Category Archives: Technology

Geek Matters

Apple is Bigger than Jesus… or the Beatles.

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It’s being noticed that Apple’s (AAPL) mar­ket cap has shot up to the stratos­phere, and sug­gested by some that it’s Only A Mat­ter Of Time Until Apple’s Mar­ket Cap Is Big­ger Than Microsoft I say don’t hold your breath for it to get — or stay — there. Paul Kedrosky wrote yes­ter­day about Apple, Wal-mart, and the “Mar­ket Cap­i­tal­iza­tion Big­ger Than” Thing, con­clud­ing “When we press our noses against the mar­ket glass and ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at a company’s mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion exceed­ing some­thing it shouldn’t … let’s just say bad things tend to hap­pen. Eventually.”

I agree — just take a look at the con­text he gives it. Do you really think that Apple is worth over $200 Bil­lion today?

Thinking Differently about the Virtual/Natural World Intersection (TED Talk by Pranav Mistry)

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As good as most of them are it’s a rare TED video that makes you want to stand and applaud with the crowd even though you’re only stream­ing a record­ing of a past event. But this TED Talk by Pranav Mis­try has some truly jaw-dropping stuff, par­tic­u­larly for those who haven’t much con­sid­ered the extent to which we could be inter­fac­ing our dig­i­tal world our the nat­ural one. Some of this looks like gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion. Haven’t heard of him? I hadn’t either. “Pranav Mis­try is a PhD stu­dent in the Fluid Inter­faces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his stud­ies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher; he’s a grad­u­ate of IIT. Mis­try is pas­sion­ate about inte­grat­ing the dig­i­tal infor­ma­tional expe­ri­ence with our real-world inter­ac­tions.” He is also the inven­tor of SixthSense.

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AT&T dumps celebrity hacker: Can’t secure his account

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Kevin Mit­nick kevin-mitnick-card has been dumped by his web host and cell car­rier because they can’t keep crack­ers and script kid­dies out. Their solu­tion — rather than deal­ing with the secu­rity impli­ca­tions — is to dump the cus­tomer. Mit­nick is a $20,000-a-year for AT&T because of his roam­ing charges, and could help them find a solu­tion. But no… evi­dently it’s best to just ditch the cus­tomer. Maybe they didn’t real­ize we could all do the math… your AT&T data is no more safer than his.

Think Differently: Electrical Outlets

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My friend John La Grou johnlagrou of Mil­len­nia Media and Safe­Plug is an inven­tor and an entre­pre­neur, to name just two of the bul­lets on his resumé. As read­ers here will know, I’m big on think­ing dif­fer­ently — not an easy trick, but one which gives you the fresh per­spec­tive to break out of assumed molds. It’s a skill that is nec­es­sary both to inven­tors and to entre­pre­neurs. At the most recent TED con­fer­ence, John gave a very brief TED Talk on one of the inven­tions he’s worked on, a new kind of “smart” power out­let that reduces the risk of fire con­sid­er­ably more than GFI plugs and stan­dard cir­cuit break­ers could hope to do. It’s an idea he and some friends arrived at by think­ing dif­fer­ently.

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Preparing for a Linux Desktop Migration: Practical Advice

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Linux Mascot: Tux I recently commented on a discussion about a planned migration to Linux in order to avoid having to deal with Windows Vista. It seems that it takes more searching than one should expect if one is attempting to find positive reviews. Some companies are electing to not to make the switch at all, waiting instead to see what the next version will bring.  Vista is easily the biggest flop in the product line since Windows Me. When I purchased a new HP laptop last year, I received a coupon for an upgrade from Windows XP to Vista (the unit shipped with XP), I didn't bother to redeem it. My laptop is running Mandriva, and though it still dual-boots to XP, I haven't used the option in more than a year now. The recent discussion got me thinking about my own migration from Windows 2000 to Linux, and what advice I might offer.

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Sun Acquires MySQL… Early Thoughts

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MySQL + Sun I was dropping the kids off at school yesterday when I got a call on my cell phone from an editor I've worked with before at CIO.com. It took a minute to sink in, but she was telling me that Sun Microsystems had just purchased MySQL. They wanted to get a story up fairly quickly on what this meant for CIOs, and they thought I'd be a good person to tackle it. Now, the last time I wrote for them about MySQL (of which I'm a fan), I got raked over the coals a little, but then I was writing as the dark horse. Of course I took this one on anyway, and "Sun Acquires MySQL: Impact on the CIO?" was up within a few hours. Go ahead and read it; I can wait, then we'll carry on.

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Two Items of Interest

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Firstly, for those who blog — Dar­ren Rowse’s Problog­ger is giv­ing away almost $60k worth of prizes to cel­e­brate the blog’s birth­day… which is cer­tainly one item of inter­est, at least. What caught my eye today were the LG USB LCD mon­i­tors that Dis­playLink is giv­ing away as part of the fun, and that’s the sec­ond item of inter­est. USB video has been a long time com­ing, and should a pair of USB mon­i­tors befall me, I cer­tainly won’t miss the exist­ing video cables that chain my mon­i­tors too close to my com­puter tower.  If you are a blog­ger, head over there and see what prizes you might take a shot at.