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  • OPINION

    There's no such thing as free tech

    Life, James Hein, Published on 21/01/2015

    » Can hackers really ruin your day? Consider the story a friend of mine recently told me. He has been playing the game Stronghold Kingdoms for a couple of years now. Apparently, as a result of hacking, some players gained points and certain advantages and had their accounts spoofed. 

  • TECH

    Even writers need to think before tweeting

    Life, James Hein, Published on 16/08/2017

    » Without the internet, there would only ever be part of a story. Consider the recent example of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. She watched an edited video and then took to the internet using her fame to decry the treatment of a small child by a prominent leader. Her concerns were quickly and widely spread but the unedited footage showed the opposite. Even the mother of the child finally got involved and asked the internet to please tell J.K. Rowling that she was wrong. At the time of writing Rowling had apologised to the mother but not the leader she smeared. In the current fast pace and instant Twitter-response world it is important to take a step back and do some personal investigation before reacting, often incorrectly, to a flash tweet or news story. If you see a clip try and find the full or unedited version, that extra time can save you from future embarrassment, though some personalities seem to be immune to it.

  • OPINION

    Burning issues and great expectations

    Life, James Hein, Published on 19/12/2018

    » Another year almost gone, another year of IT improvements, advancements and lower prices. It was a year of missing graphics cards, where Bitcoin data miners snapped up the market for a while.

  • TECH

    The World Wide Web turns 30

    Life, James Hein, Published on 10/05/2023

    » The public version of the World Wide Web turned 30 recently. Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext system called Mesh. The next year he added a hypertext GUI browser and editor and called the result the WorldWideWeb. Inside CERN, people loved it and by January 1993 the world had around 50 HTTP servers. By February, the first graphic browser appeared known as Mosaic and by April of that year, CERN decided the project belonged to humanity and the public domain version of the WWW was born. The rest and billions of web pages later, is history.

  • TECH

    What would you do without internet?

    Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2023

    » India recently blocked all internet, phone and SMS access to the state of Punjab for four to five days as they search for a Sikh separatist. I had a friend who was there at the time and they told me how eerie it was to see no one on a phone for a few days. Someone would occasionally pull out the phone to see if service had returned but apart from that, there were no people talking loudly on phones in restaurants or on public transport. This impacted 27 million people, which is more than the population of Australia.

  • TECH

    Free speech and pedestrian blues

    Life, James Hein, Published on 21/12/2022

    » Let's take a look at my predictions for 2022, a mixed year for technology. How did I do? Virtual reality didn't advance as much as I'd hoped. Artificial intelligence made some incremental games including as I pointed out in an earlier article, for music producers. The Neuralink interface did improve this year, if indeed that is something you're interested in, but still not available for broad human use. I also was wrong on cryptocurrency. With the FTX exposure the private firms took a hit, but governments have started to get interested in the technology. The world is poised for a crypto explosion, but not this year.

  • TECH

    Big Brother grows bigger

    Life, James Hein, Published on 08/06/2022

    » For some time now I have been having problems with USB and my hard drive letters. Over the course of a day or three, with the exception of C:, hard drives letters would vanish. I have C, W, X and Y. C is an SSD on the motherboard with the other three normal hard drives at 10, 10 and 8 TB. The other problem I had was the computer locking up as the system was scanning for a missing USB drive, even if I ejected them using the correct process. The exception was any Samsung phone that I tried to eject without success.

  • TECH

    Prediction hits and misses for 2021

    Life, James Hein, Published on 22/12/2021

    » It is time once again to look back at 2021 to see what happened and how my predictions panned out.

  • TECH

    Always check your sources

    Life, James Hein, Published on 15/09/2021

    » At the dawning of the internet age the aim was to provide a platform to share information, initially between higher education facilities. It was a golden age of what was essentially a library of information shared across the United States and later the world. The early fact checkers were academics interested in facts, data and a robust discussion.

  • TECH

    Google triumphs over Oracle

    Life, James Hein, Published on 14/04/2021

    » - Long-time readers may remember that back in the mists of IT time, over 10 years ago, Oracle challenged Google over the use of Oracle's Java API's and some of their code in Android.

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