Tech

Teach Yourself Java 8 in 24 Hours

I'm working on author review today for the Java 8 edition of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours. This is the phase of the project near the finish line where I get all the chapters back as edited Word documents, review the changes recommended by editors and answer any questions they have. I also give each chapter a quick read and make sure the code compiles. (I hate it when a computer book has code that doesn't compile.) One of the things I like about writing a 24 Hours book is that my ... (read more)

2014/03/14

When Men Defend a Sexual Harasser

The techblogger Dave Winer has a piece up on Scripting News defending Bora Zivkovic, a prominent science blogger at Scientific American and conference organizer who appears to be a serial sexual harasser of younger women he meets in a professional capacity. In recent days three women have come forward with first-hand accounts of how Zivkovic treated them: Monica Byrne, Hannah Waters and Kathleen Raven. They allege that he had a skeevy habit of steering conversations to sexual subjects without ... (read more)

2013/10/22

Tech Journalist Quits the Internet

Paul Miller, a blogger who covers tech for The Verge, is quitting the Internet for a year. He'll continue to file stories for the site by pioneering a revolutionary new technique in online journalism: Calling people on the phone. Here's how Miller imagines the phone-driven journalism process working: "I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of ... (read more)

2012/05/02

Full Disclosure: TechCrunch is Screwed

"We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch." -- AOL chief executive officer Tim Armstrong Around five years ago, Microsoft fueled a controversy by giving $4,000 Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop computers running Windows Vista Ultimate to some popular tech bloggers. A lot of bloggers -- particularly those who did not receive incredibly overpriced luxury branded laptops -- raised such a ruckus that Microsoft eventually asked for them back. Bloggers who ... (read more)

2011/09/06

Matt Haughey on Running a 'Lifestyle Business'

There's a great interview in Willamette Week about my friend Matt Haughey, who has turned MetaFilter into a successful small business that employs around 3-5 people and gets 25 million hits a month. Haughey, who was one of the founders of Blogger, left Silicon Valley for McMinnville, Ore., several years ago. The interviewer does a nice job of picking up on the phrase "lifestyle business," which is used in the dot-com world to insult startups that make a sustainable amount of money for their ... (read more)

2011/07/15

Huffington Post is a Content Cesspool

A lot of the commentary about AOL's purchase of Huffington Post is coming from people who don't appear to have ever visited the site. Huffington Post is not a liberal news and opinion site, though that was founder Arianna Huffington's stated goal when it began in 2005. It's a massive search engine optimized pile of junk content with a little original news and commentary sprinkled in -- and most of that was written for free with no editorial oversight or quality control. On Saturday, an unnamed ... (read more)

2011/02/09

Comics Publisher Has Lousy Rep with Freelancers

The small comic book publisher Bluewater Productions keeps getting an enormous amount of mainstream media attention for publishing cheezy comics about celebrities and other public figures, like its upcoming biographical book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg: Bluewater Productions Inc. is doing a "giant-sized" 48-page bio-comic that will explore the question, "Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?" The company said it had good success with comics like its "Female Force" series featuring women ... (read more)

2010/09/28

Former Sun CEO: Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Suit

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words. Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents: In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the ... (read more)

2010/03/09

Gawker Takes Shots at Company's Early Skeptics

In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money: ... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business: Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is ... (read more)

2009/09/03

Leo Laporte is Bleeping Sick of Michael Arrington's Bleep

There was some unexpected drama this weekend when Leo Laporte, a longtime technology journalist well known for his work on TechTV, flipped out during a live Internet broadcast after his integrity was questioned by TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington. Laporte has a reputation for being genial and non-confrontational, making it all the more amusing to see him drop a bunch of F bombs and kick the entire Gillmor Gang show off the air. After Arrington apologized the two mended fences, but I'm ... (read more)

2009/06/08

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