Roughly 18 months ago, I wrote a post about the problems with the industry’s inability to agree upon a next-gen DVD format — leading to the split between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Among other things, I said the following: So now we come to the next generation solutions for video playback: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. During the […]
Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Bhutto yesterday, Pakistan has seen several large cities erupt in violence. Many of the protests have been peaceful but quite a few have turned violent, with rioters focusing on burning property and destroying anything they can. A summary map of the most active cities below: Far and away […]
It’s a sad day for the forces of moderation and cooperation in the Muslim world. Early this morning US Time, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed a short time after a political rally. Reports from the scene state that multiple shots where fired, and one person detonated an explosive vest at the time […]
Besides this blog and my other one, I also have two websites that deal with my professional life: a personal one (brucefwebster.com) and one for my business (bfwa.com). For the first one, I had been using a website design tool that has since been abandoned by its manufacturer (or rather by the firm that bought […]
An interesting post from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Bertrand Serlet recalled to his home planet Well it’s a sad day for all of us here in Cupertino. Bertrand Serlet, the friendly cyborg from the future who has lived among us and helped guide our software development efforts with such skill, has been recalled […]
CNet in the UK picked Vista as one of its ‘Top Ten Terrible Tech Products‘ — and the products on this list stretch back many years: Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced […]
InsideCRM has a list of the 20 Worst Capital Investments of All Time. As someone who actually helped successfully raise venture capital for a software startup — a total of $7 million, which lasted us for five years — it hurts to see the vast sums squandered on some of these companies: Pets.com: This icon […]
From Slashdot comes a link to this postmortem by the Princeton University team competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles: It was the closest thing to a memory leak that you can have in a “managed” language. C# manages your memory for you by watching the objects you create. When your code no […]
Just today I’ve had some communications with Jerry Sheehan at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). During the San Diego fires, they were also providing information to the public via the web, working with NASA to generate and publish satellite imagery of the fires (click on the photo and scroll down to […]
Here comes the bubble, redux
Some months back I raised a cautionary flag over what I considered to be the excessively high valuation of VMWare (“Uh oh…Tech Crash 2.0?”). I got caught in the original (though largely unacknowledged) tech crash in the 1988-1991 time frame and so was able to see (and avoid) what is largely (if incorrectly) termed the […]
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