VISITORS to Wikipedia last Jan. 18 didn’t get the treasure trove of information they had come to expect. Instead, they got a darkened page that asked them to “Imagine a world without free knowledge.”
“For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history,” the message read. “Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”
WITH more than 3,100 high-tech companies showing off 20,000 new products over 1.9 million square feet of exhibit space, and 153,000 visitors attending, the Consumer Electronics Show this year in Las Vegas seemed as vibrant as ever.
So why did Jason Perlow of ZDNet predict the show’s death by 2015?
His reasons are compelling.
A LETTER came across my desk last month that reminds me that little has changed in the way the Philippine Internet domain is managed.
In the letter dated Dec. 20, 2011, the official Philippine domain registry, DotPH, told a giant retail chain that it would find itself temporarily homeless on the Internet if it didn’t agree to drop its current domain name, which is disallowed under current rules.
I recently set up a computer with Windows 7 Home Basic and quickly realized that it’s quite different from the Professional edition that I use in the office, or Home Premium that I’ve installed on other computers.
LAST Christmas, I remember shopping for a Flip video recorder at a local appliance store. I had seen the promotional videos from Cisco chief executive John Chambers (who bought the company because he was so impressed by the gadget) and was intrigued by the single-function simplicity that the hand-held video camera promised: Just shoot away, plug the retractable USB connector to a PC and transfer your videos in a snap.
IN this age of spam, do we really need our telcos stuffing our cell phones with junk messages?
If you’re a Globe prepaid subscriber, here’s the kind of crap you’re likely to find in your inbox regularly:
Para mas merry ang Pasko, may murang tawag para lang sayo! For only P15, enjoy 30 minutes of calls to Globe/TM, consumable for 1day. P0.50 per minute lang yan! Register up to 2x daily, text SUPERCALLS15 to 8888. Valid until Dec18 only. This is a free advisory. NAH11a-2.
1 more week! HULING HIRIT para makakuhang aguinaldo! Get FREE 40 minutes of calls to Globe/TM valid for 1day by simply loading a total of P500 from Dec7-20. If you have reloaded the required amount, expect your reward within 5days. This is a free advisory. NTR206a-14.
There are so many things wrong with this I almost don’t know where to begin.
NOW you see it, now you don’t. Wait, now you do.
That’s what it felt like when HP announced last week that the WebOS mobile platform wouldn’t be sold or axed after all, but turned over to the open source community for further development.
Now just in case you’ve missed out on the recent travails of the world’s biggest computer company, here in a nutshell is what happened.
THE need for a good alarm clock got me started on this week’s column.
I wanted a way to set an alarm on my MacBook Air and realized I couldn’t do that on the standard clock application. A quick search in the App Store showed a number of choices costing from 99 cents to $19.99. I know—who wants to pay $19.99 for a fancy alarm clock, right? So I did some searching outside the store and found Alarm Clock 2 by Robbie Hanson (http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/), a free program that lets you set as many alarms as you want, and wake up to any song, playlist or podcast in your iTunes library.
Alarm Clock 2 can even wake up your computer from sleep—as long as you don’t require a password after sleep or the screen saver begins. Once started, the Alarm Clock icon sits unobtrusively on the menu bar so it won’t take up any extra desktop space.
THERE’S been a lot of talk lately about disgruntled Ubuntu users moving to other Linux distributions. Some technology journalists cite Ubuntu’s Unity interface as the reason users are looking to alternatives such as Linux Mint, which still uses the familiar Gnome 2.x interface.
One columnist for ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, even claims that Linux Mint is already the most popular Linux distribution today, outstripping Ubuntu on which it is based.
This is silly.
