George Orwell’s 1984 is rightly a hugely famous novel of the twentieth century. His depiction of a totalitarian future was so griping and compelling that the words and phrases he coined in the creation of his vision have embedded themselves in popular language and culture. I wonder how many teenagers watching reality TV understand where [...]
Say you’re a bright young kid at Univeristy and you’ve decided that computer science is what you want to do with your life. What should you start doing with yourself to live that dream? One piece of advice you will frequently hear is ‘Get involved with an open source/free software project.’ Should you?
Short answer: yes, with an if. Long [...]
I complain a lot about FreeBSD here and on Twitter and, thankfully, I am now about to stop using that horror on my desktop. But why horror?
In the world of desktop computers, anything that is not Windows, is niche. In that niche, anything that is not Mac OS X is niche. In that niche, anything that is not Ubuntu Linux [...]
Recently I have realised that at a very early age my attitudes towards and interactions with computers were permanently damaged. Like all geeks, I first started programming in primary school. And like many geeks my age, the first computer I had to program was an Apple //e. My Dad had lots of books for the Apple //e, so I [...]
Clearly Steve Jobs and the JesusPhones is the ultimate name for a band.
We’ve had mobile phones in our lives for quite awhile now. First they were enormous, and only tradesmen had them. Then they started to get small, really small. So small you couldn’t use them. And then they got bigger again: now swelling with countless features. Torches, cameras, pedometers. [...]
I’ve always enjoyed audiophiles; it’s pretty hard to find a single group with so much rich potential for mockery. But, through all my laughter at their talk of high quality digital cables (they haven’t heard of error correction perhaps?); through all the sniggering over their detailed discussions about bit rates when the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem is a mystery unto them [...]
You may have noticed a pattern in my posting over the last few months. There was a lengthy quiet period at the end of last year, followed by many posts so far this year. You may also have noticed that I’ve been clearing a large backlog of book reviews, but with each separated by a non-book review post.
Well, of [...]
Thomas Watson from IBM said that he could foresee a need for perhaps five computers worldwide, and we now know that that figure was wrong, because he overestimated by four. – Clay Shirky
There is only one computer in the world now, and that computer is the World Wide Web. Developers must [...]
There was a federal election in Australia, just last weekend: the 24th of November. This election went a lot better than the last few years worth of elections. John Howard finally lost. After 11 years in power and four election victories against either ineffective or insane Labor opposition, the mean, evil little troll has finally been ejected from power.
It was [...]
Has a century of compulsory voting and a decade of international neo-conservatism finally killed off the last vestiges of original thought in governmental policy? It certainly feels that way.
As Australia approaches a federal election both major parties are competing based almost exclusively on policies either of cutting taxes in some form or giving money away in some other form. Is there no other [...]
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