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I just held a reunion with people I worked with at a real-time and data acquisition computer vendor 20 years ago, and was interested to see how many ended up in another, related line of work.

The mobile network has created unprecedented opportunity for the world. It truly is pervasive - spanning out across geographies and socio-economic boundaries to enable sustainable participation, growth and potential prosperity on a previously unimaginable scale.

I am big believer that markets gravitate between FEAR and GREED, and that industries are driven by core assumptions about the SCARCITY or SURPLUS of enabling resources. Think about the stock market in terms of the former (it's heavily outlook driven), and the evolution of computing, as afforded by the latter (i.e., the commoditization of processing, storage and bandwidth).

The news out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the BLS) was grim this weak - the unemployment rate had reached 8.1%, climbing two whole percentage points in the last quarter. This rise is even more stunning given that unemployment had reportedly been stable for the past several years at around 5%, though this may also be simply a reflection that the numbers haven't been cooked quite so vigorously.

Seth Godin recently published a rather insightful blog post on how trade groups often work to stifle innovation in order to maintain the status quo. The comments are especially timely now, as industry after industry goes to Washington hat in hand in order to beg a few billion here or there to keep their particular company or even industry afloat.

The paradox of contemporary life is upon us. I paid $2,000 for the laptop upon which I type these words, in addition to a hundred dollars a month paying for online access, yet the editor I'm using is a web page within a free web browser, connected to a server that is running either Linux or Open Solaris, which was downloaded for free from a distribution disk that no doubt someone paid for, albeit at a cost of pennies. Yet the time and energy to creating these operating systems were non-negligible, representing thousands of man years in total dedicated to writing this free system.

The new Kindle 2.0 is a cool enough-looking gadget - its hyper-svelt profile (just over a third of an inch) is thinner than most of the books it holds, at ten ounces it's also lighter, and the silvery/white casing (among others) manages to take scuffs and dirt better than its predecessor. The e-ink paper, sporting sixteen shades of gray, is also a compelling testament to what looks like the next major display technology - e-ink retains its state after it's configured, which means that you only have to refresh the page when you move beyond the buffered page content ... which in turn means that you can run the Kindle for days without recharging.

We'll, let's just start by saying we've constructed an infrastructure for daily life with no future. That's pretty disturbing, isn't it? I customarily refer to this as the greatest misallocation off resources in the history of the world. Having poured all our post-WW2 wealth in it, we've made ourselves hostage to the psychology of previous investment -- meaning we will desperately try anything to keep it all going, to sustain the unsustainable, at all costs. Thus, we'll be squandering our dwindling resources in a gigantic act of futility. That's the Big Picture end of the story.

Understanding the art of prognostication is not that dissimilar to understanding weaving. Few things ever occur out of the blue - they just hadn't emerged out of the background noise just yet, and as such when they do appear,...

The recession that started in January 2008 looks to be four phased. The first phase, The housing collapse, actually started in August 2007. The financial meltdown hit in September 2008, and likely will continue through to March 2009 or so....

The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...

Here in Victoria, my corner gas station has a liter of regular unleaded gas for CAN$0.80, about US$3.00 a gallon. Six months ago, a similar liter cost nearly $1.50, more than $6 a gallon when factoring in the dramatic...

This week's podcast has a commentary from editor Kurt Cagle on the potential opportunities that this year could bring, a conversation with Tim O'Reilly about ways the SEC could leverage search technology, the answer to last week's quiz and a...

After eight years in business California-based MadTux, an online retailer specializing in systems preloaded with Linux, has closed.

It's Christmas Eve as I write this, but after having put the children to bed and turning off the tree lights, I find that my thoughts are not on Santa Claus tonight ... at least not in a very positive way.

A year later, the IT industry was in the worst recession that it had faced in fifteen years, a time that became known as the Tech Nuclear Winter. Senior programmers with thirty years of experience and post graduate degrees - people who sat on standards committees boards and often served to shape the industry - could be found at coffee shops "working on their next projects" while waiting for a job to open up.

Forums have become an integral part of many communities over the years - as a webmaster on a number of different social sites, I found that the sites tended to live or die on the strength of their forums more than on any other component of the site. They provide a way for people to express their feelings, to communicate with one another, to explore deep concepts (and silly ones) and to learn, and as such they often form the vibrant backbone of communities regardless of the subject matter expressed.

The decline of petroleum seems to be one more awful problem facing the US, but could it actually be an extraordinary chance to create a fine and fair national health care system?

While newspapers are likely on their way to the recycle bin, editorial journalism isn't. We are moving to an era where journalistic integrity and personal prestige of the individual journalist is becoming more important than the prestige of the newspaper or other media that the journalist writes for. Journalism is becoming decentralized, and there are many indications that this is, just perhaps, a good thing.

William Hurley recently posted an article titled Three Reasons Open Source Will Save The Economy one a new weblog of his.