We Support The Smarter Economy Through Rural Empowerment

We proudly sponsor this event to be held in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija on 17 February 2016 from 9:30AM to 3PM in line with our vision of a progressive country strengthened by countryside with empowered rural communities.

Please register and participate in this event. Don't miss the chance to listen to the discussions and exchange ideas and viewpoints with some of the most notable speakers and experts in the technology and its impact and contribution to our society, especially on rural empowerment and development.

We are humbled with the overwhelming support for this event also by Microsoft Philippines, Tech4Ed, MobilityIT 4 Youth, Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP), Metro Dagupan ICT Council (MDICT), ICT Office, Google Educators Group (GEG) Nueva Ecija, Animation Council of the Philippines and Yolanda's Atrium.

We look forward to sponsor and participate in more events like this that will bring the technology and opportunity awareness to our fellow Filipinos in the various provinces of the Philippines.

Beyond Open Source: The Latest on Microsoft and Apple

To further boost the competitive edge,  after Microsoft outsourced their CEO post to India, closed-door discussions are on the way to purchase Red Hat and finally roll-out the long overdue and much ballyhooed vaporware codenamed Microsoft Linux.

Meanwhile at Apple, in a bold move to dispose old Intel-based Macs in preparation for the release of A7-based systems across the board, Steve Wozniak performs cameo role as the delivery boy.

A Tale of Two Hackathons

Having graduated from a provincial university rather than an institute in the capital city, I saw and experienced first hand the difficulty of farming. Ironically, given the vast agricultural challenges and opportunities of the country, many if not most of my countrymen would rather work eight or more hours in the office than to get their hands dirty to produce food on the table, while the Filipino farmers who toil the land for more than those office hours get little to nothing for their effort; Pareto may be in hell for this.

A Brief Date with Windows 8

As a gift from my sister, I was able to buy a new laptop, and I can say I got a bargain with an HP ProBook 4445s; with nice specs and clean design, I call it my weapon of choice and am very happy with it. Depending on how you look at it, blessed or cursed, it's already installed with Windows 8.

For me it was a blessing, at least initially, since it's been some time since I last used a legitimate copy of Windows, add to that this is a brand new version, so support for new and related software is abundant. This is the first Windows version I used where I never encountered the dreaded and legendary its-a-feature-not-a-bug BSOD aka Blue Screen of Death, but it doesn't mean I never force rebooted it, there were still instances when it hangs but it was rare and the incidents were far in between. Frankly, I was starting to doubt whether free and open source platforms, like the gazillion GNU/Linux-based distributions and BSDs, will have anything worthwhile to offer when Windows 8 and its stability and performance improved.

Having no access to other legitimate proprietary software, I opted to use free and open source applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape and the like. This is where PortableApps really shine and make the use of Windows 8 pleasurable for the time being.

A Walk Through Dead Tech Lane

The computing industry has come a long way, but it seems parallel to human evolution, there's no end in sight, just continuous change for the better. Computers and their related technologies were ironically devices for the purpose of World War 2 that found more productive use in the academe and on the consumer's hands.

Even the internet as we know it was designed for the US military requirement of a network that automatically re-routes network packets when a network node was unreachable (could have been obliterated by a nuclear bomb attack, seriously this is the idea behind TCP/IP). Worse than the body count of war atrocities, there were many computer technologies that were left for dead or put aside considered obsolete but whose contribution to the advancement of our computing user experience deserve revisiting.