Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips A new high or low in robots in the warehouse. I find this one fascinating. This warehouse “robot” walks a human to the right spot in the cavern of products. The touchscreen shows the human what product to load in the bin. Hence, the robot knows where the product is and how […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Somteimes I miss the analog days. They covered a lot of my mistakes. Handwritten notes let me fudge and smudge and avoid mistakes—like spelling. I could smudge the “i” and the “e” together and put the dot of the “i” somewhere in the middle, and no one could tell that I didn’t […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips A new edition of the cheapest computer in the store finds a small tablet and keyboard for $80. Slow, but sufficient. Want to write a book? Can’t afford a MacBook Pro or Surface Pro or someone-else’s-pro? Here is a writing system for $80. It comprises an Amazon Fire 7″ $50 tablet and […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Those who don’t program still seek the Holy Grail of business: the ability to flush programmers from their lives. Google recently launched its App Maker. Its a tool kit that allows persons who don’t know how to program to write programs. Well, sort of. I guess Google’s product, similar to other similar […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Facial recognition is easily fooled. So when will our law enforcement stop using it? The polygraph is one example from history of technology barred from court. Facial recognition is one of the latest hot technologies in law enforcement. Facial recognition software scans huge databases to identify a person at the scene of […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips A look at the Lenovo Yoga Book. This look concentrates on typing on the Halo Keyboard. Next up, let’s try writing with a pen. Lenovo may have reinvented the portable computer. We’ve come a long way since the days of the KayPro CPM lug-able computer. Lenovo’s Yoga book is thin. See the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Let’s be honest about all these calls for better personal digital assistants. This one has to be the worst. This guy wants a drone to follow him, record his life, and do all the little tasks he mumbles during the day. Where ever you are right now, imagine a small object hovering […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Knowing, ahead of time, when to change the design of a technology system. Consider: We have software running on different computers. We don’t have much electrical power available for computers “out in the field,” i.e., they probably run on batteries. Hence, we move heavy computations to lab computers where electrical power is […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Every era has its own stupid question. Ours is no different. The title of this post is the stupid question of our era. Back in the day, if you said you have a computer that had the performance of a Cray, was the size of a shoe box, cost $100 and so […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips New deep learning tools have turned a technology field into a general-purpose programming language. I worked with neural networks 25 years ago (yes, I am that old). Recently, big, big neural networks have returned to favor as deep learning. Clever techniques have reduced this to a programming language instead of an area […]

[Read more →]