Author: RB

Tomorrow’s technology today

Check this about Sharp Labs from EE Times:

Camas, Wash. – Sharp Laboratories of America aims to turn your TV into a Web-surfing, news-gathering, sports-summarizing, on-demand movie viewing, e-mail center. As the beachhead for U.S. imports from Japan’s $20 billion Sharp Corp., Sharp Labs also has designs on your cell phone, video recorder, document-imaging system and more.

“We are charged primarily with researching technologies that Sharp Corp. can develop into products for the U.S. market,” said Sharp Labs’ founder and director, Jon Clemens. “For instance, Sharp had the first camera-enabled mobile phone, and by 2005 we will be producing only LCTVs [liquid-crystal-display televisions], no more CRTs.”

Interesting place, if I say so myself.

California recovering

Despite a housing bubble, UCLA economists expect California to grow in 2005:

Yet the fallout from the bubble in California won’t be devastating, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Indeed, the Golden State’s economy will expand at a faster clip than the nation’s in 2005, thanks in part to a recovering Bay Area, the widely watched forecast says.

All in all, next year is shaping up as “solid but not spectacular” for California, said Christopher Thornberg, a UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist and author of its state outlook.

Welcome back.

The End of an Era

So it’s official, IBM is getting out of the PC business:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) — Lenovo Group Ltd. will buy IBM’s personal computing business in a $1.75 billion deal, creating what the companies said Tuesday night will be the No. 3 PC maker worldwide.

I thought this day would never come. The IBM PC, from its inception in 1981, had the most dramatic effect on the computer industry in general and my career in particular of any technology or event of the last 30 years. Before the PC, I was a system programmer at Texas Instruments developing operating systems and protocols for closed, proprietary systems, systems that were full of fun and complexity with multi-tasking, real-time priorities, virtual memory, and interprocess communications. The PC, with its deficient operating system and marginal hardware, put an end to that sort of system, bringing about a massive shift to bare-metal programming, a retarded CPU architecture, a return to proprietary communication protocols, and assembly language instead of block-structured high-level languages.

As the virus spread, it gradually overcame its origins and evolved into a lower-cost version of the kind of systems I used to work on, only without my having access to the system code so I could simply change it if I didn’t like the way it worked until Linux came along.

But now IBM has decided the whole experiment wasn’t such a hot idea. Presumably, they’re still in the server business as well as services and consulting, so the more things change the more they remain the same. Sorta.

Scientific Method Man

Gordon Rugg has devised a simple method of solving scientific problems currently thought to be intractable, such as Alzheimers. Here’s how it works:

The verifier method boils down to seven steps: 1) amass knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading; 2) determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field; 3) look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research; 4) analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms; 5) check for classic mistakes using human-error tools; 6) follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions; 7) suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

On its face it seems reasonable, so much so that it’s more or less exactly what many of us do already in the search for unique intellectual property.

Disruptive technology

Take a cheap WiFi router and add some mesh networking software, and before you know it he Telcos are obsolete. Read Cringely’s theory about how it will unfold:

A disruptive technology is any new gizmo that puts an end to the good life for technologies that preceded it. Personal computers were disruptive, toppling mainframes from their throne. Yes, mainframe computers are still being sold, but IBM today sells about $4 billion worth of them per year compared to more than three times that amount a decade ago. Take inflation into account, and mainframe sales look even worse. Cellular telephones are a disruptive technology, putting a serious hurt on the 125 year-old hard-wired phone system. For the first time in telephone history, the U.S. is each year using fewer telephone numbers than it did the year before as people scrap their fixed phones for mobile ones and give up their fax lines in favor of Internet file attachments. Ah yes, the Internet is itself a disruptive technology, and where we’ll see the WRT54G and its brethren shortly begin to have startling impact.

RTWT for the theory, which sounds crazy, but who really knows?

Return of Robopundit

I’m playing around with a GPL package called “zFeeder”, which does RSS aggregation and formatting in Javascript – it’s on the left-hand side. Functionally, it’s similar to the Robopundit tool I had on this blog a couple of years ago before RSS was all the rage and stuff. The old Robo was a major kludge, relying on a program running on a personal server and a service on a community college server in W. Va. that’s now been discontinued. the zFeeder thing is php that refreshes in real-time.

It has some quirks I don’t much care for, but I’m still learning how to use it and stuff. The installation was a snap, just one line in the MT template after the files were uploaded to the host of my choice. Someday all Blogware will have this function built-in, but for now we have php.

It’s cool enough.