The news around the Internet today is that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, passed away over the weekend. I think it’s a mark of his impact that it might not be readily apparent exactly how important Ritchie was to our modern technology world. The fact of the [...]
Any of our long-time readers/listeners can tell you I’m a HUGE fan of offshore windfarms. I think they flat out just make the most sense for sustainable energy production. Apparently Google agrees with me. Google is funding a windfarm that is supposed to stretch from New Jersey to Virginia and generate enough power to light [...]
This is a great example of a rudimentary, but effective, UI for navigation. We played around a little with some heads-up devices back in the day, but we never had access to the good stuff (a la movie magic) so it never seemed appropriate. Fast forward a decade and wearable doesn’t have to mean a [...]
Anyone who talks to me about energy will quickly learn I’m a HUGE fan of offshore wind energy. So this news item in the New York Times caught my eye pretty quick – regulators have approved the US’s first offshore windfarm. As the opponents point out in the article, this is just one of several [...]
A couple of days ago, Tim O’Reilly published an interesting piece entitled “The State of the Internet Operating System” I’m not going to say a whole lot about it, other than to say it touched on a lot of areas. He talked about mobile, location based services, platform integration, abstractions, and a bunch of other [...]
Ars Technica is reporting that the Obama administration has decided to ramp up the broadband stimulus money outlays into one more round instead of the planned two. The monies appear to be a different pool than what is funding the broadband mapping work, but the article is a tad unclear on that point. All in [...]
Switched online is reporting an article in the UK’s The Guardian that GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as 2010. They note that the Air Force maintains the satellite network and was supposed to launch the first replacement in 2007… which it promtly didn’t do. The satellites have been up there for up [...]
I should start by saying I’m not even going to pretend to not be biased on this issue. The community of Wilson, NC decided that they were tired of paying so much for so little with regard to broadband and cable. So what’s an industrious community who’s tired of their contractor to do? Well do [...]
For those of you who have always wanted to pilot your own giant mecha battle robot, Japanese researchers have taken another step toward the dream with the development of the Media Vehicle (site is in Japanese), which is a pod-like personal VR chamber that envelopes the user in a spherical display with no access to [...]
Last year, scientists such as Physics professor Gaurav Khanna of UMass Dartmouth and Frank Mueller, a computer science professor at NC State, made news in tech and scientific circles by creating supercomputing clusters from Sony Playstation 3s. Their clusters have the same computing power as a small supercomputer, but the cost is only around $5000, [...]
