Category Archives: a/b

“Up To”

July 19, 2011 – 5:50 pm

I’ve made a graph. This is Bell and Rogers current broadband offerings, their advertised “up to X” speed, and how long it would take to hit their stated monthly cap running at their advertised maximum speed full-out. As you can see, they’re selling you a month of quota that you can use in half a [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in business, digital, fail, future, hate, interfaces, losers, toys, vendetta | Comments Off

Shocked, Shocked I Say.

July 7, 2011 – 10:20 am

Compare and contrast. Exhibit 1: Rebekah Brooks letter to the staff of News Of The World. It is almost too horrific to believe that a professional journalist or even a freelance inquiry agent working on behalf of a member of the News of the World staff could behave in this way. If the allegations are [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in doom, fail, hate, interfaces, losers, vendetta | Comments (1)

Where The Puck Is Going

April 7, 2011 – 3:11 pm

I alluded to some fictional future tech the other day, specifically ARM-powered Macbook Airs. My reasonings, let me show you them. With OSX 10.6, Apple announced Grand Central Dispatch, a framework for managing multithreaded programs across multiple cores, which they released, surprisingly, under the Apache open-source license. This gives programmers who take advantage of it [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in arcade, digital, future, interfaces, toys, vendetta, want | Comments (5)

Pick Two

March 21, 2011 – 2:11 pm

The last time I did this, it didn’t go particularly well – The cheapest subnotebook I could find turned out to be pretty terrible, had a lot wrong with it from Day 1 and ultimately lived a pretty short, pretty unhappy life. I’ve got an odd fascination with the bottom end of the hardware spectrum, [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in digital, documentation, fail, future, hate, interfaces, toys, vendetta, work | Comments (6)

Monopoly Money

February 1, 2011 – 3:34 pm

This isn’t the Usage Based Billing post I promised a friend recently; that’s on its way. This one is just some math. An uncompressed 720p HDTV signal is about 740 megabits per second of information. That’s a 720px by 1280px image, 12 bits per pixel, sixty times per second. Around 80 megabytes per second, uncompressed. [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in digital, fail, interfaces, losers, vendetta | Comments (8)

Normalizing Crazy

January 9, 2011 – 5:12 pm

While I’ve been working on this, it has already been done better here and here. But if you like, feel free to keep reading. Pretending that rhetoric doesn’t involve a measure of culpability is a wonderfully convenient fiction, isn’t it? “I was just giving orders.” When emotions are running hot and the situation is complicated, [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in documentation, doom, fail, hate, interfaces | Comments (4)

A Note To My Business-Niche Cohabitants

January 7, 2011 – 3:29 pm

My little startup is moving along quite nicely, have I mentioned that? 2010 was a good year, and 2011 is looking extremely promising, in large part because of the awesome people I’m working with now and looking to hire. But I’d like to clear up one little thing about that; noted Seneca professor Dave Humphrey [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in academia, awesome, business, future, interfaces, vendetta, work | Comments (5)

Women And Open Source

January 6, 2011 – 10:16 pm

Noted sex and technology blogger Violet Blue has written a bit here calling 2010 “The Year of Whining About Women In Tech”. In my erstwhile role as an obscenely overprivileged white man and freestanding meritocracy I’ve been giving this some thought recently. I feel that you should pay attention to my opinions on the subject. [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in digital, documentation, fail, future, interfaces, linux, losers, vendetta | Comments (9)

DNA

December 3, 2010 – 3:38 pm

From Douglas Adams “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”: It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in digital, doom, linux, lunacy | Comments (2)

Picking Turing’s Pocket

October 15, 2010 – 1:06 am

This is interesting, and stirs some pleasingly cyberpunkish ideas around in my brain. Three months ago, from The Atlantic: Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges. What they do doesn’t show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street [...]

By mhoye | Also posted in academia, awesome, digital, doom, future, interfaces, science, weird | Comments (1)