university of missouri Archives - The Silicon Underground

Yes, an ethical journalist protects his/her sources

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 11:00:25 +0000

An anonymous reader asked why journalists protect their sources. It’s a fair question but an easy one to answer. Part of a journalist’s role in society is accountability. When something is wrong, the journalist is supposed to raise awareness. In

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Phil Kerpen, net neutrality, and socialism: A post-mortem

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 11:00:45 +0000

I learned the hard way a few weeks ago how net neutrality can be equated with socialism, an argument that puzzles people who work on computer networks for a living and see networking as a big flow of electrons. I

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The legend of Mt. Fuji

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:00:26 +0000

Twenty years ago, I was a promising young–and very unseasoned–columnist for a student newspaper at the University of Missouri–home of the Tigers–called The Maneater. Get it? Tiger? Maneater? Actually, healthy tigers never resort to eating humans, but legend has it

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Why I set work aside for a while before calling it done

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 11:00:18 +0000

A former supervisor called me the other day. He’s having quality control issues at his new gig, and quality control was one of the things I did when I was working for him. He wanted my insight. And he was

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“Why do we have a server named ‘Vicious?'”

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:00:21 +0000

My first non-food service, non-retail job was working desktop support for my college, the University of Missouri-Columbia. They were doing a massive computer upgrade and needed some part-time help. When they realized they’d found a journalism student who knew PC

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The trouble with bringing your own software

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:00:51 +0000

PC Magazine is advocating a bring your own laptop, with your own software approach to business. It likens it to mechanics who bring their own tools. The trouble is that while mechanical tools in a toolbox operate autonomously and don’t

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Advice on avoiding college debt–at least for Missouri residents

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:26:51 +0000

The business section of the Post-Dispatch had a good article on avoiding college debt. It’s tricky, as even Mizzou costs $22,000 a year now. I’m pretty sure when I was a Tiger, it was more like $10,000 a year, though

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There’s plenty of credit for the Internet to go around

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 12:13:28 +0000

There’s a crazy rumor going around saying that the government didn’t do much of anything to create the Internet, and that private industry did it all. I remember the Internet before the private sector got involved in it. I was

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Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson needed to explain himself

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:42:53 +0000

I understand Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s predicament. I don’t agree with how he handled it. You see, both Scott Thompson and I work in the technical industry, and neither of us have a degree in computer science, computer engineering, some

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Happy late birthday, OS/2

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:45:33 +0000

Twenty-five years ago this month, on April 2, IBM announced its new PS/2 computers and a new multitasking operating system to run on (most of) them–OS/2. They even lured a bunch of the actors from M*A*S*H to do an ad

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