Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips My iMac disk dies so I have to recover everything from backup. But wait, not everything as my Google world is still there. Short story about my Apple iMac computer. I was updating the operating system and the installer froze the machine. The guy at the Reston Apple Store was very helpful. […]

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Sometimes it just isn’t worth being on the leading edge. It was 1981 and an attempt to purchase an office computer turned into a monster. 1981 – the Apple II was fun and the TRS-80 was, well it was something you could buy at Radio Shack. These little computer things could store data on floppy disks. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Wearing a health monitor practically 24 hours a day is now possible. Our physicians can know everything about our life style and work with us on our health. But do we want to be that healthy? Computers are smaller and lighter and use less battery power and all those things that engineers […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Why don’t we have more engineers and computer scientists? Maybe, for better or worse, we don’t have enough “tough” people. I have recently read of a shortage of engineers and computer scientists. I have my doubts about this shortage, but enough people are declaring it that there may be some truth to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is a trend lately for young male programmers to act like fraternity pledges. This is just the last in a long line of dysfunction in computer science. The percentage of female computer science graduates and professional programmers is declining. It has been in decline for several decades. There is much speculation […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The cell phone camera plus computer vision plus computer speech equals apps for the blind. I worked in computer vision during the 1980s and early 1990s. My work was mostly with having a computer transform an aerial image into a map. I didn’t foresee the technologies that would make the digital image […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Computers still have three basic parts: (1) processor, (2) memory, and (3) input/output (I/O). The latest addition to the I/O is the camera. This post is a little late – several years late, but better late…and so on. In the early 1970s, I was introduced to the computer. There were and still […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some thoughts on Seth Godin’s idea of “pre digital” and how some places can become “formerly pre digital.” Seth Godin recently posted thoughts on what he calls “pre digital.” I liked his thoughts. I can punch a few security holes in the example he uses of a hospital emergency room, but that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I use PenDriveLinux to install Linux Mint on a 1GigaByte USB stick. I had a little spare time one weekend, so… I had seen several people mention Linux Mint. (I can’t seem to remember if it is Linux Mint or Mint Linux or even Lint Minux, but that is another matter.) So, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Computers are cheap. The people required to buy and install them at a company are not. Maybe it is time to treat the computer at work like we treat office supplies such as pens and paper. The title is correct. Computers are too darn cheap. Desktop machines are $500 and less. Laptops […]

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