The technology industry is one of the most important industries in the world. Technology is what pushes human evolution forward. While there are other important industries, like the food industry, it is technology which provides them with tools to function and advance. It is no surprise that the world of technology is filled with idealists, people who have a particular vision of how things should be, and want to change the world to meet this vision. The rapidity of technological evolution swiftly introduces new challenges to our existing ideas about Read More

Every new decade experiences more change than the previous one. Quite a bit happened between 2001 and 2011 and a lot more can be expected between 2011 and 2021. Some of what I’m about to present are actually likely to be quite conservative “predictions” as they are based on trends that are already well under way or have enormous potential that we are very unlikely to pass up, controversy and conflicts that may occur over them notwithstanding. 1. Predominantly Mobile Computing (or the “Post PC” era) There has been a Read More

Optical Drives As far as optical media such as DVDs and CDs go we seem to have entered at least the beginnings of a phase out stage that previously befallen the floppy disk. I would actually argue that this was in effect for a while now, but it was a silent trend. Nobody really seemed to have talked about it until Apple shipped a greatly popular MacBook Air, and the rest of the industry followed with a horde of ultrabooks, most notable for their thinness, lightness, use of flash storage, Read More

For some time I’ve been of opinion that in the future it will not only be music, movies, books, images and software that will be essentially costless to copy, but real physical objects as well. I typically envision something akin to replicators that can be seen in science fiction worlds like Star Trek, using nano assemblers to assemble things on a molecular level. All you need is a raw material, which can theoretically be anything that the assemblers can conveniently extract necessary atoms from, and energy. While nanotechnology is advancing Read More

Human beings have many aces up their sleeves compared to other living species on Earth. In terms of our physical properties we seem to strike just the right balance of capabilities. Our weaknesses are typically compensated for by certain advantages in a very smooth and complementary manner. We are an evolutionary proof that the strongest, fastest or biggest aren’t necessarily the best. We’re neither the strongest, nor the fastest, nor the biggest, yet we manage to accomplish more than any other species on the planet. It could be said that Read More

I’m going to do the unthinkable. I am going to actually defend the practice that many consider “anti-competitive”, the practice of so called “vendor lock-in” often employed by technology companies such as Apple and Microsoft. In a nutshell the practice of lock-in involves building pieces of technology that work only in certain predefined circumstances and interoperates with only a selection of other technology. A typical example are proprietary file formats which are designed to work only with the software sold by the same company that created the file format. The Read More

The US Government on Friday nonchalantly shut down the entire multi-million dollar business, arrested its founder, and expropriated millions of dollars worth of property. The business in question wasn’t even located in the US, but in New Zealand. MegaUpload was, of course, accused of piracy, but whatever the charge this is a clear cut case of administering punishment before trial, or being assumed “guilty until proven innocent”. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that this government would be doing such a thing at a time when indefinite detainment of even Read More

There is a house in my neighborhood whose roof is completely covered by solar panels, and is owned by someone who is apparently selling them. Just yesterday I noticed they brought up a huge new surface in their yard covered with solar panels, as if trying to tell the passerby’s (of which there are many) that the time for solar energy has come. There are more than a few good arguments for making solar energy the primary new energy source. The sun is a fundamental source of energy in our Read More

There’s a whole slew of new memory technologies coming up, all of which could be on the market within just three years, and all of which promise tremendous improvements in speed, capacity, and power efficiency. Those of us tech savvy enough to at least know we have DDR3 memory in our machines might expect DDR4 to be the next generation of memory, running at even greater speeds, and perhaps supporting even greater capacities. But as it turns out DDR4 is just one of the runner ups for the future of Read More

How quickly do things change when it comes to HP this year. Just earlier this year they were talking about emulating Apple’s strategy of end-to-end control of both software and hardware where webOS would be HP’s equivalent of iOS. Fast forward to now and under the guidance of the new CEO they are giving it up to the open source community, hoping other device makers pick it up and use it. The reaction of the technology press has varied from proclaiming this as the beginning of the end for webOS Read More