Working Up

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Depending on where we draw system boundaries, we probably aren’t doing the same thing over and over again. There is a quote attributed to Einstein about insanity being the act of doing the same thing and expecting different results. There is a debate among people who debate such things about if Einstein […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The ever decreasing cost of technology enables more people to look at more of our problems. There is hope. Linus’ Law is disputed as to what it is and who said it and who published it and all those things that come with a quote that is often quoted and misquoted. I’ll […]

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