Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We try to relearn this again: people have to use technology in some “smart” way. Money goes to big data projects, but not much comes back. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, it was with fill-in-the-blank-with-one-of-those-new-technologies-that-was-going-to-change-the-world-by-itself. People use technology. Well, sometimes we use it, and sometimes we use it in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Tech companies use photo recognition algorithms to learn about you. They sell this information to advertisers, and the rest is history. It is with humble apologies to the professors who ushered me into research in computer vision and image processing that I present this post. Google and others are constantly improving their […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The application of augment reality glasses remains the same as it always has been. The trouble is that application isn’t fashionable or cool. Google Glass is up and down these days. I can’t follow the story, so I don’t know if it is dead or reborn or something. The application of augmented […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Can we stop the silliness surrounding drones and come back to reality? This recent story decries coming regulations that may require a pilot’s license to fly a drone. Let’s repeat a bit of reality: Today’s drones are not autonomous flying robots are remote-controlled (RC) flying vehicles For decades, hobbyists have flow RC […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Today’s smartphone bears a striking resemblance to yesterday’s transistor radio. Okay, yell at me. I will wait. Now that you’ve screamed your lungs out, let’s compare today’s smartphone to yesterdays transistor radio. In case you are young(er) and don’t know what a transistor radio is, see this page. Attributes that the smartphone […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yet again, we have a less expensive way to broadcast live to the entire world. Recently, GoPro (makers of those neat little action cams) announced that if you wince just right and combine GoPro with LiveStream with a smartphone with the Internet with some imagination…you can show the world what your GoPro […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Google, Adobe, Chromebooks, and Creative Cloud take us yet again forward to a day long ago. Google and Adobe have just announced that we can run Adobe’s Creative Cloud on a Chromebook. Wow. I am not trying to be flippant. This is a big deal. You buy a $200 or $100 Chromebook […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most of today’s “computers” are nothing but I/O devices to the cloud. Persons like me who use a computer that is in front of us are rare and disappearing. Here is a little, historical lesson on computing. A computer has three basic parts: processor memory input/output (I/O) That’s it folks. Nothing else. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Back in the 1970s, we wished for useful things built into the bodies of our calculators. Today, some of us old persons wish for the same in the bodies of our smartphones. I was looking at the back of my smartphone. I remember the back of my big Texas Instruments calculator from […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems the last time the title question was asked was when two dinosaurs were chatting while sinking into a tar pit. I didn’t know the answer to the title question for any of the computers that I use everyday. At one time, not too long ago, that was the preeminent question […]

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