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In its heyday, the company seemed to dominate market segments effortlessly. From humble beginnings developing BASIC language interpreters for the early hobbyist computers, it developed the operating system that powered the platform that became the standard for nearly every computer sold in the world. It watched from the sidelines in the mid-1980s as graphical…
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Spurred on by reading Flower Confidential a while back (and being connected, at least loosely, to the floriculture industry), I’ve been tracking the quest to create a naturally blue-colored rose through genetic engineering. Think back to biology class and recall that all organisms — from flowers to frogs, humus to humans — are built…
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So, I purchased a netbook over the holiday — an Acer AspireOne to be precise. It came with XP Home loaded on an internal 8GB solid state drive…Which lasted about an hour while I downloaded Kubuntu which I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while. The whole idea behind a netbook is that all…
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Ever since the Web moved from being a tool of academia to a platform for commerce and communication, companies have looked for ways to leverage its “access from anywhere” and “zero install” nature for applications. I’ve written about this before when the industry I then worked in was consumed by the hype over Web-based…
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…Amazon.com. This is the first real challenge to the long-standing rule that online businesses without a physical presence in the state are not required to collect state sales tax. http://www.macworld.com/article/133276/2008/05/amazon.html
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One of the outgrowths of the digitization and mass collection of personal information is the ability to match disparate bits of data into a profile of individual, a profile that can then be used to make certain judgments about that person. Privacy considerations aside for a moment, when it works it is tremendously powerful.…
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Just published at Privacy International At the same time, technological advances, technology standards, interoperability between information systems and the globalisation of information have placed extraordinary pressure on the few remaining privacy safeguards. The effect of these developments has been to create surveillance societies that nurture hostile environments for privacy.
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In the January issue of Wired David Byrne reviews the current economics of the music industry. The classic model of a recording company handling production (the recording studio), promotion (touring), and distribution (CDs) is being displaced at each step. Recording studios are now laptops, promotion is now a MySpace page, and distribution is now…
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The folks at Microsoft’s MacBU have taken some heat for this (as the decision to develop and promote a community site for innovative Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents when Office 2008 is, well, late). Some cool examples nonetheless. What would Professor Lessig say about the copyright to these examples… www.artofoffice.com
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In the past few years, MMORPGS have become more than a place to play games or engage in virtual conversations evolving into a place for commerce and economic experiments. It is common for people to sell game objects (swords, spells) from MMORPGs like Everquest on eBay for real currency. Companies have begun using these…