At the D8 conference, via the New York Times, Apple CEO Steve Jobs muses about the future of the personal computer: Mr. Jobs also predicted that the ongoing shift in technology away from the PC and toward mobile devices will continue. But rather than disappear, the PC will become a niche product, he said. Mr. Jobs compared the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, to the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation. “All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm,” he said. Now trucks are one in 25...

02 June, 2010

In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post's Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote: Brin and Page's billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly. These innovations remain the backbone of today's search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web's first search engines, had only...

29 May, 2010

Art Ortenburger is a home-schooled teenager who can't get high-speed Internet at his home in Bonshaw, PEI, 24 km. west of Charlottetown. Ortenburger wondered how many other Islanders were beyond reach of broadband, so he crafted a set of automated computer programs to find out. His tools submit each address from the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database to Aliant’s web page. Aliant, the only provider of DSL (or telephone-based) high speed Internet on the Island, responds with one of two messages: Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…” or: Your address … does not currently qualify for...

24 May, 2010

The Boston Globe has 40 heart-wrenching photos of the Gulf oil spill. A sampling: Thirty-six more here. Hat tip: Elaine Gibson....

12 May, 2010

An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast's craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper's website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation. Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them...

12 May, 2010

Nature by Numbers, a four-minute film by Spanish graphic artist Cristóbal Vila, explores the natural world's use of Fibonacci's number, the golden ratio, the golden angle, the Delaunay Triangulation, and Voronoi Tessellations. Very cool. If you know a math teacher, send her the link. View HD version here. Hat tip: FlowingData.com....

12 May, 2010

We've read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up? Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar's apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote: It has been...

11 May, 2010

This big: [Correction appended.] Google Engineer Paul Rademacher has produced a tool that will put a shadow the size of the Gulf oil spill anyplace on earth. (You may need to install the Google Earth Browser Plugin, which Rademacher developed, in your browser.) If the spill occurred off Sambro Island near Halifax, the slick would extend from Rose Bay, Lunenburg Co., in the west, to Port Bickerton, Guysborough Co, in the east: Here's how it would look on Sable Island, where Shell Oil's Uniacke G-72 gas well blew out for 13 days in 1984: Here it is on George's (!) Bank, where Canada...

09 May, 2010

Matt McKeon turned the Electronic Freedom Foundation's chronology of eroding Facebook privacy settings into an interactive graphic showing how much of your FB data is visible, by default, to various categories of Internet users, by year. You can get a sense of the problem from these screenshots, but the details emerge best in McKeon's website. Still plotting my escape. Hat tip: Flowing data....

08 May, 2010
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