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One of the minor annoyances with OS X over the years had been that Apple’s iCal application’s icon has a date on it, but only showed the correct date if the application was open. When the application was closed, it showed the date July 17. The fact that the incorrect date was prominently displayed on [...]

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Greg Knauss has a theory on why developers often make poor managers. Here’s a snippet:

The manager must be involved with each and every project, but at the highest level. He doesn’t care about the race condition that’s plaguing the project three levels down, he just cares what the impact on the schedule is [...]

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Hopefully you won’t be surprised to learn that the Bush administration treats the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as just another political tool to help build support for its policies. We learn this from recent statements made by Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo, who resigned last month.

Here’s [...]

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Comet is a new term that’s been coined to describe the modern incarnation of server push. Most Web applications that update a Web page in real time use polling to grab updates from the server. Comet refer to Web pages that maintain a live connection to the server and allow the server to push data [...]

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People for Internet Responsibility has launched a new effort to monitor network providers for violations of network neutrality called NNSquad. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a law enforcing network neutrality, and there are very good arguments that such a law would be impossible to enforce or would hurt more than it helps.

Network providers [...]

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The Google Phone has arrived, except that it’s not a phone. It’s an open source operating system for handsets that’s based on Linux and that will be released under an Apache license. Google has lined up an impressive list of handset makers and carriers who will be adopting Android.

This really is great news. It’s wide [...]

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Last week, I talked about Apple’s self-perception as a struggling company, fighting for good taste in a world of mediocrity. These predictions from the past are why Apple fans still cheer when the company includes Easter Eggs in its products that poke fun at Windows, despite the fact that the company is now a gorilla [...]

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Ars Technica notes that in the wake of the OiNK bust, many sites have already been launched to take its place. As the article says, in the end the OiNK bust will probably already make things worse for the music industry in terms of file sharing. Before the bust, I didn’t even know that there [...]

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Here’s Tyler Cowen writing about areas where the UN is successful:

I don’t hold the extreme view that the UN always fails. It is possibly good when there is a general consensus for action (UNESCO World Heritage sites), or when a well-targeted military action has a defined purpose. The UN is very [...]

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Freedom to Tinker writers Andrew Appel and Ed Felten have put together a series of three posts you must read about AT&T data mining its call records on behalf of the government. How does the system work? The first post explains:

What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly [...]

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