Rich Skrenta, who may have written the first microcomputer virus [http://www.skrenta.com/cloner/], calls Google the start page for the Internet [http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html]: > The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree.
In Typing Trumps Pointing, I extolled the virtues of the full-text search included in Vista's new Start Menu. As many commenters pointed out, the feature itself is nothing new: I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you
Windows Vista gets criticized a lot in the press, mostly for not being OS X. Some of the criticisms are valid. It is terribly late. And the feature list has grown less and less impressive as the development process has worn on over the years. But Vista has one killer
Ned [http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/200701.html#e20070108T073027] recently pointed out Martin Fowler's article Mocks Aren't Stubs [http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html]. > The vocabulary for talking about [pretend objects] soon gets messy - all sorts of words are used: stub, mock, fake, dummy.
Everyone loves ping. It's simple. It's utilitarian. And it does exactly what the sonar inspired name implies. Ping tells you if a remote computer is responding to network requests. The ping utility was written by Mike Muuss, a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research
I've largely been ignoring Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative. I appreciate the nobility of the gesture, but how interesting can sub-$100 hardware running Linux really be? Well, that was before I read about the novel user interface they're building into those
I happened upon Russ Walter's Secret Guide to Computers around 1993. By then it was already up to the 18th edition. The first version of The Secret Guide was published in 1972 as a self-typed 17 page pamphlet. The latest edition is a hulking 607-page monster, a rambling,
I have something of a clock fetish. My latest acquisition is a nixie tube clock from my wife, as a Christmas gift. My computers aren't just giant calculators, they're also clocks. Unfortunately, my nixie clock is a much more reliable timekeeper than any of my PCs
This Gawker post on blog cliches [http://www.gawker.com/news/blogs/bad-lingo-blogmedia-clichs-222162.php] hits very close to home. It's an "annotated list of words, phrases, and terms that have long overstayed their welcome in the media-blogosphere." I'd have to agree. I'm
As I recently discovered, playback of high definition video is very demanding. You'll need a beefy PC to achieve the holy grail of maximum 1080p (1920x1080) resolution playback. Here are the minimum system requirements according to Cyberlink: * Very fast single core CPU (3.2+ GHz Pentium 4, 2.
Instead of one giant monitor, I'd rather have multiple moderately large monitors. I'm a card-carrying member of the prestigious three monitor club. But giant monitors have their charms, too; there is something to be said for an enormous, contiguous display area. But large monitors tend to
Playing video on a computer has always been a crapshoot. You must have the correct video codec installed, the same video codec that the clip was encoded with. If you don't, the video won't play. You'll have to find, download, and install the proper