Editor wars are some of the most divisive debates among programmers and writers. These days, the battles are between proponents of IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, and the like as often as they are between proponents of vi and Emacs, the traditional battlegrounds. That fight hasn't ended, of course. The support of the vi camp has largely solidified behind Vim, the largest and most feature rich (or bloated, if you like nvi) variant, and GNU Emacs has essentially vanquished its internecine rival. Are you a traditionalist? You can find an argument if you really want to. Of course, a lot of people now vote for third parties. There are candidates for the ignorant, for the masochistic, and the insane. Some people are more comfortable with familiar interfaces. Still others are obsessed. [Previously]
posted on Dec 22, 2007 - View this thread

David Pogue on the Power of Simplicity Complete with musical opening.
posted on Aug 30, 2007 - View this thread

An' all the hot cats on the block have been doing it too - c'mon now, honey, I wanna do it with you. Anyone hoping to build their own Death Probe without dismantling the vaccum cleaner or floor waxer can rejoice. The creators of Roomba and Scooba have released a barebones version. Add-on software from Microsoft is available, should more ambitious types decide to pair iRobot's tech with LEGO MindStorms pieces.
posted on Jan 10, 2007 - View this thread

FlexGo™. Microsoft targets emerging markets with pay as you go and subscription models.
posted on Jun 29, 2006 - View this thread

Microsoft WSYP A very exciting and promising new technology coming from Redmond. [movie - .asf (windows media)]
posted on Oct 20, 2005 - View this thread

THE ULTIMATE SELF LINK: MY BRAIN. Use this excellent little MRI program to open .hdr 3d-scan files. Endless, disturbing fun.
posted on Sep 28, 2005 - View this thread

The avatar versus the journalist. Ant farms, Bombay, the neolithic revolution, and Wikipedia.
posted on Jul 22, 2005 - View this thread

The John Markoff of the New York Times [registration required] reports that Google plans to roll-out a text and file search tool code-named Puffin for finding information stored on PCs. The move is seen as a defensive one; Microsoft plans to include PC searching in its new operating system, scheduled to be released in 2006 (at the earliest).
posted on May 19, 2004 - View this thread

What software version numbers really mean. Not sure who started the latest trend of dropping version numbers from software. We could always blame Microsoft with Windows ME . But Macromedia is at fault too with the whole MX thing. And MX doesn't even stand for anything. Now Adobe is getting into the mix. There will be no Photoshop 8 or Illustrator 11. Just CS . So is this a good thing? Version numbers may not be exciting but it sure did make it easy to keep track of the latest upgrade.
posted on Sep 29, 2003 - View this thread

Denim "A team at the University of California at Berkeley has developed a software sketching tool that helps designers create fully interactive websites using just a graphics tablet or mouse...

Developed by the Group for User Interface Research at UC Berkeley, Denim allows designers to play around with different ideas with the speed and ease of drawing on paper. Even better, sketches can be hyperlinked, allowing a series of rough drawings to become a fully interactive site.

'We're trying to replicate the way designers have traditionally worked in the early stages of design, which is with pen and paper,' said the project's lead, James Landay, an associate professor at the university."

(Quote above is from this Wired News article.)
posted on May 12, 2003 - View this thread

Distributed spam filtering. Sure, your spam filter may be hot stuff, but Spamnet takes filtering to the communal level. With its easy install, point and click simplicity, and Outlook support could Spamnet be the SpamCop for the masses?
posted on Dec 19, 2002 - View this thread

The Self-Healing Minefield From the current Village Voice: "Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and 'healing' software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics."

Bonus ubertasteless Flash animation courtesy of DARPA here. Color me fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.
posted on Nov 27, 2002 - View this thread

Glitch Art. When software fucks up, their display on-screen sometimes goes with them. Beflix finds the art in these glitches, and in all kinds: glitchy circuit design printouts and electron scans, for example.
posted on Oct 25, 2002 - View this thread

On flight simulators, Tetris, and the CIA The Sunday Times Mag has a feature on Gilman Louie, popularizer of Tetris who was recruited by the CIA in 1998. " Louie's marching orders were to provide venture capital for data-mining technologies that would allow the C.I.A. to monitor and profile potential terrorists as closely and carefully as Amazon monitors and profiles potential customers."
posted on Apr 12, 2002 - View this thread

[re]distributions is a collection of art software and essays centering on PDAs and information appliances. Glad I cleaned out my Jornada at work today. Most of the artists have various other projects at their own sites, if you follow their links.
posted on Dec 12, 2001 - View this thread

WE ARE WATCHING YOU. "The FBI added that its research is 'always mindful of constitutional, privacy and commercial equities,' and that its use of new technology can be challenged in court and in Congress." No really, go ahead, try and stop us if you don't like it. That's your (snicker, snicker) right.
posted on Nov 24, 2001 - View this thread

The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted on Oct 2, 2001 - View this thread

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted on Sep 8, 2001 - View this thread

Anti-rip CD system bypassed. heh. nice try, boyos. i've never understood how people can believe something digitized can possibly be protected in such a manner as to be foolproof. what one process can scramble, another can undo. [via /.]
posted on Aug 1, 2001 - View this thread

San Diego Opensource Convention Ends With "Positive Feelings"
The conference included a debate (documented in real time!) between Microsoft open source---what's the opposite of evangelist?---Craig Mundie and the CTO of RedHat Michael Tiemann entitled "shared source versus open source." Tiemann was feisty and "baited" Mundie, who remained cool as a cucumber. I thought we could all benefit from some postgame analysis here... (1, 2, 3)
posted on Jul 27, 2001 - View this thread

I usually just ignore Jakob - he has his right to his opinions, tho' I seldom agree with him - but I draw the line at misrepresenting a technology so egregiously... Acrobat's not that hard to understand; I can't believe it's possible for Neilsen to not know that the features he berates Acrobat for missing are, in actuality, right there to be used.
posted on Jun 17, 2001 - View this thread

Internet Explorer 6 and Standards Microsoft says they'll have 100% CSS1 and DOM (I assume level 1) support. A step in the right direction? Too little too late? Discuss.
posted on Apr 5, 2001 - View this thread

Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.

i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:

``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."

Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted on Mar 14, 2001 - View this thread

The Future of the Internet is the Web application!
From the USATODAY story:

The Internet will be less about going to big sites like Yahoo and Amazon.com and more about using specialized pieces of software that connect to the Net. Two current examples: Napster and the Miller Lite Beer Pager.

Wow, the future is now!
posted on Mar 2, 2001 - View this thread

John Draper says he's going straight for good and looking to "pay back society for [his] deeds in the past," by working with a software security outfit.
posted on Jan 29, 2001 - View this thread

Codeweavers, Windows software on Linux. I think the average consumer might be very interested in Linux, if they could run their current Windows programs on it. Another step closer to the end of Bill Gates' evil rule.
posted on Dec 14, 2000 - View this thread

Wired wants your nomination for worst Vaporware of the year 2000. (Hardware included.) Read the 1999 article here.
posted on Dec 4, 2000 - View this thread

Roll your own Carnivore. A network security firm has released its own software package to duplicate the abilities of the FBI's packet-sniffing black box. Or at least, its admitted abilities.
posted on Sep 21, 2000 - View this thread

IBM's Linux commercial. Part of their Avery Brooks "serious software" ad campaign, which I like a lot, I have to say.
posted on Jul 22, 2000 - View this thread

This excellent article on software quality, which is also a review of the Mark Minasi book, is courtesy of Linux Weekly^WDaily News. It has pointers to the anti-UCITA sites, too.
posted on May 5, 2000 - View this thread

Phil Katz RIP
posted on Apr 26, 2000 - View this thread

jon kats on "geek profiling": "W.A.V.E joins new sofware "security" programs ... being tested in public schools in America to compile and computerize information on students believed to be dangerous or potentially violent. This new rat-on-kids industry is an offshoot of the Geek Profiling anti-Net hysteria that broke out all across the United States after the Columbine High School killings, whose first anniversary is fast approaching. Despite the fact that horrific incidents like Columbine are extremely rare, and that the FBI and Justice Department have both reported that youth violence has dropped to its lowest levels in more than half a century, the belief persists in much of America that technologies like the Internet (and activities like computer gaming) are turning otherwise healthy school children into mass murderers."
posted on Mar 29, 2000 - View this thread

Cat Detecto Software? It's software that detects cat-typing then blocks keyboard input while emitting "a sound that annoys cats." I wonder if this could be modified to prevent co-workers from using my computer to browse porn while I'm at lunch...
posted on Mar 4, 2000 - View this thread

Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted on Feb 22, 2000 - View this thread

I often forget that there's still a community of visual basic developers out there building all sorts of goofy apps for windows. This site has a whole bunch of useful utilities, including Gribouille, a program that lets you draw all over your desktop, Pubcruncher, an app that kills popup windows, and my favorite: "Nap and Coffee", a fake app that lets you walk away from your computer and make it appear that you're copying large files, scanning for viruses, or setting up a program.
posted on Feb 6, 2000 - View this thread

Odigo 2.0 is now out, and it fully integrates with ICQ. I just installed it, and it imported a bit too much. All the ICQ users on my ignore list showed up in Odigo, and my renamed friends showed up as their original ICQ names. The status indicators seem to be broken too, but it's beta so I guess that's alright. Of course, nobody uses it, so I don't see any other people when I'm surfing even the most popular sites, but if everyone starts using this new release, perhaps that will change.
posted on Jan 24, 2000 - View this thread

Ever noticed that the also-rans who have yet to be acquired by one of their peers seem to glom together like cornmeal in water? Take a look at who Be is partnering with for their Stinger internet appliance software: Bitstream - clearly a runner-up to Adobe in the typeface technology department; and Opera - who are trying desperately to be the alternative browser of choice. Who's next? Corel, and their latest BeOS port of WordPerfect?
posted on Dec 9, 1999 - View this thread

Adobe is extending into Microsoft's waters. They're making a beta extension available that ties Active Server Pages and ODBC compliant databases together within GoLive's rockin' page-o-rific design environment. GoLive already does some skanky things with WebObjects, so why not get down with the ASP crowd too? Can ColdFusion be far behind kids? Or would that be too edgy for the big red A?
posted on Dec 8, 1999 - View this thread