Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges.
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.
Software is now so complex - requiring so many gazillions of tiny files all over your computer - that most consumers don't want to bother to know what's really going on.
We can provide beta software to our developers in advance of the general public. We can easily link up with external partners, customers, and suppliers.
We can collaborate with a Netscape employee or partner who's halfway around the world. We can distribute information and software to customers and shareholders, and get their feedback.
Facial recognition software is already quite accurate in measuring unchanging and unique ratios between facial features that identify you as you. It's like a fingerprint.
'Authoring tools' are terrible; there is almost no software that can create closed captions for media players. And of course there is no training. TV captioning is bad enough, and this stuff is generally worse.
Pop belonged to more musical people in earlier times, but we've sort of gotten away from that. Now it's software people. I kind of feel like reclaiming it is in order.
Modern records are all made with virtually identical gear, software plug-ins and everything. Everybody wants everything to sound like the last thing that was popular because they're chasing their tails.
Ghostery lets you spy on the spies in your computer. For each web page you visit, this extension uncloaks some - but not all - of the invisible tracking software that is working behind the scenes.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
I feel lucky because earlier in my career, I found what I liked to do; it's build software that you see your friends using on the street, and they like it.
A geek is a guy who has everything going for him but he's just too young. He's got the software but he doesn't have the hardware yet.
By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.
Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.
I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.
I get so many requests for interviews. If I talk to everyone, we can't do our job with our customers and work on our software. It would be hard to stay focused.
Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
