I get a gazzillion offers for great stuff in my email. If I jumped into some of the offers I would be a billionaire several times over, and my personal measurements would embarrass an Elephant! Because of a love of my wife, small rented house, and a dwindling bank account, I tend to ignore these […]

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I always enjoy interviewing Charlie Boswell, he is one of the most colorful people I know. I would write a short biography, but that is impossible. Is he engineer, musician, film maker, thinker, futurist, or what?
Officially he holds the title of Director Of Digital Entertainment at AMD. Unofficially I class him as the AMD Energizer […]

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An Interview With AMD’s Charlie Boswell

Every family has Christmas Traditions, how they start is often unclear, but whatever it is does become part of the festive season. For some inexplicable reason I have one. How it started is long long lost in the annals of time. But every Christmas Season I seem to do an […]

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Who is Boswell I hear you ask? I think two words come to mind Enigma and Anathema. He is part musician, part filmmaker, technologist, and artist. In someways you might even call him a creative nerd. He somehow dropped out of Music in college and came away with a BSEE.  He is also a Producer […]

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As if there are not enough wonderful ways to fritter the day away online, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to name but a few, Google has now got into the act.
In a glorious piece of high tech nerding they have rolled out a truly amazing piece of nerdery with the latest upgrade to Google Analytics.
For the […]

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I read a name from the past in today’s news: Medgar Evers.
The name takes me back to the days of when as a child we visited our aunt who lived in the deep south, and I was astonished that there “colored only” restaurants and water fountains.
Evers was one of the heroes who fought for the […]

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I have a good friend who works for AMD, he is an engineer by trade, and a damn good one. His mission at AMD though is far different from what a traditional engineer might do. It is all about bringing the power of the computer into the hands of the user. A computer is just […]

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The LATimes has a story that India has now produced a thirty five dollar tablet computer for it’s students, or sort of…
The plan is to distribute thousands of the computers in coming months to students at a government-subsidized rate of $35.
It has taken several years to develop, faced a lot of skepticism and received […]

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I have been involved in the computer industry for almost four decades. During that time I have seen huge changes, but have I really? The computer industry is very cyclic, sure the technology gets smaller, cheaper, faster, the do more for less syndrome.
At the very core of the technology is not little black chips but […]

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A lot of Republican bloggers in the US are rolling their eyes up in mockery at the report that President Obama plans to send in US troops to fight the so called “Lord’s Resistance army” in Uganda.
A typical response is this, from the National Review Blog The Corner:
This is even crazier than getting involved in […]

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I remember the event quite well. IBM was a company that I had had many dealings with, including a 9 month stint camping out at one of their research facilities. I was assumed by many to be an IBM employee, but in actual fact I worked for a client, and my job was to assist […]

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Web sites have a colorful history of fixing things that are not broke. One subject guaranteed to upset a large portion of users is then the site decided to change the users relationship with it, and each other.
Google got hung out to dry when it introduced its early attempt at social media, Buzz. There was […]

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When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.
Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every […]

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It was called “Operation Vengence”.
He had ordered the deaths of thousands of Americans using airplanes, and alerted the average American that a war of civilizations was now endangering them.
Therefore, the president used secret intelligence networks to find where the mastermind was hiding. And after some discussions, the president approved of the mission tasked to kill […]

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Like all Americans, I am happy that the terrorist leader Osama Ben Laden has been killed.
Yes, as a Catholic Christian I pray for his soul, but unlike Time Magazine, I believe in hell, especially since there is no evidence that he repented his murders of the innocent on three continents.
Yet shortly after the announcement, my […]

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If you want to go to Medical schools in the US, you have to take a test called an MCAT. It is to try to figure out if you are smart enough to be a doc or something like that. I’m not sure, since I predate that test.
At least in the past doctors were trained […]

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Readers of my articles have likely figured out that I have little use for the entire Anthony clan, and very little respect for the legal team putting on her defense. The fact that the tax payer is funding Casey Anthony’s defense just pours salt on the wounds.
However, I also understand that the young lady does […]

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On the subject of e-readers I have kept very quiet, when it comes to books, you just cannot beat the weight of paper. Paper offers comfort and trust that no electronic version can. The smell of new ink, the handwritten note from the author, the choice of fonts, the front and back cover, all of […]

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Every innovation has three phases. When it is new, it is expensive and exclusive, when the technology catches on it becomes cheap and mainstream, and then it enters a phase of decline, the result is always the same. The great innovation dies. Except for a few die hard fans, the world moves on to the […]

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Although the tablet is making quite a stir in computing technology, the best web designers begin their initial designs on paper. Each web designer may have a preference – bound, unbound, unlined, lined, ridged or smooth. Although the materials vary, the objective remains the same. The goal of early explorations in web design is to […]

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the news of the Japanese earthquake is terrible.
US Navy Photo from StrategyPage.
But a few stories below the fold show how such disasters sometimes bring out the best in people.
BelmontClubBlog points out how the US Navy is there, assisting the Japanese Navy in areas where the infrastructure makes other ways to deliver aid difficult:

“…The […]

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Ok let me start with a question, what does the ip address of  69.72.189.220  mean to you? I’ll be honest, it held no interest to me until this morning. A check on comments left overnight showed a huge spike in ‘Ping Backs’. Rather than the regular 3 or 4, there were over 20 of them. […]

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I’ve been too busy to watch the US news on our cable network, but the BBC reports are mainly about the fighting in Libya.
But here in the Philippines, the headlines are about our workers. You see, there are at least 25,000 Filipino OFW’s (”overseas foreign workers”) in Libya, and although the government has arranged a […]

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The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.
The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant […]

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TedLipien.com, Truckee, CA, March 1, 2011 — In this series of analyses for Free Media Online (FreeMediaOnline.org) — U.S. International Broadcasting in Crisis– Ted Lipien, former Voice of America acting associate director, examines recent Broadcasting Board of Governors’ decisions, with a focus on the latest controversial plan to completely eliminate Voice of America on-the-air […]

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In a previous post, I joked that if the Governor of Wisconsin wanted to fire all his teachers, he could hire a lot of qualified Filipino teachers to replace them.
Yet this is not quite a joke: The cut backs in US medical training have resulted in the active importation of foreign medical graduates to fill […]

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FreeMediaOnline.orgTruckee, CA, USA, February 21, 2011 — As reported by PiratesWeek and Kim Andrew Elliott, a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employee who publishes his own private international broadcasting website, the BBG-managed Voice of America (VOA) websites were hacked on February 21, 2011, apparently by the “Iranian Cyber Army.” In 2009, VOA websites were […]

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Clinton once had a line “It’s the economy, stupid”, and one longs for someone to teach economics to the present administration.
I was always a union supporter, and many of my family and friends belonged to unions. But you know what happened to a lot of textile jobs in the northern states in 1950’s and 1960’s? […]

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Writing real articles takes a lot of time. So the question is why bother? This is clearly a question that some sites have already made a decision on. Lets face it, if you have real people generating content, you also have the requirement for editors, and other boring overheads that add costs.
The solution is simple, […]

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There is little doubt that Google is the 800lb Lowland Gorilla of the internet. To cross them means almost certain death. They have a huge influence on the internet. I am not always in agreement with the company, and it can certainly be argued that they have created as many problems as they have fixed. […]

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