President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said , represen
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the
In previous posts in this series , I talked about how to read EXPLAIN output, and what each line (operation/node) means. Now, in the final post, I will try to explain how it happens that Pg chooses “O
This is Part 3 of a three-part series on what changes, if any, may be coming to TV TV, as I have recounted in the last two articles, is as firmly entrenched as an incumbent can be. The idea that you c
Frustration with patent trolls, and momentum for reform , has been building for some time now. Today, the stakes got even higher when the White House announced that it was actively taking on the troll
I regularly get emails from young people, usually those with an interest in programming, who are trying to make decisions about school and/or their professional futures. This post is for those young people. If you’re in your late teens or early twenties, you’ve grown up in a world that has come to…
About a year ago, I wrote an article about misogyny . Within the conclusion, I included this acknowledgement: I've made sexist remarks. I've jumped to sexist conclusions, or made sexist generalisation
“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded. Postgres
Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age. Published in The Peer Society · 7 min read · May 21, 2013 -- It’s no surprise that George Packer—one of the most gifted writers in the bu
The same week as my piece in The New Yorker on the political culture of Silicon Valley came two big stories from the tech world: Tumblr, a blogging platform founded by a high-school dropout (now all o
The grudge match between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his former protege Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has reached legendary proportions in recent years. Ellison and Benioff pepper their sp
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behav
08.03. 2005 The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to
Op-Ed Contributor Celebrating Inequality THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis playe
How to Know When Apple Finally Gets iCloud Right May 19, 2013 WWDC 2013 is fast approaching, and chances are good that we'll get some sort of preview and song and dance about how iCloud sync is even b
I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird. The last thing I remembered was being in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wrapping up a four-hour Google I/O keynote liveblogging session. My last recollection was of Google CEO Larry Page taking questions from the audience and promoting a…
Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous inbox. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing…
However, there's a loophole in Einstein's general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light. The trick? It's not the starship that's moving — it's the space around it.
My mission, should I choose to accept it – and I have – is to talk about the Merchant Princes novels. For anyone who’s reading this without having read the full Stross collection, the MP novels concern a group of related individuals – the Clan – from an alternate universe, the Gruinmarkt, with a…
A study has shown that women repeatedly talk down their achievements and undervalue themselves when working in a successful group alongside men. Rather than take the due credit and recognition, the woman's assumption is that kudos is due to the male team members.
The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff Kickstarter projects have generated a lot of headlines, a lot of fan excitement, and a lot of questions. Should famous people use Kickstarter? Do they hurt other creat
The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses . This raises an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit? Watch Vizio’s
Since tickets to WWDC sold out in less than two minutes last Thursday, a flurry of angry tweets and blog entries has flooded the Cocoa community. Overwhelmingly, the voices of long-time Mac developers are saying that changes to WWDC are badly needed. Many hold the opinion that Apple is ignoring a…
Warren Buffett with the late Katharine Graham of the Washington Post at his 50th-birthday party in 1980
In the flood of words written recently about women and work, one related and hugely significant point seems to me to have been neglected. It has to do with America's future, about which -- here's…
Rion totally nails something that has been sticking in my craw for the last six months or so. Ever since the rollouts of features that vastly improved the Flickr experience, the old design of the pages for holding sets of photos is really underwhelming. Here's what an epic set of photos taken by Jon…
Apple. The company that’s captured much of our hearts for more than a decade is now “doomed.” Day after day we see headlines suggesting that Apple is on its way to oblivion. The company is no longer making great products, they say. Tim Cook should be replaced! Supplier woes stir Apple demand fears.…
Inspired by the events of the past week, here’s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress,
Cook in February.
FORTUNE -- The last time we wrote about Doug Kass -- a small hedge fund manager with a large presence on CNBC -- it was to document a nifty piece of stock manipulation played out on his Twitter feed in February, the day before Apple's annual shareholder meeting.
Apple's (AAPL)…
I've been a Microsoft developer for decades now. I weaned myself on various flavors of home computer Microsoft Basic, and I got my first paid programming gigs in Microsoft FoxPro, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Visual Basic. I have seen the future of programming, my friends, and it is terrible CRUD…
SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember…
An explosion erupts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, one of two explosions in an attack in Boston Monday. (Dan Lampariello/Reuters) As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd
[If you’re the type who only tunes in to the Macalope on Saturdays, please note that Thursday’s column offered a correction about last Saturday’s.] They say that those who fail to learn from history a
theory