Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The number crunchers now rule the world. How did that happen? Many years ago I was a number cruncher. I did then what people still call “digital signal processing.” We took analog signals, magically made them numbers in computers via gadgets called analog-to-digital converters or A/D converters, and happily applied digital approximations […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Information is power. It can be good as well. I keep a steno spiral notebook on my workspace. I jot the date for today and everything I do today. I have done this since sometime in 1986. That is … a bunch of years. I have all the notebooks, so if you […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have more data today. Really? I don’t think so. We do have more places to put data, so we need to put something there. Right? I don’t know how many times I have read about all the new data we have today. The amount of data we have is BIG. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We move forward to the 1980s when the lawyers prevented artificial intelligence (AI) from helping us do our jobs. Note: This post is about legal maneuvers that prevent helpful AI systems. It is not about AI systems that were built poorly and mimic some human tendencies to discriminate against persons illegally. Those […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Lest we forget, we have always had more data than we could process. For some reason, we are now recording it with magnetism. I just read yet another article telling me that “data is everywhere.” Then there are the usual numbers of peta-peta-something-or-other bytes of data every second or so. Cries follow […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The weekend tends to erase all prior history. That is a bad thing in endeavors that are worth our time. Monday morning. A good weekend behind me. Okay, now what? Well, what’s interesting in the tech and culture news? Oh, look at that. I’ll spend some time exploring it. Problem: I am […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to reinvent the past as we move into the future. Remember JCL? I took an class in operating systems in 1980 (yes, I am that old). At least that was the name of the class. In reality, it was a class in what IBM called Job Control language or JCL. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A bit of history and lost opportunity. The Android operating system is 13 years old in November of 2020. Gosh. Horrible memories back to 2007 and early 2008. Senior government managers looked at the mobile landscape back then and declared: The future was the Microsoft phone and its operating system. Junior government […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The year 2020 got you down? Declare it over. Person A: I’m glad 2020 is over! Person B: Huh, we have another 6 or 8 weeks of 2020 to go. Person A: No, 2020 is over, gone. We’re in 2021 now. Person B: Huh, we, uh, what? Person A: 2020 is gone. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We review some fundamental concepts of programming and building things using any other technique. Now and then in conversations with well-learned and well-accomplished persons, I find that they lack in some of the basics I had the privilege to learn many years ago. It seems that we either forget these or never […]

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