In the fall of 1986, during the first week of my freshman year of college, my cousin took me to the university computer store to help me buy my first Macintosh. The Mac platform was two years old at that point, and Apple had just released a new machine called the Mac Plus that featured a…

You probably don't need to check your e-mail every five minutes while refreshing your Twitter feed and sending a text. STORY HIGHLIGHTS New gadgets are powerful stimulants when they break into the mainstream Smartphones can be addictive because they tap into our compulsive desire to be social Put…

Over at Ars Technica , they’re asking whether the iPad is a PC or not , with some debate over the semantic boundaries of the term: does a PC have to have a keyboard? Must it be directly programmable? Does it have to be an open system? It’s an interesting discussion. Apple’s line, of course, is that…

Editor’s note : This guest post is written by Tom Anderson , the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace. You can now find Tom on Facebook , Twitter , and Google+ Google is an algorithm driven-company. “PageRank” (named after Larry Page himself) was the “founding algorithm” of…

Old broads don’t need stuff. For my 50th birthday, what I want is to raise $50,000 for my favorite nonprofit, WriteGirl. In 50 days. In order for that to happen, I will need your help. A lot of your help. I will need your financial help at any level, if you can offer it, but even more important, I…

Disk Speed Test

Windows Phone Marketplace has reached 25,000 apps. That’s an impressive figure given that so few devices have actually been sold. Compared with Android which is activating half a million devices per day, Windows Phone seems like a rounding error. According to Gartner, 3.6 million smartphones using a…

HP's TouchPad. I spent half an hour in a meeting, using HP’s new TouchPad tablet, before someone realized I wasn’t using an iPad. That says a lot about this product—due to be released Friday—and not just in superficial ways. Physically, yes, the TouchPad is the most iPad-like tablet I’ve seen. Like…

In my last post I promised that I’d elaborate on why I think “Free” is a flawed and misunderstood business model. This is that post. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now; ever since I read Chris Anderson’s book Free around two years ago in fact. My contention is that “Free”…

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by friend Kevin Lipe, after a discussion over beer and pizza about writing on the Mac, and how it has changed over the years. Longtime reader may remember that Kevin is the guy I bought this domain name from . Kevin is a native Memphian, a killer musician…

By CAROLINE GRAHAM in SEATTLE Created: 13:58 EST, 9 June 2011 Rocking gently in his chair, he begins to sing: 'I wanna be a billionaire so freakin' bad. Buy all the things I never had. I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine. Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen...' 'It will be a minuscule portion…

Apple has finally unveiled its long-rumored iCloud service, and these days it seems like you can’t swing a mouse without running into “the cloud” — a nebulous term that sometimes seems to represent anything that runs anywhere on the Internet. In reality, there is an actual definition for cloud…

PayPal was once an up and comer — the hot web commodity — a service that users loved and were rightfully excited about. Remember when it didn’t suck? You probably don’t because for the past few years it has really been a miserable experience. The service is still the best out there, but that’s not…

Back in the mists of history -- probably the late '90s or early '00s -- I remember reading a blog post. I'm afraid I have been unable to find it again, so you'll have to take my reminiscing on faith (but please leave a comment if you know what I'm talking about). This post dissected and analyzed a…

There are some uncanny analogies between the story of Osama bin Laden’s life and death and that of a another charismatic political outlaw, who, once upon a time, “declared war” on the United States. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary and close confidante of Fidel Castro, was no…