Monthly Archives: October 2008

Political for a moment

By Michael Becker | Published: October 27, 2008
I’m sorry about inject­ing pol­i­tics into this blog, but I couldn’t resist this. CNN is report­ing that vice pres­i­dent can­di­date Sarah Palin went “off script” at a rally Sunday in Florida. From the arti­cle: A senior McCain adviser told CNN that those com­ments “were not the remarks we sent to her plane.” Palin did not [...]
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An impatient world

By Michael Becker | Published: October 26, 2008
The New York Times gives us this morsel today, from writ­ers Matt Richtel and Ashlee Vance: There is noth­ing new about frus­tra­tion with start-up times, which can be many min­utes. But the agi­ta­tion seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days. Back then, peo­ple felt less urgency to log on to their soli­tary, uncon­nected machines. [...]
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New computer

By Michael Becker | Published: October 25, 2008
Well, I did it. I went ahead and bought one of the new MacBook Pros, the 2.4-gigahertz model. Why? Because, as my girl­friend notes, I’m an impulse shop­per (hav­ing obsessed about the com­put­ers since they were released) with an elec­tron­ics store credit account and a will­ing­ness to pay a monthly “elec­tron­ics tax.” Do I care [...]
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Wikipedia makes this world

By Michael Becker | Published: October 23, 2008
Wikipedia’s def­i­n­i­tion of truth mat­ters, says Technology Review con­tribut­ing edi­tor Simson Garfinkel, because of the sheer num­ber of peo­ple who use the online ency­clo­pe­dia with­out a sec­ond though about its accuracy.
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Old friends never die, nor do they fade away

By Michael Becker | Published: October 23, 2008
Scott Brown at Wired exam­ines the always-growing econ­omy of friend­ship on social net­work­ing sites like Facebook, where dig­i­tal per­ma­nence makes los­ing touch nearly impos­si­ble. We squir­rel away Friends the way our grand­par­ents used to save nickels—obsessively, des­per­ately, as if we’ll run out of them some day... Friends are the cur­rency of the socially net­worked world; [...]
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