According to some religious myths it is the “word of god” that created “the heaven and the earth”. Ironically, there may be some truth to the idea that “words” have so much power. There is a source code to the universe. Science is the process we use to reverse engineer it. Every new piece of the source code of the universe that we discover gives us that much more power over the universe. We can modify the source code to suit our needs and desires and build new programs to Read More

Macs are a pretty powerful platform to compute on out of the box, but there are ways you could be taking advantage of them that you don’t even know about! Do you want to pimp your mac? Check out this collection of tips and tricks for Mac users: 1. Enable “Tap to Click” Regular laptop users click a lot. Unfortunately, the Mac trackpad requires a pretty decent amount of pressure to make a click. Mac users can bypass this by enabling the “tap to click” feature in system preferences –> Read More

Facebook's alleged declaration of war on Google and the talk about the the "link" being replaced by the "like" as the new search paradigm got me thinking about search engine optimization and the future of search engines. I have to say that I never quite liked search engine optimization because it always seemed to be so much more about doing things for the robot instead of for the human. I think that providing real value to users and the overall user experience are ultimately all that matters. Everything that falls Read More

This week was marked by the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Among the biggest debuts were the motion control peripherals including PlayStation Move from Sony and Kinect for Xbox 360 from Microsoft. The race is on about which of the two technologies will perform better in practice and which will be better received in the market. Of course, neither Sony nor Microsoft were first to come up with motion control. Nintendo had this nailed since the launch of Wii with its Wii remote control in 2006. They will, however, claim to Read More

" We are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet." — Albert Einstein Wired on Tuesday ran an article called "Wireless Oligopoly Is Smother of Invention" pointing out how restrictive of choice the current carrier oligopoly in the US is. Ryan Singel does an excellent job in contrasting the wireless industry with the TV and Internet service provision industry to illustrate just how closed and restrictive the wireless carriers are. I can vouch that this is not the case only in the USA, but to at least Read More

For the last few years we’ve been hearing that cloud computing is the future. Last year I’ve argued that it is already the present, and Apple just further cemented that fact with its iCloud announcement. Apple is making iCloud services available across all of their devices so data created with and stored on one device can immediately become accessible on all the others. This is precisely what represents the biggest draw of cloud computing and where all of its benefits come from, namely effective automatization of data management and access, Read More

Our lives are increasingly a blend of real and virtual. We do much of our communication, socializing, shopping, work and entertainment in what is essentially a virtual world. What makes what we see and hear from this virtual world meaningful and relevant is that it represents something in the real world. Sometimes those are real people or real objects, but other times it includes things that are less tangible such as experiences, emotions, or just knowledge or information. How do we define the difference between what is virtual and what Read More

Reading about Nvidia’s VP claiming that Moore’s Law is dead got me thinking about what this means for the expected exponential growth of technological evolution. Apparently Gordon Moore himself said that his law is dead. Elsewhere then I also read an argument about the development of particular technologies following an S curve whereas the uptake of a brand new technology feeds its accelerating improvements until the saturation point at which there is no longer sufficient demand to sustain the acceleration, and the growth begins to level off until a new Read More

In an incredibly thought provoking article in the National Post, the future – that could be – of computers was revealed, as envisioned in a conference at Toronto, on the third wave of computing. And that future is where everything will be a computer. Computers, in the future, will be “pervasive”, used for all sorts of things. For example, you are comfortably in the bed upstairs and forgot to turn the dish washer on downstairs. That’s fine. Using your cell phone, you can turn the dish washer on. Or, while Read More

We may be coming to a point when Internet may be considered a “public good” and a “natural monopoly” for government to regulate and administer. This comes from what appears to be a long established mentality which already treats certain goods and services as things that can only be provided and cared for by a government (public roads, provision of law, courts and defense etc.). We therefore have the privilege of witnessing just how does a particular good or service undergo this amazing transformation from something that previously operated in Read More