Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips It is difficult to measure things from a distance. That distance can by in space and it can be in time. We often attempt to measure things from a distance. We take photos of the ground from 10,000 feet up in the air. We then run through geometric calculations to determine the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A social robot is the last in a long line of attempts at building a digital assistant. Maybe we should just hire people to be personal assistants? I stumbled across this little “social robot.” It talks to you when you talk to it. It makes phone calls for you. It takes pictures […]

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by Dwayne Phillips After several recent experiences, I know a little about cloud computing. I have been experimenting in several ways recently with cloud computing. The basic sales pitch from a cloud computing provider is: We’ll buy and maintain the computers. You rent them from us. This takes us forward to the past to a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Twitter and the World Cup show that the world changed. Most people, didn’t even notice. The world changed. When I show people, they shrug. “Of course. What’s the big deal?” is the usual response. This web page has a story about how 300 million people tweeted about the FIFA World Cup. So […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Science, and just about everything else, continues to advance with the number of eyeballs on every problem. Linus Torvalds is credited with saying: Given enough eyeballs, are bugs (problems) are shallow It is a simple concept: if many people are staring at a problem, at least one is likely to see the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Automation is replacing human jobs. Sorry. That is bad news for people who want to work, and there is no way around it. Such is the nature of today’s new technologies. In recent centuries, new technology arrives and displaces workers. Those unemployed eventually find jobs in new industries that build and maintain […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Somehow, at some recent point in time, someone tried to change the definition of a technology company. Blame it on old age, but I am fed up with what the media, in particular the technology media, calls a “Tech Company.” Headlines tell me that our President (Obama) is meeting with CEOs of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is an old diagram that helps explain what a system does. Sometimes, these old diagrams are lost and need to be found again. Apologies to Google and the Chromecast, but it is a good example to mention. Me, i.e., old engineer: What is that? Young Engineer: It is a Google Chromecast. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Praising the most successful education project in the history of man: the Raspberry Pi. Nobel Prize? Why not? Two years ago the Raspberry Pi was launched. 2.5 million units later, it is still going. Two years is a long time in technology—a very long time. (Wikipedia has a good article on the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I build my own little LibraryBox2. I stumbled across this project recently and, since I am fascinated by libraries and distributing content, decided to try to build one. I am not good at this sort of thing, but why not try it? It worked! I have my own LibraryBox2 (see photo). LibraryBox […]

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