Practical Technology

People have this delusion that the Web is a fount of all information. That, if you look hard enough with Google and other search engines, you can find all the answers. That’s crap. Let’s look closely shall we? Google, in honor of its 10th birthday, has put up a site that lets you search the [...]

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I started using the Internet in the 1970s. It didn’t look anything like it does today, and our search tools were, well, awful. Still compared to what we started with, they were great. Before I ever turned my hand to writing, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online [...]

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I was sure that Microsoft would find some way to wiggle out of the European Union deal to reveal its trade secrets. At the very least, I thought the company would find a way to keep its intellectual property goodies away from open-source groups such as Samba. I was wrong. The Samba Group and the [...]

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Is there anyone alive who doesn’t thrill to the idea of exploration? While we can’t be Indiana Jones, it is possible to search for temples of software treasure in the Internet. To computer fans, a new program or an interesting data file can be as exciting as any golden idol. And, besides, we never ever [...]

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