Why is it so difficult to create a voting machine which has been vetted by any and all qualified persons who want to; which utilizes open, transparent and non-proprietary technologies; which records and tabulates votes accurately; which is secure and relatively tamperproof and which makes any tampering evident; which produces a paper/hard-copy audit trail […]
I hadn’t been to Cambridge, MA in a year or so, and just today spent half the day roaming the few bookstores which remain. The Coop is one of them - and I discovered a bunch of books which look interesting, one way or another. The following are 1-minute reviews based on my first impressions […]
The New York Times has an article today about the cost of archiving digital movies. And believe it or not, it turns out it is quite a bit more expensive than archiving regular old-fashioned analog film!
The problem boils down to two thing: the longevity of the media, and the incessant drumbeat of technological change.
Digital media […]
PHP is obviously an enormously popular language for web development. Several major open-source applications are written in PHP - including Wordpress which runs this website, things like Joomla, PHPMyAdmin, and many others. PHP has a lot of positives going for it:
it is a fairly simple language to learn
an intuitive programming model so that non-programmers can […]
Isn’t the problem with computers these days that the screens are never big enough, and if you want to carry a device in your pocket, the screen is the size of a postage stamp?
From David Byrne:
The R&D folks mentioned the potential advent of portable devices with tiny projectors that would effectively turn any […]
David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) has an interesting article in Wired about surviving - even thriving, in the digital (post-cd) age.
The old way:
In the days of yore, the “Record Companies” fulfilled an important role: they bankrolled the expensive recording and manufacturing, not to mention marketing and distribution.
Today, recording and manufacturing are practically nil. So […]
Paul Stamatiou has a very nice summary of Amazon’s Flexible Payment Services. This is a platform for developers for creating customized payment systems. These systems could be as complex as a PayPal clone, or for specific requirements such as recurring billing, charging commissions, expediting payments between two customers, etc. Micropayments are supported. And Amazon […]
I just switched our entire blog farm from one host to another - and things seem to be working flawlessly.
Tada!
This, from Paul Davies in the New York Times:
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, […]
Amazon goes database crazy, by announcing SimpleDB. This is the newest component for offloading higher-level server functions (like S3 for storage, a queuing service, computation service) so developers can concentrate on the good stuff and not worry about scaling.
The service is not a relational database in the traditional sense - it is more of a […]
