Tag: Technology

Forget PCs, We Want Robots

Noted today: a report on the state of PCs in Japan. The interesting part of the report:

“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones,” said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.

Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.

NEC’s and Sony’s sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.

“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV,” Katayama said. “And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”

Is this a sign of things to come? Will the personal computer go the way of the dodo in another decade? Possibly, although it seems to me that Japan is a bit of an outlier when it comes to a passion for cutting-edge gadgets.

Perhaps the takeaway here is a reminder: consumers care more about what they can do than the tools they do it with. If they can do everything they need to on a cell phone, or with a DVR attached to their TV, then those tools will outsell PCs.

As for me, I’m a little old-fashioned. I like a full keyboard and a bigger screen when I’m writing blog posts, editing photos, or reading feeds. But 10 years from now, who knows what cellphones will be able to do?

UPDATE: Tony Hung weighs in with some good points.

Belated Thoughts on the iBrick

The Apple iPhone/ iBrick thing is starting to become old news. Since I’m happy waiting on the sidelines until a 3G iPhone comes out, I haven’t weighed in much, but there’s one or two things I do want to put out there.

I get that users want to hack their iPhones. It’s such an amazing device, and it would be even more perfect if you could only add [insert favorite missing application here]. It makes perfect sense. I’d be tempted to do it too, which is why I am deeply grateful I didn’t buy an iPhone.

What I don’t get is the outrage over Apple’s lockdown. It’s not like Apple encouraged developers to hack their phones and unlock their SIM cards, then turned around and went the other way. Apple was really clear from Day 1 that they expected software development to go via web apps, not installed apps. So why is anyone surprised when Apple started enforcing what they already said they were going to do? Did they really think that they’d let the “hackintosh” crew do whatever they wanted to the iPhone?

The fact that Apple was willing to go to the length of making hacked iPhones utterly unusable as phones strongly suggests to me that they’re doing it not just because of any Steve Jobs control freak tendencies, but because they have to in order to maintain the AT&T contract. And if they want to sell iPhones in the USA, that’s what they have to do. There is no getting onto the US wireless network without getting into bed with a telco. I don’t like it one bit, but it’s the way the industry is right now, and if you want to be in the game you cannot ignore reality.

I well remember when the Treo was first coming onto the market, hearing from some of the Handspring and Palm people about how utterly painful it was to get telcos to be willing to let it in. That was 5+ years ago, but somehow I suspect not all that much has changed.

At any rate, what I understand least of all is this: paying $100 to some 3rd-party outfit for an iPhone “unbricking” that will at best only work until the next Apple patch.

The phrase ‘”throwing your money away” comes to mind.

Update: Nice to see I’m not the only one weighing in this week.

The Older I Get, The Scarier This Is

I can take being rejected for a job because I don’t have the necessary skills, or because someone else was a closer match to the skillset in question. That’s business. But this is another matter altogether:

A state appeals court reinstated a fired manager’s age-discrimination suit against Google Inc. on Thursday, saying a jury should hear his evidence that a supervisor told him that his ideas were “too old to matter” and that the giant search engine company gave its older employees lower ratings and lesser bonuses.

[snip]

As part of the lawsuit, Reid presented a statistician’s study of employees and managers in his department at Google that found older employees consistently received lower evaluations than their younger colleagues, and older managers got bonuses that were 29 percent less than those awarded to managers who were 10 years younger.

Age discrimination is not new to Silicon Valley, but you’d think that as the industry matures we’d see less of it. Not yet, it seems.

What Happened?

You might notice that the blog looks a bit different tonight.

Scott decided that it would be fun to go to the WordPress Upgrade Party that the inimitable Matt M held Wednesday night. I figured, it was a good time to see if I actually could port the blog over from Movable Type to WordPress. With 1220+ entries in the database, I was more than a little worried that trying to move them all would be hell and result in me having one massively screwed-up blog.

Well, I was wrong. The process was unbelievable pain free. Absolutely everything just worked. Amazing. I’m so used to tech stuff almost-but-not-quite working; for something to NOT screw up or require weird hacking to get it right felt…. wrong.

At any rate, I got the data ported over last night; tonight was the fun stuff. Find a theme, customize the sidebar, add a few plug-ins. The move is about 98% done, but if you catch any weirdness or bad links, please let me know. I still need to re-add the comment policy and a link to my old travel blog, plus decide what kind of spam filtering I’ll be doing. Akismet is up and running, but that may or may not be enough.

So…. after 4+ years, it’s farewell to Movable Type. I feel a little sad about it, but it’s time for a change.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know!

Update on the Spam Front

So, a few weeks ago, I was getting fed up with the comment spam onslaught, and tried using captcha technology to shut it down. And it worked, which was great, but it also caused some problems for some readers, which was not so great. Pissing off readers is not something I want to do, so I dropped the captcha and am trying some new back-end spam filters instead.

Although the new spam filters seem to be working well so far, I’m a bit bummed about the outcome, because the captcha plug-in I was using — reCaptcha — is a bit more than your average spam deflector:

ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand.

I’d like to implement ReCaptcha at work instead of the captcha currently in place on the blog there, but it’s busy as hell right now; I probably won’t be able to get to it for a few more weeks.