Star Trek, along with other science fiction futures, has given us many things, apart from a vision of humanity that is hopefully a little better than we prove to be, but also a taste of what technology can be like when it is integrated so fully into people’s lives that it’s nearly taken for granted.
The [...]
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every [...]
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Charles Fishman has a wonderful article on a aircraft engine manufacture plant in Durham, NC. There are a lot of interesting lessons in here about teamwork, motivation, and work that make it a highly recommended read.
I’m supposed to be packing up the house and instead just read that.
Update:Jon supplied a link to a Joel [...]
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In the future, when you have your first humanoid robot servant and you decide to have some fun with it, and you tell it to do something stupid and arbitrary like go stand in the corner for no reason, put itself in embarrassing poses, or anything generally “abusive”, will you feel bad afterwards? Should you? [...]
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I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this morning. It took about 45 minutes, two reboots, and afterward I had no problems. It never showed up in Windows Update for me so I used the standalone installer (linked to above), fully prepared to reinstall some drivers. But afterwards, no drivers seemed to have any problems–Device [...]
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Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too!
Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will ever [...]
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My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, “Have you heard of this? what do you think?” I think she wants one.
I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other than [...]
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Power. Electricity. The Holy Grail of modern technology.
I say this because the information revolution completely depends on electricity, whether it’s batteries, hybrid motors, or the grid. Everything we do depends on converting some naturally occurring resource into power to drive our lives.
I was thinking about power recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The [...]
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Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html]
Ok. it’s ugly, but notice [...]
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Do an experiment: keep Task Manager or any other CPU activity monitoring program up on your screen for a few hour or days, glancing at it every so often. Do you see it EVER above zero (other than momentary spikes)?
Here’s mine, from a Google sidebar gadget:
I’ve got a Dual Core and 2GB RAM. Currently I [...]
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