cosmix.org

On Device Identifiers.

cosmix — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:01:57 +0000

Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps [...]

Independent companies

cosmix — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:35:29 +0000

WSJ: Before Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. died, he approached you with a buyout offer. Why did you turn it away? Mr. Ferdowsi: The problem that we’re trying to solve is a problem that only an independent company can solve. We want to let you use a Mac, or Windows PC, or iPad, or Android, [...]

Bluffdale

cosmix — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:45:05 +0000

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a [...]

It would have been truly hilarious

cosmix — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:05:13 +0000

..if it weren’t about the sad fact that 22% of UNESCO’s funding was withdrawn by the U.S. this year, because they dared vote and recognize ‘Palestine’ as a member state. As a sidenote, I’m not quite clear on why people like Wexler, the U.S. congressman would agree to participate in an über-sarcastic piece like this [...]

Break free, create your own walled garden.

cosmix — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:58:46 +0000

It’s ironic, how ‘ease’ becomes the noose that chokes innovation and development. AOL, Facebook, iTunes, they all offer closed, proprietary solutions to ‘problems’ that — in more ways than one — are not so hard to solve. Solutions that seem to ‘work’, that ‘succeed’ because the ‘trend’ is to embrace ‘easy’, as opposed to ‘moderately [...]

The Robot Economy

cosmix — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:19:00 +0000

We live in a world in crisis. Comparisons to the 1920s and 1930s are inevitable, but the crisis, similarly to the ones before it, conceal not economic, but political roots: It is a crisis born of the fallacies of a world governance, world economy and global priorities decided by and enforced upon the world by [...]

Codify for iPad

cosmix — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:04:49 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Lua since the early 2000s when a friend introduced it to me, even though I never got around to finding the time to properly learn and use it in production stuff. We have discussed about using Lua as a scripting language to allow for downloadable bundles that would extend AthensBook/ThessBook [...]

KF8. The path to fragmentation.

cosmix — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:43:27 +0000

Amazon announced Kindle Format 8, a new format for ebooks destined for its popular ebook reader. The new format, based on html5, promises books with small file sizes, excellent rendering performance, varying typefaces, tables and, in general, much more complex layouts and as a result way more beautiful books than the standard experience typically found [...]

Τουλάχιστον να γνωρίζουμε.

cosmix — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:40:07 +0000

Πριν από περίπου ενάμιση μήνα ‘υποβαθμίστηκε’ η ταχύτητα της σύνδεσής μου στο σπίτι, για λόγους που μπορώ να αποδώσω μόνον στην ανικανότητα του ΟΤΕ. Παρ’ότι ενδιαφέρουσα περίπτωση που συνδυάζει τεχνική ανικανότητα και μια γερή δόση Κάφκα — δεν θα μπώ σε λεπτομέρειες (ζούμε άλλωστε μια ιδιαίτερα σουρρεαλιστική εποχή που κάνει ασήμαντη την εν λόγω προσωπική [...]

The depth of everything that’s involved

cosmix — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:28:55 +0000

JBQ’s writings on Dennis Ritchie’s death find me in total agreement and are worthy of a citation. dmr was a legend and his contribution, concise as meaningful, simple yet immensely powerful, has — and still does — shaped computing (and much of modern life) as we know it. C may not be ‘modern’ anymore, it [...]