Dwolla
Money is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the economy, yet we largely take it for granted. When we pay for our morning cup of coffee (or tea) with cash or a credit card, we tend not to stop and [...] Read more
The Challenge: A Decentralized Rights Registry
Since my post last Friday about alternatives to SOPA/PIPA, I have started to talk to a bunch of people about the idea of a decentralized content registry. Here are some thoughts and questions that I have been kicking around since [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: HTTP
Today we are continuing on with the web request cycle. After the browser has parsed the URL and obtained the IP address of the server via DNS, the browser now has to communicate with the server. That is done using [...] Read more
ReRAM: An Exciting Hardware Innovation
In my Tech Tuesday posts I have covered main memory and storage (by the way, coming up tomorrow: HTTP). If you have read those or otherwise follow hardware, then you will find this short piece from BBC Technology News on [...] Read more
Thinking About Alternatives to SOPA/PIPA
With SOPA and PIPA shelved at least for the moment, it is time to start thinking about alternatives. It would be a shame if we limited our collective thinking here to slightly different versions of those bills instead of exploring [...] Read more
Apple Is Slow Boiling Developers
How do you boil a frog? Slowly. Apparently the same is true for endusers and even software developers. That at least is what Apple seems to believe. And while this has been debunked for frogs (they do jump out as [...] Read more
Supermodularity And Service Bundling
This will be a bit of a wonky and short post with a longer and less technical one to follow some time soon. Google has just announced a coming update to their privacy policy which will essentially make it possible [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: DNS
Today we are continuing with the web cycle that I outlined two weeks ago. After a URL has been parsed in Step 1, the browser needs to determine the IP address for the domain as Step 2. Reprising the previous [...] Read more
Why Software As A Service (A Personal Reminder)
I am in the process of migrating a bunch of stuff off an ancient server which has been up continuously for 5 years and is being sunset (the hardware is tired and RedHat is ending support for RHEL4). The migration [...] Read more