LIKE death and taxes, software upgrades are inevitable. And while they are not fatal like the first, or costly like the second, they are often accompanied by a great deal of pain. Unfortunately, we all need to go through the process now and again, or fall hopelessly behind the technology curve.
LAST week, the entertainment editor of Standard Today lost his notebook computer—an Apple MacBook Pro—when thieves smashed in the window of his BMW, which was parked at the Greenhills Shopping Center. Some time ago, a colleague at the university where I lecture suffered a similar fate, when he left his notebook unattended at an upscale coffee shop in Quezon City just long enough to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, incidents such as these are likely to increase as more people buy laptops.
Bradley Horowitz and other Yahoo executives watch presentations by UP computer science students at the first Yahoo Open Hack Day in the Philippines earlier this month.
“WE’RE having a Yahoo day” is what we say to each other at the office when we can’t connect to the Yahoo Messenger network and our online story conference comes to a temporary halt. Not such a flattering picture, but it’s a sign of how Yahoo has become part of so many people’s lives. The numbers are more impressive than the anecdote. Today, more than half a billion people use Yahoo or one of its associated services, says Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo’s advance development division.
NO matter where you take the Sony Vaio TZ, this ultra-portable black-body notebook computer is certain to turn heads. Everything about this notebook—from its travel-friendly size and weight to its gorgeously vivid 11.1-inch screen—speaks of quality and thoughtful design that will make people around you stand up and take notice.
“FOR a song” is a phrase that means “cheaply”—but don’t tell that to Jammie Thomas. Last week, the 30-year-old unwed mother from Duluth, Minnesota, was found guilty of violating music industry copyrights and ordered to pay a total of $222,000 to six record companies for songs she had shared on her computer using Kazaa, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network.
Old Digital Life Web site
SOMETIME today, this blog reached a milestone, going past 1 million page hits. That might not sound like a lot, but it took me awhile to get to this point. I started using ExpressionEngine to run this blog in January 2006, so my tracking really started just then. Before that, Digital Life began as a simple Web site in 2003 on a different URL. You can still see what the old pages looked like back then, thanks to The Way Back Machine.
DESPITE early fears that the Internet would hurt reading habits, few bibliophiles have traded in their books for flashing electrons on a screen. In fact, online retailers such as Amazon.com have made books even more widely available anywhere in the world. now, some Web sites reinforce the love of books by taking it online, where it can be shared by like-minded surfers. To a certain extent, three fairly new sites—Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari—do essentially the same thing. They all enable users to easily catalog their books, rate and review them, and share this information with others. In this sense, they are all Web 2.0 sites that rely heavily on user-generated content and social networking to generate traffic.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Made the switch to Linux? Tell me about it here and get your own penguin! Click here for a high-resolution image.
| October 2007 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
