 | |
Contributors A-Z | Top contributors | Edit profile
Rowan Puttergill is a technology evangelist and software engineer with a long career working in enterprise environments. He brings with him the experience of being the Technical Editor at SA Computer magazine, and a career history as a technical author. He is a huge advocate of open-source technologies, and is a huge fan of debian-based linux operating systems.
The mobile wallet has been touted as the next big thing for a number of years, so you would expect that by now the App-For-That maxim would ring true for everyone with a smartphone. Oddly enough while mobile payment services still seem to be positively fetal when it comes to real world application, industry gurus swear that mobile wallet use is significantly on the rise.Back in 2009, Gartner Group predicted that the number of mobile payment users around the ...
I have a t-shirt created by Dinosaur Comics. It's a nerdy shirt with way too much text on it, but its premise is pretty cool: what would happen if you travelled back in time and you had all of the information to create the technology of today way back in the past? Of course, take the credit!Actually, when I bought this shirt, a friend and I had been discussing what we would be able to do during a technological ...
In a recent article that appeared on AllThingsD, Keval Desai argues that the web of entertainment is now surpassing the web of utility.That initially looked interesting to me. Looking back, glossy-style magazine and gossip columns have been around forever, games on the web for years, online video is pretty ubiquitous, and streaming music sites are old news. That got me wondering what amazing new forms of entertainment Desai was imagining for the web's future. Furthermore, I was intrigued by ...
The Raspberry Pi, single-board computer, has been shipping for a few months now and you're lucky if you can fit in an order. A month ago, over 20 000 boards had been sold, and suppliers are struggling to keep up with the demand. We decided to take a look around to see why the boards are proving so popular so quickly after launch.Raspberry Pi at schoolEben Upton, one of the core designers behind the board, envisioned bringing hardware back into ...
Last month, we gave you the low-down on internet prophet Mary Meeker's 2012 Internet Trends. One of the things that Meeker pointed out is that mobile traffic is growing at a tremendous rate, accounting for nearly 10% of all internet traffic. Interestingly, 3G subscriptions only account for 18% of the world's total mobile subscriptions.The enormous number of 3G subscriptions that took place in emerging markets like India and Brazil suggest that mobile is exploding in a way that very ...
A year after ICANN announced its plans to expand the TLD (Top Level Domain) namespace, we are finally able to see the application list for new TLDs. There are nearly 2 000 applications, each costing US$185 000. ICANN believes that each suffix will cost owners about US$25 000 per year to maintain and they will be required to commit to a 10-year maintenance agreement.Among the applications are many variations on a theme and conflicts over potential ownership. As a ...
IPv6 is finally rolling out onto the internet. We've been waiting for this to happen for nearly ten years now. On 6 June 2012 we celebrated World IPv6 Day. This event marked a commitment by many major ISPs, home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services. In the very long-term, this will revolutionise the internet.The number of unique addresses available under IPv6 is difficult to express in non-mathematical ...
If you haven't changed your LinkedIn password yet, it's time to do so. And for all of you who like to use the same password across all of the sites that you visit, you have a lot of password changing ahead of you.This week, a hacker in a Russian forum claimed to have hacked LinkedIn and to have obtained the password hashes for 6.5-million accounts. The hashes were posted online on a variety of sites, but have been released ...
While Facebook shares seem as volatile as anything, one is left questioning how valuable social networking really is. As the poet and philosopher George Santayana once said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I think its time that we take a good look back at how social networking has developed on the internet since the days of yore.Email, IM and the UseNetMany people think that social networking is what defines web 2.0, but in reality ...
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of the 3.4 version of the Linux kernel. While Linus notes that there have been no majorly exciting changes since the last release candidate, it's worth taking a look at some of the things that have made their way into this release of the Linux kernel and what it means to the Linux community as a whole.Perhaps some of the most prominent features and changes that appear in the kernel, are centered on ...
