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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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Category Archives: Commentary
Why Apple Owns the Mp3 Player Market
Last Wednesday, Apple made several announcement regarding their iPod line of products. The announcement ran from new Shuffle colors, all the way to the iPod Touch. At the end of the event, Steve Jobs (Apple’s CEO) made a surprise announcement. He dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone which had been sitting at $599 since its launch, to $399. That is a two hundred dollar price drop for those that are like me and bad at math. This incredibly strategic move by Apple shows why they are an industry leader and remain so when it comes the mp3 player market. Continue reading
Posted in Commentary, Technology
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Christians Versus Harry Potter
It seems Christians (whom I would consider “my people”) are still tackling the Harry Potter issue with every movie and book release. Fortunately they have run out of books to complain about but we still have two more movies to get through and we can expect that Christians are going to continue to complain about them. Continue reading
Posted in Books, Commentary, Movies
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Office Politics & Employee Relations
By the end of the day Friday I will have left my current employer and will have begun working for another company. I am leaving the steady world of real estate technology for the consulting world. Thanks to a good friend of mine I will now be allowed to play with other technologies, learn Business Intelligence (that new buzz word that’s going around), and improve my programming skills.
To say it is not a sad thing that I am leaving my current employer is an understatement. I have spent the last better part of 7 years (minus a forced 9 month sabbatical) of my professional career where I am at. That means something to me. However, I am not doing what I want to do and the pay is not as good as it could be. And there in lies the problem. Continue reading
Posted in Commentary
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Geeks: A Social Conundrum
Last Wednesday evening, I did something that I do not do very often. That thing I did was networking. I do not mean networking in the cabling and internet kind of way but rather the networking of a more personal nature where one talks to people, pretends (if necessary) to have an interest in what that person does and then hands them a business card in hopes that the person will contact them for one reason or another. Continue reading
Posted in Commentary
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Where Sony Went Wrong (and Right)
I seem to end up in the same debate every couple of weeks. The agrument of which video game system is the best right now is on a lot of people’s minds. With Sony and Microsoft lowering prices on their … Continue reading
Posted in Commentary
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Michael Koby 
Big Companies & Open Source
Last week, IBM announced that they would put somewhere around thirty developers on OpenOffice to help improve the product through bug fixes, new features, and collaborating with the OpenOffice team. The reason IBM says they are doing this is because they are seeing wide adoption of OpenOffice and it’s ODF (Open Document Format) by governments and companies the world over. But what makes this interesting is the fact that IBM is paying employees to work solely on an open source project, giving away features, code, and resources to a project that long term, makes them next to no money (if any at all). Big Blue seems to be doing this a lot lately. Why would a company do this? Continue reading →