The first time I saw someone use a terminal to control a remote computer, I didn’t understand what I was watching. I was a student at the University of Akron. An IT support guy sat down, opened a window, and typed something. Then he was somewhere else. He was executing commands on a different machine,
A few weeks ago, I had a hankering for some sci-fi. Not Marvel sci-fi. Not blockbuster sci-fi. I wanted the weird stuff — cerebral, indie, atmospheric. The kind of movie that leaves you staring at the ceiling afterward. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I Googled it. What I got was a
The other day, I was walking through a certain Florida theme park—a place built on the legacy of a man who invented beloved characters and vertically integrated his creative vision—when my daughter, Mary, said, “I wish this was Netflix World.” She was quietly humming a song from her latest obsession, K-Pop Demon Hunter. It was
This article is part of larger context I have been documenting about my study of Anthropology and Computer Science, and how it changes the way you think. I often think of a person’s actions and personality in the context of three main layers – Biology/Hardware, Culture/Firmware, and Behavior/Software. For example….
Continue Reading “Hardware, Firmware, and Software – Biology, Culture, and Behavior “
Anthropology and Computer Science don’t typically seem like they would have a lot of overlap, but they do. Each focuses on how discrete units change temporally and spacially. One focuses on human evolution, the other on engineering – one on statistics, the other on digital logic. In Anthropology, at least in the US, we study
A few weeks ago, I was down in Columbus at a coffee shop. This place happened to have a bathroom which needed a key to use. I went to the counter to ask for the key because mother nature called, but the key was nowhere to be found. Somebody was already in the bathroom and
Continue Reading “Explaining Race Conditions to Non Programmers”
I love the content they produce like Orange is the New Black, Narcos, Stranger Things, and House of Cards. But, remember back to before Netflix produced this content? They were struggling with subscribers, under attack from cable companies, and their future looked very, very uncertain. So, how did they turn the ship around? They started
Continue Reading “Netflix – Technology Wizards or Good Content?”
[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] I recently read an article by Benjamin Mako Hill called When Free Software Isn’t Better. This article addresses the fundamental argument of importance, between the Open Source engineering paradigms and political Software Freedom. For an outsider, this argument can be difficult to understand. The approximate argument is that Open Source
This weekend, I found the consequences of a hawk catching a pigeon in my driveway. It basically looked as though a grenade had blown it to pieces. There were about a hundred and fifty feathers spread all over, strangely, there was not much red in the picture. This led me to a few thoughts on
Just read this article and, I hate to admit it; I really, really hate to admit it. I think Microsoft is right on with this one and it scares me. I see so many people looking at new technology in this down economy and that is helping Redhat because MS Server with SQL Server is
