Well, as we are just a hop, skip and an eggnog away from putting on silly hats, drinking champagne, and kissing random people as we bid goodbye to the year, it behooves me to look into the digital rearview mirror and ponder what we can see rushing away from us.
Before I get to this week's main topic I must give a big thumbs-up to a book that all of you who like to cook will thoroughly enjoy: "Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food" by Jeff Potter (pub. O'Reilly).
There's an old joke: What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? Answer: I don't know and I don't care.
The quest for smaller and smaller computing devices usually involves a tradeoff between processor power, battery life, communications features, memory and storage. While the product I'm looking at is in some respects the result of the intersection of a vision with compromises, the WiMM One from WiMM Labs is one of the slickest miniature computing devices I've seen to date.
The recent revelation that most of us are carrying around smartphones with embedded rootkits is both surprising and not so surprising. It's surprising because it makes you wonder, "How stupid can the carriers be?" It's not surprising in that we know the answer to that.
Here's a piece of news that will worry anyone interested in <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/security.html">security</a> (which should be pretty much everyone who reads Network World): A programmer by the name of Juuso Salonen has created a Ruby script called <a href="https://github.com/juuso/BozoCrack">BozoCrack</a> that cracks MD5 hashed passwords with remarkable success and with very little effort.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Señoras y Señores, Κυρίες και Κύριοι (and for you classicists, Nullam et Viri), welcome to the Eighth Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards!
A while ago I got over-excited about <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/081011-gearhead.html">maps on the iPad</a> and promised more of the same in the future and now, the future has arrived.
When <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/steve-jobs-dies">Steve Jobs passed away</a> early last month, there was a <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/101911-steve-jobs-252167.html">remarkable outpouring of grief</a> along with countless articles that sliced and diced the man, his history, his achievements, and his impact on the world. The majority of these articles were laudatory focusing as they did on his remarkable drive and demand for perfection and for what you might call his "uncompromising" management style.
All together now: Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!
I haven't talked about programming languages for a while so here goes: We start this week with the free, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/opensource/">open source</a> (<a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT License</a>) <a href="http://www.lua.org/">Lua</a> language.
Once upon a time, IT said unto select employees (in biblical tones): "Thou lucky employee, thou shalt have this very expensive cellphone (sign here) and thou shalt want no other. Go forth and communicate," adding, "and, lo, thou shalt also have this very expensive laptop (sign here as well) and thou better not break it, buster. Now, go forth and lug it around the country and give presentations and whatever else it is you do. Begone."
I have written several times about my ongoing love affair with the iPad and, surprise, a wave of iPad-related products has been appearing in the Gibbs Universal Secret Underground Bunker.
I have written several times about my ongoing love affair with the iPad and, surprise, a wave of iPad-related products has been appearing in the Gibbs Universal Secret Underground Bunker.
Well, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/101411-backspin.html">last week's Backspin</a> on Rossi's E-Cat power generator was fun. Between that column and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/">a blog posting</a> I made on the topic over at Forbes, I've had more than 100 comments and an insane number of page views which all goes to show just what a hot topic alternative energy is.
