Julian C. Dunn

Every so often I hear criticism from CBC’s audience that we choose "proprietary codecs" for the distribution of our audio and video material. The arguments usually go something along the lines of:

1. CBC is a publicly-funded organization
2. CBC shouldn’t be beholden to proprietary technologies as it limits accessibility
3. Therefore CBC should stream audio and video in completely open formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, etc.)

Nobody wants to be accused of limiting accessibility, and CBC certainly doesn’t start with a position like, "hey, we should be jerks and just lock out anyone who’s using FreeBSD/Linux/OpenSolaris/HP-UX/etc. from watching/listening to our material!" But many moving parts in the encoding and distribution ecosystem prevent us from being completely open, as I’ll explain in this article. Continue reading…

Before Clay Shirky was courting controversy by claiming that women don’t get ahead because they aren’t arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerks, he wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In this book, he performs an eloquent and well-thought-out analysis of social organization in the 21st century, leading to the unsurprising conclusion that the dramatically lower costs for self-organizing are bound to have a serious, disruptive effect on our society and the power structures that govern it. Continue reading…

My Christmas break project was to build a Hackintosh out of a Dell Mini 10v. The Mini 10v is a $299 NetBook that, I swear, is deliberately manufactured with on-board parts suitable for creating a Hackintosh.

There are tons of guides out there with conflicting instructions on how to create a Hackintosh on a Mini 10v. I’ll just share with you what worked for me, in a really brief way, because I know you’re busy and want to get working on your new Hackintosh! Continue reading…