink

Bill Webb — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:18:24 +0000

Pentax K10D50 mm1/90 @ f6.7ISO 100

ICANN moves toward completely opening top-level domains

Bill Webb — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:32:10 +0000

Tim Conneally at BetaNews discusses the ramifications of ICANNs proposal to release a flood of top-level domains. Looks like an ICANN of worms to me — in short, causing a great deal more trouble than it’s worth. Some things just need to be done slowly, with careful thought, and only as needed. [...]

Gates Says G’Bye to Microsoft

Bill Webb — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:05:17 +0000

Billy G. heads out the door, and pundits wonder: will there be any real changes or will the 800-lb. gorilla continue to lose weight? As the company prepares for Gates’ departure this Friday, a host of analysts and tech experts waxed practical and philosophical about the future of Microsoft and the legacy of the man behind [...]

Dalton Trumbo and American Evil

Bill Webb — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:17:54 +0000

Andrew O’Hehir’s blog in Salon examines Peter Askins’ new film “Trumbo,” about the life of the most famous of the blacklisted filmmakers in the ’50’s witch hunts, along with the lessons the three generations since can take from the history of censorship and political gagging of Americans. If the Hollywood blacklist and the entire Red Scare [...]

Symbian to become open source

Bill Webb — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:00:47 +0000

Nokia Throws Open Mobile Software The Finnish company announced a plan to buy the 52.1% of shares it doesn’t already own in London-based Symbian, the leading maker of operating system software for advanced mobile phones. In an industry-shifting move, Nokia will merge the company with parts of its own organization and then create an open-source foundation [...]

Exabytes? Zettabytes?

Bill Webb — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:49:06 +0000

According to Cisco Systems, visual networking will drive a nearly exponential growth in IP traffic between now and 2012. IP traffic to ‘double’ every two years - vnunet.com In related news, Hughes Network systems has announced satellite broadband delivering download speeds of up to 3 Mbps. SpeedGuide.net News :: Hughes Breaks Satellite Speed Barrier

Scenes from the birth of the computer

Bill Webb — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:22:33 +0000

Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer — from its 16th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers. Listen for the story of the very first artificial life — stored on a deck of IBM punchcards and ready to come alive again. Watch this talk on [...]

Field Guide to Firefox 3

Bill Webb — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:08:52 +0000

Firefox 3 launched today — Download Day — and it’s time to upgrade to the best browser ever, IMNSHO. Your opinion, of course, may vary — but it doesn’t make you right. :p You can download it here. Do it today and help Mozilla set a 1-day download record that will be [...]

Tech Companies Join to Stop Email Addiction

Bill Webb — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:19:12 +0000

Email and other communications technologies are supposed to make us more productive. But has the pendulum swung so far that these tools are now a productivity drain? Many large tech companies are worried that it has. That’s why IBM, Intel, Google, Microsoft and more than a dozen other companies and academic institutions have come together to [...]

First processor to top 1 Teraflop

Bill Webb — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:29:30 +0000

AMD’s FireStream 9250: first processor to top 1 Teraflop - Engadget AMD’s second generation FireStream 9250 just broke the single-precision teraflop barrier at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

MySpace Hopes to Clean Up User’s Acts

Bill Webb — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:59:21 +0000

Starting Monday, five major areas of MySpace will receive a major redesign and feature upgrade: navigation, profile editor, search, and MySpaceTV player. MySpace says it’s hoping to improve usability and introduce more engaging features to build community. From the press release, we also sense a strong undertone of nudging users towards cleaning up what many [...]

Public safety and transporting ethanol

Bill Webb — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:52:29 +0000

Public safety and transporting ethanol | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists According to the Renewable Fuels Association, 151 biorefineries in the United States produce nearly 8.7 billion gallons of ethanol annually. Another 51 refineries are under construction and 7 are being expanded, all of which is projected to increase ethanol production by another 5 billion gallons [...]

Two Die in European Truck Drivers’ Fuel Price Protest

Bill Webb — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:36:31 +0000

Two Die in European Truck Drivers’ Fuel Price Protest BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 11, 2008 (ENS) - Two truck drivers were killed in fuel price protest actions in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday as governments across Europe struggle to contain strikes by thousands of truckers, fishermen and railway workers over soaring fuel prices. I couldn’t find reference to [...]

Hollywood’s Decency Epidemic

Bill Webb — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:55:24 +0000

Alas, even as the floodtides of rectitude threaten to give us all a cleansing soak, the Culture War’s most dogged mercenaries grow increasingly desperate to sound notes of alarm. The Parents Television Council is so eager to characterize your flat-screen as the portal to Satan’s eternal multiplex that it actually characterizes the plastic surgeries on [...]

Do Our Virtual Lives Make Our Real Lives Suck?

Bill Webb — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:34:14 +0000

Do Our Virtual Lives Make Our Real Lives Suck? - 236 - The Room The problem with video games and the internet and Web-connected cell phones and giant TVs with surround sound is not that it makes us violent. It’s that it makes us bored with reality. If you’re under thirty-five like me, answer this question: [...]

Why Tiered Broadband Is the Enemy of Innovation — Om Malik

Bill Webb — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:16:28 +0000

Flat-rate broadband – however cheap or expensive (depending on your point of view) it might be – inspired the formation of Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and MySpace, amongst others. It allowed us to freely experiment, to embrace both the applications and the ideas they represented, such as VoIP, online video, digital downloads and social [...]

Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing

Bill Webb — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:06:13 +0000

When it comes to broadband internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can’t have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of us with cable or DSL modems connecting us to the internet, there is still a finite amount of bandwidth available. When a user [...]

Online Web Conferencing for Meetings