Le réseau d'origine

I'd love to say I stumbled across this, but I can't. I'm copying it off of a friend of mine's blog. If you haven't checked it out already, please stop by and give it a peak.

The saddest thing about Olet's predicament was that he was hamstrung by the technology of his day. To realize that someone envisioned (though not necessarily invented) the internet a full 60 years before it became practical is simply amazing. One wonders what technological advances fellow members of our generation are dreaming up that only future generations will see...



From the NY Times: The Web That Time Forgot

"Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."

Although Otlet's proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today's Web. "This was a Steampunk version of hypertext," said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet's vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. "The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century," Kelly said. "It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions." "

via www.nytimes.com

A Slice of Technological Perspective

He's right. When I was a kid, a cell phone was twice the size of a 2TB hard drive. Today we have cell phones with more computing power than some computers...and we have 2 TERRABYTE hard drives.

The evolution from 8in floppies to the cloud has completely shifted the way data is used, transferred, and stored. The leap from vinyls to SD memory cards completely changed how music was stored on physical media, and the music transition to wireless did away with physical media entirely. It's simply amazing.

I try to keep my ears open for news from the holographic industry. With HD a commonplace occurrence, our transition to and through 3D tv is just an awkward step towards losing the need for a screen altogether.

One of the setbacks to holographic technology is that projections need a way to be seen. When do you see a rainbow? After it rains, when there's still enough water in the air to refract the light waves. If you've ever done laser experiments you know it's easy to see the point where a beam hits an object, but in order to see the beam you need the light to pass through a medium (namely smoke or fog). Normal screens don't have this problem; the image is projected onto the glass from behind and an image is visible. But, like with 3D tv without glasses, I'm sure this is a hurdle and not a show stopper.

When S1M0NE came out, I dismissed the idea of a computer generated holographic woman addressing an audience as something that's possible, but not probable. It could happen, but it wouldn't happen for a few decades.

But if you wanted to reduce those decades to eight years, where would you go?

Japan, of course.

I'll save you the witty wrap-up and encourage you to do your own research.

Rise of the (Droid)Machine?

http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/12/technology/quadroid/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin

Apparently, Quandroid is the new Wintel, which makes perfect sense- if you know what it means.

While I can understand and appreciate the comparison, I'm more interested in the Android v Apple battle. I don't forsee the third contender, RIM's Blackberry, going anywhere for the time being. RIM set the standard for smartphones, but that standard is evolving. While government and corporate employees will almost certainly be issued company Blackberries for the next several years, the rest of the cell market is moving in different directions.

The link above made an interesting statement about how Android phones hold 27% of the smart cell market while Apple holds 23%. That figure must ring true to the ears of Droid users as a sign of Apple's impending disenthronement, but here are two things Droid addicts don't realize:

1) The figure compares operating systems, not individual platforms

2) For Droid phones it's a flood of quantity over quality

The iPhone is 100% fruit: it's an Apple mobile operating system (iOS), with Apple software (like iTunes and Safari), on an Apple hardware platform. Droid, on the other hand, is just an operating system (Chrome OS). Google had to pair with six companies (Samsung, LG, Sanyo, Motorola, HTC, and Nokia) to make the phone happen. And considering that fact, you have to look at how many phones can call themselves Droids.

Sprint has 8 phones.
AT&T also has 8.
Verizon, leader of the pack, has 14.
T-Mobile, bringing up the rear, has 3.

Apple, on the other hand, technically has two. But because the 3GS can upgrade to the iOS that runs on the iPhone 4, it's really only one phone.

If we were comparing operating systems' market slices alone, my hat would certainly be off to Android; but we're not. We have THIRTY THREE Android phones against Apple's ONE iPhone. 33:1. Imagine how the market demographics would change if Apple made even 3 or 4 iPhones? Imagine an iPhone 4, an iPhone mini, or an iPhone shuffle. Rather than a couple of Apple phones, we have only one- and Apple is holding 23% of the current market with it. If each Droid phone was given a market percentage as a hardware platform alone, it would be an average of 0.82% per device.

Granted, as a credible OS Android is certainly on the rise, and neither Google nor Apple show any signs of slowing. While Android does have the advantage of being an open platform, we have 7 companies' 33 phones barely doing better than 1 company's 1 phone. When you look at it that way, Jobs is leaving Google in the dust.

How 'bout that Apple?