Posts with keyword: technology

11 entries

My Letter to Senator Hatch in Opposition to PIPA

Fri Jan 20 08:42:00 2012

Efforts to make copying more difficult by technical means (such as the DNS blocking provisions in PIPA and SOPA) hurt legitimate uses of technology while leaving those who would copy without permission plenty of ways to circumvent those measures.
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Productivity and The Distribution of Wealth

Sat Nov 12 14:37:00 2011

Wealth concentration is structural and computers have led to and sped it up.
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Natural Born Cyborgs

Mon Mar 29 16:38:00 2010

Years ago, I read a great book by Andy Clark called Natural Born Cyborgs. The thesis of the book is that humans are natural tool users and the current way that we use search engines, mobile phones, and other modern devices are no different. We naturally adapt our lives to using these new tools. Clark considers cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and Internet search engines as "prime, if entry-level, [examples of] cyborg technology". He says "the mind is just less and less in the head." In fact I regularly called my laptop my "exocortext." For a look at how far
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Batteries in Your Clothes

Wed Oct 10 14:39:00 2007

This story about using nanotechnology to create wearable batteries puts last weeks story about a man's iPod battery catching his pants on fire in a whole new light.
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Harvesting Underwater Logs

Thu Feb 15 15:42:00 2007

I was fascinated by the Wired article on using submersible robots to harvest underwater forests (and there's a lot of wood underwater, as it turns out).
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April CTO Breakfast Report

Fri Apr 28 09:47:00 2006

Today we did something different at the CTO breakfast and brought a projector for 5 minute lightening demos. Nathan Conger from Novell went first and showed the new SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop. We saw Beta 10. This is available from OpenSUSE.org. Nice integrated wireless network management. Virtual desktops are a rotating cube. Windows warp when you drag them. Windows can live "on the corner" of the cube. An official DVD player will ship with the final version. Window transparency built-in. Expose-like behavior. All-in-all, pretty flashy. Support for Visual Basic macros in OpenOffice. Windows users now have to envy SUSE
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IT Conversations Is Branching Out

Tue Jan 10 06:44:00 2006

My favorite podcast network, IT Conversations, is growing up and becoming The Conversations Network (TCN). IT Conversations will be one of, eventually, many channels in TCN. Doug Kaye discusses the logic behind this move and it's implications on his blog. Good luck to Doug on this new move--his efforts to build IT Conversations have changed how I get information and enriched my life. I'm grateful.
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Tech State or State Tech?

Fri Dec 16 08:35:00 2005

John Palfrey, Executive Director of Harvard's Berkman Center, made some remarks a few days ago on the proper role of government with respect to open standards. He did so in the context of Microsoft trying to use the Massachusetts Legislature to do an end run around the Massachusetts CIO on the issue of adopting open standards. John talks about the proper role of Government in this struggle: That job is not to choose between competing technology vendors, circa 2005, in a fast-changing marketplace. The elephant in the room is the struggle between Microsoft on the one hand and IBM
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Approaching Omniscience

Fri Nov 11 09:53:00 2005

I attended Paul Allen's keynote at eBusiness Day. He spoke on "Approaching Omniscience." Paul gave an amazing talk and I wrote it all up in a blog post but then a errant click killed the page where I was writing. Argh! Paul started with a quote from Robert Browning: "Grow old with me; The best is yet to be." This aptly reflects Paul's natural optimism. He ended by saying that we are empowered like no other generation to lift the poor and help people and giving suggestions about how people can change their lives and do that.
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CTO Breakfast Report

Fri Oct 28 11:39:00 2005

I really enjoyed this morning's CTO breakfast a lot. At the suggestion of some attendees, I tried to moderate it a little and keep it more focused on new and interesting technology. Here are some of the things we talked about: Riya is a new photo sharing service that includes face recognition. You can identify people by selecting their face and typing in something (name, keyword, etc.) The service then will identify that same face using that keyword in any other photos you've uploaded. Very cool. There are some obvious privacy concerns... Right now, it's invitation only and I'd
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October's CTO Breakfast

Fri Oct 21 07:57:00 2005

Next Friday at 8am we'll get together for October's CTO Breakfast. I'll just be getting back from two days at the Internet Identity Workshop, so I'm sure I'll be fired up about that. I've also had several people lately ask about building quality assurance organizations and their role in software development, so I thought that would be a good thing to discuss with the group. I'd love to know what people are doing now and think they ought to be doing. Of course, any technology-related topics you're interested in are welcome as well. As usual, we'll be holding the
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