Tag: engineering

  • To the Moon – with extreme engineering

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    Apollo space program as a triumph of power and industrial might. The superpowers’ space programs were, of course, political and chauvinistic, designed to showcase national wealth. But there’s a better way of looking at the program, Dennis Wingo reminded me recently. Masses of money helped put man on the Moon of course, but the Moon…

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  • Rescuing Nokia’s Ovi: a plan

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    It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong. Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it…

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  • Technorati knocks itself out. Again

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    Technorati, the comically inept search engine, has redesigned itself again – knocking itself out in the process. The site was down when bloggers checked in yesterday. More importantly, the latest redesign is a tacit admission that it’s given up on its original mission – indexing the world’s weblogs. Technorati now claims to present “zillions of…

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  • One Laptop Per Child: it’s a con, says former exec

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    The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It’s all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

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  • Widget-fiddling at Nokia

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    When one looks at the prime assets of the Nokia of five years ago, it’s alarming to see how many have been discarded. At the turn of the decade, the Finnish giant boasted a formidable reputation for reliability, security and ease of use. Now it’s thrown all three out of the window, with security being…

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    Tim Berners-Lee says some really stupid things, then goes mad

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    In which the Greatest Living Briton says some very silly things, and then loses his temper So there we were. In a room devoted to Engineering, the man voted the Greatest Living Briton had exploded in front of me. Sir Tim Berners Lee, co-inventor of the World Wide Web, was at Southampton University to deliver…

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