She was born in Pakistan, and quickly became a computer programming prodigy.

At age 9, she became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional.

At age 10, she made a recording that included her philosophy of life:

“If you want to do something big in your life, you must remember that shyness is only the mind,” she said. “If you think shy, you act shy. If you think confident you act confident. Therefore never let shyness conquer your mind.”

That same year, she [more...]

Despite the nearly always negative connotations that are propagated by popular media, the term “hacker” can be used to describe people who do positive, as well as negative, things with technology.

In fact, for all of our protection, it’s becoming more and more important for friendly governments to train groups of “white hat” hackers, to protect us from an ever-increasing number of (often-unfriendly-government-trained) [more...]

Many years ago, Web pages were static.

Words and images.

And hyperlinks.

Simple displays of information.

Then someone thought, [more...]

There were a few years, 15-20 years ago, when a well-educated IT professional with some work experience could practically name their own price, and employers were happy to pay it.

I know, because I was one of those who named my own price.

But, before too long, everyone and their brother [more...]

It seems that less-than-fully-competent people always look for others to blame for their incompetence.

And, nowadays, computers are ubiquitous enough — and not very clearly understood by very many people — that they are a convenient target for that blame.

You’ve probably experienced it, probably as many times as I have: [more...]

Linux kernel 2.6.36 reportedly contains nearly 13.5 million lines of code.

That much code leaves a lot of opportunity for errors and omissions — and probably a lot of room for improvement.

But the nature of open-source software [more...]

In the early 1980s, while working on my B.S. in Visual Communications Technology, I worked at a PBS affiliate for more than three years.

Along with mastering all of the live production positions from lighting to floor director to camera person to telecine to audio to chyron operator to switcher, I directed hundreds of live TV shows and did post-production editing and other tasks on [more...]

I’ve been using personal computers since 1979.

So I’ve either seen or personally witnessed nearly all of personal computing’s history.

Probably the biggest influence in all of personal computing has [more...]