When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.
Filed under: consumer technology, featured, information technology, Technology Review
November 2, 2010 • 3:03 pm 0
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
October 2, 2010 • 4:26 pm 1
The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review
April 21, 2010 • 4:26 pm 0
SpotRank, CitySense and the Smartphone Panopticon
If you have a smartphone, you are being watched 24/7 by an all-seeing eye. Good thing the data is anonymized.
Technology Review
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, Atmosphere Industries, CitySense, reality mining, SimpleGEO, skyhook, smartphones, SpotRank
April 7, 2010 • 11:06 am 0
Geometry + Shannon’s Limit = Spatial Re-use
To accommodate explosive growth in demand for wireless data, many mobile carriers have begun touting next-generation “4G” networks. But to consistently achieve fast speeds, especially indoors in densely populated areas, some carriers are starting to offer small, low-power indoor cellular access points called “femtocells.”
Technology Review
The original draft of this story included a discussion of Cooper’s Law, Shannon’s limit and the fact that 3/4 of a circle’s area lies outside an area delimited by half its radius. All of which explain why AT&T isn’t crazy to ask you to pay an extra $150 to make your smartphone’s 3G radio achieve data throughput better than a local WiFi network. But that was a bit much for a piece of this scale.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, femtocell, macrocell, picocell, Public Wireless, Sprint, Ubiquisys, Verizon
March 9, 2010 • 9:33 am 0
From Wardriving to iPhones
“There are some extremely interesting and exciting apps coming down, one built on our technology, that will allow people to further integrate the virtual and real world,”
Technology Review
The real story here is Skyhook. They had a fleet of vans cruising the streets of the U.S., mapping wi-fi hotspots, back when Street View was just a glimmer in Sergey’s eye. Now they’re in every iPhone on the planet.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, facebook, geolocation, iPhone, skyhook, Twitter, wardriving
February 10, 2010 • 6:00 pm 0
What’s Inside the iPad’s Chip?
Cost and power efficiency may have pushed Apple to create its own microchip
Technology Review
There has been a lot of speculation about why Steve Jobs thinks the A4 chip at the heart of the iPad is so special. This piece is more of the same, but it comes from better-informed sources.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, a4, Apple, ARM, Imagination Technologies, ipad
January 19, 2010 • 10:17 am 0
China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans
It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors.
Technology Review
I really hope this works out. Because the last audacious technology project I covered – the Iceland Deep Drilling Project – didn’t.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, 863 Plan, China, Dawning, Godson, high performance computing, HPC, Loongson, Supercomputing
November 9, 2009 • 12:51 pm 0
For the Ultimate in Secure Web Applications, Microsoft Clones Your Browser, Monitors Your Every Move
Web Security Tool Copies Apps’ Moves
Technology Review
Imagine a sci-fi future in which a clone of you is modified so that its free will is limited to acts that are morally sound. Now your behavior and thought patterns are compared to it in real time, and if you ever do anything the clone wouldn’t, the thought police swoop in and shut you down. That’s sort of what Microsoft’s new web security invention does, except for web apps.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review, Microsoft Research, Ripley, the cloud
October 1, 2009 • 10:50 am 0
IPsec VPN + EC2 = VPC, other acronyms
A More Secure, Trustworthy Cloud
Technology Review
What didn’t make it into this piece: the overall trend that servers, having been virtualized, are now so easy to set up within someone else’s cloud infrastructure that they are now within reach of anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.
Those who remember what it was like when only a few people knew how to build web pages, who also now marvel at the ease with which blogs and Facebook profiles can be deployed and edited, will understand the analogy:
Some day soon, slick interfaces for putting your own cheap, temporary, ridiculously powerful computing and storage resources to productive use will make you wonder how you ever got along without them. Off-site drives like DropBox and JungleDisk are but a first step.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review
