Category Archives: Musings

Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review

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When even MIT warns about the dangers of over-reliance on big data, you know somethings up. Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review.

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Whitney Saves Douglas Davis’s ‘First Collaborative Sentence’ – NYTimes.com

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Whitney Saves Douglas Davis’s ‘First Collaborative Sentence’ – NYTimes.com. Electronic art has always had a short lifespan and digital work even more so. My own piece, “Web Phases,” from the mid-90s no longer functions in modern browsers.  

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May 18

Checking out the crystal ball

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As I’ve been moving virtual house over to the new hosting service, I’ve dug up some articles I wrote for MIT and others at the end of the last century. I think they make some interesting reading, and I think I got a lot right. Towards Hypermusic – MIT Press 1998 Sound On The Internet – […]

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May 18

All change

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After 15 years of running two websites of my own, I’ve consolidated and simplified. All of my URLs (http://www.cinemavolta.com  http://www.odenkonsult.com  and http://www.johnmaxwellhobbs.com) all point to the same place – this WordPress site. It’s simpler, faster, more flexible and cheaper – exactly as most internet applications have become. Of course, all my old links are now […]

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May 16

The Web is where it all went wrong

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Yesterday the internet was alight with celebrations of the World Wide Web‘s 20 year jubilee. I marked it with a moment of silence in memoriam for the internet that might have been (and possibly could still be). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of the web and the irony of the fact […]

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We will resume our normally scheduled programming as soon as possible

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Things have been very quiet on this site since the autumn.  The end of November starts a long season of celebration that begins with Thanksgiving and includes Christmas/Jul, Hogmanay, my birthday and my wife’s birthday.  Finally concluding around Valborgsmässoafton. I now need to lose around 8 kilos, but it’s a good way to keep the […]

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November 20

Early days on the ‘net: Now what do I do with this thing?

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So, I began to play around with my new found global connectivity. I quickly mastered using Pine for email (and became a dedicated Pico user as well. Never could get my head around EMACS). Fortunately, Panix offered hints as to useful things. I played around with Gopher and became a fan, checked out this new […]

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October 22

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Originally posted on The IABM Blog:
John Maxwell Hobbs is the Head of Technology for BBC Scotland and is a keynote speaker at the IABM Annual Conference next month. We took the opportunity to ask him a few questions: 1.)    Please can you us tell a bit about yourself, your organisation and your role? I’m…

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September 03

Early days on the ‘net

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I open the VT100 emulation program, type, “ATDT,” followed by a string of seven digits and hit, “return.” I hear the sound of a dial tone, followed by DTMF tones, followed by a shrieking and hissing noises – then silence. I’m connected at a screaming 2400 bits per second. The screen prompts for my username […]

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Remembrances of things past

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I’ve reblogged a great article with a poor title from GigaOm, “The one big thing that newspaper visionaries didn’t foresee.” That article brought back so many memories, particularly the memo from 1992 by Robert Kaiser, a former editor at the Washington Post. I won’t rehash any of it here, I strongly recommend you go read […]

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