Every so often, I’ll get a little pissed off and start wondering aloud, “where the hell are my talking computers?” Seriously, though – it’s 2008. Ten years ago, we were sure that by now, speech recognition would have surpassed the keyboard as the primary means of input. Hell, we’ve been predicting it for so long,… Continue reading Speech Recognition and Artificial Intelligence
Online Backup with Mozy
It’s a classic tale – a computer person who knows better, knows he (or she) should have a backup, but doesn’t. The results are often quite tragic. Until recently, I was one of those people. I knew I needed a backup system, but I just didn’t get around to making one. And really, without a… Continue reading Online Backup with Mozy
On Copyrights, Patents, and the Constitution
Techdirt: On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents: This short series of posts starts out really well – by quoting (of all people) Thomas Jefferson: “Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of… Continue reading On Copyrights, Patents, and the Constitution
Perceived Performance
Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance A brilliant post, one that points out something that we (as programmers) often miss. I mean, seriously, of course we’d measure performance objectively – but our users don’t see it that way. And as an aside, I always wondered why the file copy in Vista seemed so slow, and… Continue reading Perceived Performance
Focus… Focus!
I’ve been fiddling around with my camera again lately, and my feature-of-fiddling has been aperture, as it relates to the focus of the camera. Like a lot of people who get into photography (or so I assume), it’s a little mind-bending at first with all the terms… focal length, depth of field, f-stops, aperture, etc.… Continue reading Focus… Focus!