Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you. Which makes today the 20th …
Category Archives: Living in the Future
Notes from the Home Office: 2011-06-08
Some of you may be aware that I have now taken one more step into the realm of Living In the Future. I now work almost entirely out of my home, even though my official home office is in San Francisco. Even better, I’m telecommuting full-time while working for a company that builds solar power plants! …
“Keyboard? How Quaint!”…well, maybe not?
I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon. The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert …
iPad: The Other Side of the Coin
Since my friend Richard was kind enough to refer people my way before writing his well-thought out refutation of my iPad/Star Trek article, it’s only fair that I refer you back to said refutation.
Followup: iPad: The Star Trek Use Case
[Original article] Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…
iPad: The Star Trek Use Case
Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD. Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world …
Google Buzz First Impressions
For those of you who have been living in a Google-proof shelter this week, Google introduced its latest toy, Buzz, this week. Superficially, Buzz operates a lot like Twitter, or like Facebook’s status page, in that you’re encouraged to share your fleeting thoughts with your crowd. However, in my opinion, it so far has several …
Whatever Happened to Y2K
Today on Twitter there’s a tag-meme, #10yearsago. It’s not all that unexpected, given that we’re coming up on another round-number year, but it has special significance to many, because, of course, in 2000, there was a chance that we were facing the End of the World as we Knew It™. We were wrong, of course, …