Dylan Tweney

Sci fi writer David Brin looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings [http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index.html?x]through the lens of Romanticism vs. the Enlightenment, nostalgia vs. optimism. And Jakob Nielsen looks at computer tech through the lens of Harry Potter.

I’m a jaded tech journalist. It’s not often that a new Internet service can actually make me excited. But last week I discovered one that had me grinning all afternoon.

Learning to manage information effectively is the most pressing challenge facing the technology world today. (the tweney report, 2002-12-13)

I’m relocating this weblog: As of today, I’m promoting it to the home page of my web site, https://dylan.tweney.com [https://dylan.tweney.com].

You don’t have to be a software programmer to be familiar with the principle. Since the early 1970s, Moore’s Law — named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel — has been universally touted within the computing industry. The law has many variants, but the gist of it is this: Computing powe

I was watching “A Beautiful Mind” recently and was struck how much the mathematician John Nash’s schizophrenia, as portrayed in the movie, was like my online life: Ethereal voices constantly impinging on my attention, demanding responses, distracting me from the work (and people) at hand. Only in my

John Patrick (formerly of IBM) posts his predictions for the next five Big Things [http://www.patrickweb.com/weblog/categories/internetTechnology/web_services_myths.html]in computing: Autonomic computing, Blogging, Grid Computing, Web Services, and WiFi.

Two early 90’s talks by Bruce Sterling: Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge: ‘What’s information really about? It seems to me there’s something direly wrong with the “Information Economy.” It’s not about data, it’s about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Con

Where are the really good stories in magazines today? The ones that make you say to your friends: “Did you see that story about X?” Michael Shapiro examines the attenuated legacy of the New Journalism: “I had learned the essential lesson of those who wished to make magazines a career: write to form,

Game, set, and match. [1] The Inquirer: Moore’s Law meets market saturation. “Today, accountants to video heads have enough horsepower at their fingertips to keep themselves sated. Why shell out $1500 in next year’s technology for a measly 3-5% performance bump on the most bleeding-edge applications

What would happen if the Fightin’ Whities met up with Blackpeopleloveus.com? Chaos! Mayhem! Rampant irony! The Fightin’ Whites is the nickname of an intramural basketball team at the Univ. of North Colorado. They just raised $100K for Native American student scholarships from selling stuff in their

Dickens’ novel Great Expectations was published serially starting in December 1860 — a new episode appearing each week, just like The West Wing. Now, in December 2002, you can read Dickens’ Great Expectations as Victorians did — except you’ll be viewing .PDF facsimiles that look like the original ne