wallis

The Onion deletes offensive tweet about child Oscar nominee

The Onion has deleted a tweet that called 9-year-old Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis an extremely offensive name.

In its original tweet, the parody publication -- which is known for its dark humor and for regularly skewering public figures and institutions -- wrote that, "Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a c---, right?"

Normally, The Onion is known by its many fans to be joking about almost everything it publishes -- even though its satire is often seen as legitimate commentary on a wide range of issues. But in … Read more

Redecorate your desktop with Wally

Automatic wallpaper changers are a good idea in theory, but many of them don't work out too well in practice; they often hog resources, cause desktop display problems, and generally wreak havoc. But then there's Wally. This is a wallpaper changer with plenty of features and no functional problems whatsoever. It may have single-handedly brought us around to the idea of changing desktop wallpapers.

Wally appears as an icon in the System Tray, and right-clicking on it brings up a settings menu. Wally can display images that you have stored on your computer, but the really cool thing … Read more

Product management goes open source

One of the hardest parts about launching a new product is knowing what prospective customers want to buy. Sure, some companies like Apple can impose their product visions on the public, but most vendors need to fulfill pre-existing product requirements, not create new ones. For everyone but Apple open source offers a great way to perform product management.

When I was working on my juris doctorate, I signed up to be a guinea pig for Microsoft. (It's not as bad as it sounds.) The company would send people out to my house to observe me using my computer, and … Read more

Open standards aid intracompany collaboration

I spent some time with a large software company last week. In the course of our conversation, it became clear that while open standards are great for facilitating cooperation between companies, open standards can also serve another purpose entirely: improving cooperation within a single company.

Granted, this is mostly a solution for big companies; small companies struggle less to make diverse product lines work together. Even so, it's interesting to think that some forward-thinking businesses sponsor open standards to help with internal problems, not industry interoperability.

Consider Oracle (not the company in question). After years of acquisitions, the company … Read more

$24 million yacht or floating prison?

Judging by its photos, the "118 WallyPower" doesn't look like a luxury yacht. If anything, it has a post-apocalyptic design that gives it the appearance of a maximum-security prison on the high seas, kind of like a water-borne "Badonkadonk" tank we featured recently. But for those who have the means to purchase one--for $23,903,925 (be sure you have exact change)--we suppose it can look like anything they want.

And if its fortress-like exterior doesn't provide enough security, the vessel can outrun any potential perpetrators with three gas-turbine engines that pack 16,… Read more

Pendulum has swung in the open source debate

Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.

Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.

The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.

Why?… Read more