Move over, old-school semiconductors; COSMOS Magazine reports on the coming ubiquity of diamond in small-scale high-tech.
Tag Archives: technology
The cost of Apple’s success
So, Apple’s market capitalization has passed that of old guard Microsoft. At the same time, they’re investigating a spate of suicides at one of the Asian megafactories that supplies their hardware, and they’re about to get hit with the same sort of anti-trust lawsuits that dogged Bill Gates and company over the last decade [via SlashDot].
Many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, I guess…
Swarming behaviour enlarges brains
Immediate parallels thrown up by my own brain: Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere; Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Putting on an uncritically optimistic technophiliac hat for a moment, might we imagine the increased global socialisation enabled by modern communications networks to provoke some similar expansion of human brain capacity?
We might… but bear in mind the locust’s brain-boost is necessary to cope with a life where fierce resource competition and cannibalism is the norm. Hey presto: a grimly allegorical sf dystopia that writes itself!
Cyborg walk-assist legs in action
Does what it says on the tin; you can find words and pictures of Odelia Lee’s encounter with Honda’s new walk-assist machines (or “cyborg legs”, if you want to be kinda blunt and cyberpulp about it) at Gizmodo, but here’s a short video clip that neatly captures the mix of “man, that looks weird as all hell” and “let me have a go”:
Dumb futurism: telecommuter robot reaches staggering new heights of pointlessness
Every time I see someone ask the (usually rhetorical) question “why don’t we have the world full of robots that science fiction promised us?“, I’m always tempted to reply with a swing of the clue-by-four: “because anyone with any sense can see that a human worker is always going to be cheaper and more useful“.
Cheap and useful are two watchwords for companies that employ telecommuters, too. So why in hell’s name would a company of that ilk decide to invest in something that looks like a vaguely anthropomorphic floor-polisher to “to be the eyes and ears of telecommuters, workers in branch offices, and others who collaborate with people in an office when they aren’t in the office”?
If you really need that worker in the office, pay them to come in; it’ll be cheaper than ol’ QB here, and you’ll get all the real benefits of having a meatperson in the room, rather than a suite of functions that, if you really needed them, could be adequately provided by a mid-powered laptop and some audio-visual gear mounted on one of the old trolleys from the postroom that never gets used any more because everyone sends stuff in by email. Any CEO who thinks that he needs to spend thousands of dollars on “enterprise-class telepresence equipment” should probably give his IT geek a payrise and start listening to him once in a while.
I don’t know what’s more disappointing; that there could be even so much as a potential market for this tackily kitsch little technofetish, or that so many supposedly tech-savvy journalistic outlets could have written such uncritical puffpieces about it.
[ I fully blame the curmudgeonly tone of this post on having encountered the word “webinar” twice within the space of one morning. Writing this was a better option than killing puppies and kittens. ]