Dorkbot is a "monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students, scientists, and other interested parties who are involved in the creative use of electricity." Started in NYC in 2000 by Douglas Repetto, Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center as well as one of Wired's 10 Sexiest Geeks, there are now dozens all over the world. Past presenters have been featured here on the blue. For instance Jeff Han presented his multi-touch interface at dorkbot-nyc in April of 2006. Miru Kim presented her naked city spleen at dorkbot-nyc in October of 2006. Bummed that there's not one in your own city? Start your own! [more inside]
posted by funkiwan on Dec 30, 2008 - 19 comments

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 by sonic meat machine on Dec 22, 2007 - 98 comments

David Pogue on the Power of Simplicity Complete with musical opening.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero on Aug 30, 2007 - 51 comments

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 by Smart Dalek on Jan 10, 2007 - 17 comments

FlexGo™. Microsoft targets emerging markets with pay as you go and subscription models.
posted by davehat on Jun 29, 2006 - 13 comments

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

THE ULTIMATE SELF LINK: MY BRAIN. Use this excellent little MRI program to open .hdr 3d-scan files. Endless, disturbing fun.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Sep 28, 2005 - 27 comments

The avatar versus the journalist. Ant farms, Bombay, the neolithic revolution, and Wikipedia.
posted by Tlogmer on Jul 22, 2005 - 18 comments

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 by tranquileye on May 19, 2004 - 7 comments

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 by jeremias on Sep 29, 2003 - 42 comments

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 by eyebeam on May 12, 2003 - 17 comments

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 by skallas on Dec 19, 2002 - 36 comments

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 by Armitage Shanks on Nov 27, 2002 - 40 comments

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 by moz on Oct 25, 2002 - 11 comments

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 by brookish on Apr 12, 2002 - 13 comments

[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 by Su on Dec 12, 2001 - 1 comment

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 by rushmc on Nov 24, 2001 - 12 comments

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 by cCranium on Oct 2, 2001 - 8 comments

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted by rushmc on Sep 8, 2001 - 15 comments

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 by fuzzygeek on Aug 1, 2001 - 5 comments

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 by rschram on Jul 27, 2001 - 4 comments

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 by m.polo on Jun 17, 2001 - 37 comments

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 by fil! on Apr 5, 2001 - 19 comments

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 by tatochip on Mar 14, 2001 - 5 comments

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 by rschram on Mar 2, 2001 - 6 comments

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 by idiolect on Jan 29, 2001 - 2 comments

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 by Zool on Dec 14, 2000 - 19 comments

Wired wants your nomination for worst Vaporware of the year 2000. (Hardware included.) Read the 1999 article here.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 4, 2000 - 29 comments

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 by harmful on Sep 21, 2000 - 0 comments

IBM's Linux commercial. Part of their Avery Brooks "serious software" ad campaign, which I like a lot, I have to say.
posted by dan_of_brainlog on Jul 22, 2000 - 2 comments

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 by baylink on May 5, 2000 - 5 comments

Phil Katz RIP
posted by mike on Apr 26, 2000 - 5 comments

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 by palegirl on Mar 29, 2000 - 7 comments

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 by CrazyUncleJoe on Mar 4, 2000 - 1 comment

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 by mathowie on Feb 22, 2000 - 2 comments

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 by mathowie on Feb 6, 2000 - 1 comment

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 by mathowie on Jan 24, 2000 - 0 comments

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 by grant on Dec 9, 1999 - 0 comments

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 by grant on Dec 8, 1999 - 0 comments