Technology Commentary

I had to bite my tongue and not comment on this tweet from FTC Chair Lina Khan, who tried to make the current CrowdStrike situation a crisis because of “big tech” and “consolidation.” “How is it th…

Reflections on six decades of relations with computers

Many people, one way or another, got started programming computers using some kind of Basic. The language was developed at Dartmouth specifically so people could write simple programs without much …

When I got my first computer, a second hand 386 running MS-DOS 6.22, I didn’t have an Internet connection. But I did have QuickBASIC installed and a stack of programming magazines the local library…

Suppose you decide you want to become a novelist. You enroll in the Hackaday Famous Novelists School where your instructor announces that since all truly great novels are written in Russian, our fi…

Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala) When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that

A lack of comprehensive data strategies among Global 2000 enterprises is curtailing use of AI tools and undermining business goals, according to research. Nearly 85 percent of enterprise leaders agree that effective data management significantly drives top line, bottom line, and shareholder value, but they believe “over 40 percent” of their organizational data is “unusable.” […]

A new documentary from Eminem explores how the internet changed music forever. And diving into vintage CDs reveals just how much we lost in the process.

Paramount+’s new music docuseries How Music Got Free tells the story of how piracy nearly destroyed the music industry, and how it survived.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy is a non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill and Harald Popp to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted. Witt also documents the rise of the warez scene and spread of copyright-infringing efforts online while detailing the campaigns by music industry executives such as Doug Morris to adapt to changing technology.

A two-part docuseries looks back at the history of piracy and how the music industry found itself in such a precarious place

Re-visiting the Napster era, Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free has been adapted into a two-part documentary on Paramount+. But the documentary's director believes "The real innovative minds here were a bunch of rogue teenagers and a guy working a blue-collar factory job in the tiny town of ...

In object files, certain code patterns embed data within instructions or transitions occur between instruction sets. This can create hurdles for disassemblers, which might misinterpret data as code, r

An exploration of using object storages (like s3) as the storage for data-intensive applications

The recent Windows crashes are downstream from trying to encourage competition in areas Microsoft should have never made open to begin with, highlighting the challenge for regulators.

Pondering the evolution of Mad Libs and Droodles—two iconic brain teasers from the 1950s that share an inventor.

As fascinating and alarming as generative AI may be, it doesn't have much practical use yet.

Yesterday I discovered that Amazon had decreed that my Kindle e-ink device was too old. This post is my 🧠-dump of a intensive afternoon & evening of researching what to replace it with.

Our take on the CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 bringing down the global economy at once. And how we aim to reduce that risk in the future.

If amateur radio has a problem, it’s that shaking off an image of being the exclusive preserve of old men with shiny radios talking about old times remains a challenge. Especially, considerin…

How to capitalism with care

Oops, they did it again. Early this morning, McAfee released an update to its antivirus definitions for corporate customers that mistakenly deleted a crucial Windows XP file, sending systems into a reboot loop and requiring tedious manual repairs. It's not the first strike for the company, either. I've got details.

I am a Windows guy. I have always used Windows at home, work, school, everywhere with the exception of my phone and one Linux class at FIU. I have an A+ and MCTS in Windows Vista. Soon I will have my MCITP. I drink the cool aid. But Linux saved me and the company I sub-contract to, a large fast food giant, from near total disaster. Last month McAfee posted a virus definition update that flagged SVCHOST.EXE as a virus. This is my story of what happened.

As we are doing NervesCloud we are thinking a lot about adoption for Nerves. Our market is tightly bound to the number of folks doing IoT/embedded projects and choosing Nerves. The business can only thrive if Nerves thrives. Nerves can only thrive if Elixir thrives.

Creating effective search requires choosing the right search technique, optimizing the database, clarifying search queries and properly structuring data.

Many other markets exploded once open standards replaced proprietary systems. The same opportunity is at hand for the observability market.

Backend monitoring will give you an incomplete, and possibly incorrect, view of what your mobile users are experiencing.

Chicory was created to bring some of the benefits of WebAssembly to native JVM environments. It's like a virtual machine within a virtual machine.

PLDB: a Programming Language Database. Build the next great programming language.

Mocking is an Anti-Pattern - ways for better tests without mocking