October 2, 2008 – 03:07 pm
From Slate’s Obama vs. McCain on media policy: “Both campaigns have ‘tech plans’ that include plenty of feel-good generalities. But behind them lie fundamental differences between the candidates and a rift between their main advisers. The essential difference lies in the view each candidate takes toward private power over the public media. McCain and his [...]
August 4, 2008 – 11:25 am
From the NY Times’s McCain, the Analog Candidate: “The serious question — and one that has occupied many of the blogs and discussion groups that Mr. McCain does not partake of — is whether the computing habits of the presumptive Republican nominee should have any bearing at all on his fitness to be commander in [...]
From the Guardian’s Climate risk from flat-screen TVs: “The rising demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world’s largest coal-fired power stations, a leading environmental scientist warned yesterday. Manufacturers use a greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride to make the televisions, and…as a driver of global warming, nitrogen trifluoride [...]
From JSharkey’s Android Scan: “Scan is an Android application that finds pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode…Just point your phone at a barcode and scan it.” What happens next is pretty damn cool, but the game changer aspect is that it shows you the price of the item as sold by various virtual [...]
September 25, 2007 – 10:15 am
From NY Times’ article, Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free: “One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The [...]
March 25, 2007 – 01:19 pm
From Call Me, Ishmael: “Lately I’ve come around…to the realization that cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call “real life†(though I’m still to come to a final verdict on that), are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story. [...]
March 19, 2007 – 02:43 pm
From One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones: “Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these [...]
April 11, 2006 – 12:13 pm
In their article, This Boring Headline Is Written for Google, the NY Times takes a look at the effect of search-engine optimization techniques on the task of creating news headlines. It’s a kind of “what has technology taken from us now?” story, but it is also pretty balanced. One professor they interviewed said, “Newspaper headlines [...]
You know the way a cordless phone will start beeping when its battery is close to dying? Imagine what life would be like if, when you were close to dying, something inside you started beeping. You’d be in the middle of a sentence, talking to your wife or husband or friend or kid, and all [...]
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