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mind your b’s and K’s: the arcane art of measuring download speeds

May 2, 2012

I’ve just upgraded to the 30 MB/s internet plan at Charter cable (and added HBO so we can watch Game of Thrones), so here’s the obligatory speedtest results. It occurs to me that the units for download can be incredibly confusing. Charter advertises the download speed plan using units of Mbps. So, the question naturally [...]

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renting bytes: the case for digital non-ownership

April 28, 2012

In the course of my search for free ebook content, I found an advocacy group called Librarians Against DRM. I found the existence of this puzzling, because if not for DRM then the free-lending program of ebooks by libraries wouldn’t exist. In fact note that Macmillan, which is among publishers that refuse to give ebooks [...]

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the singular implication of uploading one hour every second to @youtube …

January 25, 2012

This is an astonishing statistic: Youtube users now upload one hour of video every second: The video (and accompanying website) is actually rather ineffective at really conveying why this number is so astounding. Here’s my take on it: * assume that the rate of video uploads is constant from here on out. (obviously over-conservative) * [...]

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it’s SOPA day on the Internet

January 18, 2012

anyone else see any irony in this? Google.com, Wikipedia.org, WordPress.org, and hundreds of other websites large and small are going all-out against SOPA. Google has the logo censored by a black bar, and Wikipedia is actually offline. Lots of other sites and blogs are following their example. The idea is to symbolically register dissent against [...]

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Why SOPA might kill commenting, and is that such a bad thing?

January 9, 2012

UPDATE: I think the anti-SOPA blackouts at Google, Wikipedia etc are a gigantic wasted opportunity to educate people about DRM. And I’m skeptical of Google putting money where their mouth is. I get it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad because it doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy. There are various screeds [...]

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Google+ is closed, Facebook and Twitter are open

July 11, 2011

There’s a simple reason that Google+ can not be a facebook killer – it adds to social noise and creates a walled garden where data can not be exported from nor imported to. There are no RSS feeds generated by Google+ that you can pipe into Twitter using Twitterfeed, nor can you import tweets to [...]

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Apple Cloud of FUD: it just works

June 9, 2011

What the hell is Techcrunch smoking? With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic. Compare this [...]

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from Twitter API to RSS feed

May 27, 2011

This is a perfect solution: code to leverage the Twitter API to create a valid RSS feed. Now, RSS feeds are no longer dependent on Twitter’s noblesse oblige.

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20 GB cloud storage for 99 cents (and Lady Gaga)

May 26, 2011

I can’t claim to be a big fan of Lady Gaga, especially since her new hit single Born This Way is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself. In fact, you’d probably have to bribe me to listen to Lady Gaga. With, say, 20 GB of disk space on Amazon’s new [...]

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Kindle for the Web

May 10, 2011

J complains that the Mac version of Kindle is not exactly stable: The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI” (although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-update”. I had originally thought the problem [...]

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