The recent business with Amazon and Macmillan has been commented on in many places: Jim Hines and Cat Valente have their takes on it - I was especially annoyed with the way Amazon seems to be trying to spin this as a "database glitch". (Yes, they only meant to remove some Macmillan books and instead yanked all of them. Entirely by mistake. "And ( Read more... )

This'll be the last post I make about the iPad. Honest.

The arguments I see popping up about the device seem to be in two camps. On one hand, you have people who complain it doesn't do enough, that it's a closed-ended system, it's locked down, doesn't have certain hardware functions, etc.

Then you have the people who love it because of all those ( Read more... )

A friend of mine recently sent me an invite to a "social networking aggregator" - oh, god, I can feel my hair falling out already - called Threadsy.

Most people know I have little love for "social networking" sites, not because the idea behind it is bad but because the implementation is often terrible. This was no exception.

And, no, the idea ( Read more... )

Further comment on the Google/China thing:

Nart Villeneuve - Google’s New Approach
The [Great Firewall of China] doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so ( Read more... )

Google is apparently having major second thoughts about doing business in China at all.

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
... this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses - including the Internet, finance, technology, media ( Read more... )

Not long ago, a friend of mine gave me his old Zune 30GB model (he replaced it with the current HD edition).

He gave me carte blanche to gripe about it as well, because as grateful as I am for having a dedicated music player, I've somehow managed to stumble across every single feature (or lack thereof) that drives me crazy.

• No UTF-8 support. Or, ( Read more... )

Every time I get that much closer to using a webpage as an application of some kind, cold hard reality leaps out of the closet and tears my head off.

Movable Type 5's default in-browser rich text editor is pretty lousy, so I've tried customizing it or replacing it. Every since one of these attempts has ended in failure, because it is next to ( Read more... )

Those of you with LiveJournal accounts probably heard about the recent little (cough) issue they had where a piece of cross-site scripting malware started trashing people's posts and infecting folks by jumping from one friend's list to the other.

Frankly, at first, I thought it was my own damn fault. I use a custom MT script to post to LJ, and I ( Read more... )

It's been a slightly frustrating week, technologically speaking. But the frustrations have balanced out nicely.

Problem #1: The fan on my notebook died.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't brand-new - a Sony VGN-CS160J which I bought back in January or so.

I've generally been happy with the quality of Sony's hardware: this is the fifth ( Read more... )

A friend of mine asked me the other day: "So when are you getting a Kindle?"

I said, "Around the time winged pigs circumnavigate the frozen-over reaches of hell."

My friend was, to say the least, taken aback. He knows I'm not a Luddite. I work in the tech biz; both of my computers are up-to-date and quite nicely tricked out; I even got on the Blu- ( Read more... )