matt stapleton

As successful as the large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are, the majority of their members are from the US (and to a somewhat lesser extent, other English-speaking countries).

Facebook has well over 100 million members. To give some perspective, the population of the US is roughly 300 million, the global population is around 7 billion. That leaves enormous room for growth internationally, but also raises a few questions.

Earlier today, I ran into an issue with a web host for another site I maintain. They had the register_globals variable set to "on". This isn't a problem per se, but it can be a security risk. I like to have it enabled, particularly for apps I haven't written, to avoid taking unnecessary risks with potentially badly written code. (Joomla! likes to see the variable set to "off" as well).

So, after trying to add to add the line:

php_flag register_globals 0

to my .htaccess file, I get rewarded with an Internal Server Error 500 message.

Organization, structure, discipline and habit – these often seen as threats to creativity. Not to mention corporate-sounding phrases such as ‘time management’ or ‘workflow’. But examine the life of any great artist and you will find evidence of hard work, discipline and a hard-won knowledge of the rules and conventions of their medium.

Swiss citizens recently cast their parliamentary election votes, which were transmitted using quantum cryptology, a method of encoding and decoding data using photons. Could this technology lead to more reliable voting results?

How Quantum Cryptology Works

Interested in becoming an Indie game developer?  This article gives some great advice on how to get started at becoming a game developer or producer. GameProducer.Net » So You Want to Be an Indie Developer?

Great article on various web 2.0 resources that are useful to entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes.  read more | digg story

For years, Google's link: command has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings -- which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new ... read more | digg story

These still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to go. The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway. They await a solution to the famous "last mile" problem: extending affordable broadband service to each person's doorstep.  

According to Forrester Research, user-generated content (UGC) is being created by approximately one-quarter of online consumers. Are you tapping into the massive power of 2.0 users?  read more | digg story

The world's most ubiquitous operating system was not always so. The evolution of Windows was often uncertain and precarious. Its success was symbiotic with advancements in processor speed and memory capacity, and Microsoft relied heavily on third-party software to bridge the gap between concept and consumer.  read more | digg story

Comprehensive list of every major - and some minor - programming languages that have developed from 1954 to today, starting with Fortran. read more | digg story

Find podcasts that actually make you smarter (yes, really) over at Open Culture, a site that scours the Web for cultural and educational media.read more | digg story

[from digg] No, it's not going away. Just days into the 110th Congress, Democrats reintroduced net neutrality legislation that had gone nowhere when they and a Republican colleague proposed it last May. The move came less than two weeks after AT&T's promise to observe net neutrality for 2 years, as a condition for gaining FCC approval for an acquisition.read more | digg story

[from digg] People often ask me what drew me to the world of social news. This is a question that has more possible answers now than when I started using Digg. Some of the answers also provide insights as to why it is so hard to stop participating in social news once you’ve started... read more | digg story