Steve Ballmer is sounding off again about rampant piracy of Microsoft (MS) software in China. Do people never learn? This issue has been amply ventilated for more than thirty years. For many digital products the marginal cost of producing another million copies is nil. Sometimes it is precisely nil, as when MS supplies a hardware [...]
With my increasingly serious struggles to learn Mandarin, I am being forced finally to get to grips with Unicode. As the internet became genuinely global, rather than just the US plus some unimportant offshore activity, it was inevitable that sooner or later it would have to get to grips with different writing systems. [Becker, Collins [...]
What’s driven sales is BBM. And it’s not be-suited businessmen doing it. It’s besotted teens. I went to a great presentation where Shaun Collins of CCS Insight said “Operators never planned for the time when 15 year old girls wanted Blackberries and CEOs wanted iPhones”. I ran into this recently (here, click the entry for [...]
Anonymous is a group of hackers who see themselves as good guys, bringing justice where the authorities cannot or fear to tread. They were in the news before Christmas for launching “denial of service” attacks against organizations that had boycotted WikiLeaks following its release of secret US diplomatic documents. Whether under pressure from the US [...]
I have always been as fascinated by electronics as by software. It seems to have huge potential, most of which is still unrealized. I even went as far as doing two years of a degree in electrical engineering (EE) a decade or so ago. But my flat is not chock full of gadgets I have [...]
