Technology

In 1995 the physicist HvL was employee of an internal software house of a large electronics company. His speciality was the creation of scientific software. Then he got the invitation from a software strategist HdV to join the semiconductor department in order to resolve a quickly emerging problem. The costs of complex embedded software were growing exponentially and this would cause severe problems in the next future. The reasons why the costs of software generation grow exponentially are the growing size and the growing complexity of the embedded software that goes into high-tech appliances…

A story about impending U.S. legislation has hit the news in the last few days: Senator Patrick Leahy, along with ten co-sponsors that include Dianne Feinstein and my own senator, Chuck Schumer), has introduced S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (link to PDF). There’s a log of blog outcry about it, of course, and rightly so. I’m less worried about it than many, but I do think it’s a bad idea. Here’s why: First, we’re meant to be a democracy, different from the totalitarian states we group together with terms such as “Axis of Evil” and whatnot. That means that,…

In the wake of the Pepsigate scandal at Scienceblogs.com and the departure of some two dozen bloggers, a variety of companies decided to capitalize on the disarray and start their own blogging networks - PLoS started a blog network for outside contributors, as did Wired and soon Nature Publishing Group will tackle it one more time at Scientific American. Blogging is big again, though of course it always was big, it was just science that was trapped in a small market, the pitfall to having domination by one site with a sketchy reputation.    With $100 million exits for sites like…

I have a few notes on home networks, which notes come from recent experience with some network setup issues. Encryption: How to secure one’s network — or whether not to — continues to be a point of debate. I favour some of the arguments for being a “good citizen” and leaving your network open, and then making sure your computers are secure. Still, that works best if you don’t want to communicate between computers within your network, and can just wall each one off. If you do want to have them talk to each other, it’s really quite a bit of work to make sure that hackers can’t talk to them as…

It may seem like a waste of time that young people play video games for hours on end but, at least for some, it may help them in surgery one day.   A new study says reorganization of the brain's cortical network in young men with significant experience playing video games gives them an advantage not only in those games but also with other tasks requiring visuomotor skills. Researchers from the Centre for Vision Research at York University in Canada compared a group of 13 young men in their twenties,who had played video games at least four hours a week for the previous three years,…

It’s managed to stay out of the general press, mostly — probably because it’s geeky, it’s hard to explain what it really means, and it’s not likely to affect anything any time soon — but the tech press has been covering the cracking of the HDCP master key. But even PC Mag got it wrong at first, having to correct their article. To see what it does mean, it helps to back up a bit. If you have a TV made in the last few years, look at the back, where all the associated components can plug in. Especially if your TV is high-definition, you’ll have quite a mass of sockets back there. Originally,…

The Macmillan Coffee Finder is a new, free iPhone app from Macmillan Cancer Support to help people find the best cup of coffee nearest to them.   And make some new friends.  And help people in the UK with cancer.  The iPhone app has over 900 cafés and coffee shops and is part of Macmillan Cancer Support's World's Biggest Coffee Morning campaign on the 24th to encourage people to get together to have fun, make friends and raise money for to help people affected by cancer.  Key features include rating the cafés by giving them a mug rating, options to upload pictures of the…

Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW. The way it works is this: When you buy your Kindle, it’s automatically registered to your Amazon account, so ebooks that you buy there are pushed to the Kindle for you. You also get an email address at kindle.com (and also free.kindle.com), and documents you send there are sent on to your Kindle — free if they’re sent by WiFi, and…

The La Jolla, California-based company BUMP launched earlier this week with an eponymous web service that uses license plates as a means to connect with drivers around you. As reported by Technology Review and Popular Science, users can "claim" their license plates and receive messages sent to them by other drivers. For now, senders have to specify the plate number and state to send a message, but future iPhone and Droid apps will make use of image recognition, and messages can be sent by taking a picture of the recipient's license plate. While the TR article focuses mostly on how the app…

The spread of mass panic through Short Message Service (SMS) and text on phones and services like Twitter is unnecessary and people need to learn to look at information with a more critical eye.   People in general are too quick to pass on information without checking - especially if they want to believe what it says - and propagating dubious or false information can have devastating results.  Mass-panic through technology is not a new phenomenon - in 1938 the first segment of HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" was aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network and as…