Back in May, Bob Taylor spoke with Guy Raz at the Computer History Museum about his days at ARPA, funding visionary projects such as Douglas Engelbart at SRI and the ARPAnet, and founding the Computer Systems Laboratory at PARC. Here are some of my favorite quotes of Bob Taylor from that conversation: Computers were abominable …
Category Archives: Computers and technology
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07
@landay I find iPhone’s UI still has more polish. Plus, I’m still in an AT&T contract, and Nexus One doesn’t support AT&T’s 3G frequencies. in reply to landay # @j_lin Google Voice also avoids the annoyances of voicemail. in reply to j_lin # Whatever happened to the opening crawl in Star Wars? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8O8YbnworA (via Gizmodo) …
A few thoughts about Apple’s iPad
One day after the iPad was introduced, reactions in the tech world have been mixed, so I watched Apple’s announcement to see for myself. There are quite a few features the iPad lacks: multitasking, a camera, Adobe Flash support, HDMI video output, USB ports, an SD slot, and so on. But remember that at first, …
HCI well represented in this year’s TR35
Congratulations to the HCI researchers in MIT Technology Review’s list of top 35 innovators under 35: Jeff Bigham, Jeff Heer, Shahram Izadi, Shwetak Patel, and Jamie Teevan. Represent! Technology Review: TR35 2009
Memory price drops
As I was cleaning out my papers, I came across some old receipts for various tech gadgets. While I’m used to high-tech stuff getting cheaper and cheaper, I still find it stunning how quickly prices have fallen for certain items: Item Purchase date Purchase price Current price Annual depreciation rate Annual overall inflation rate (CPI) …
My new Mac
Well I did it: I’ve bought a 13″ MacBook. Its size and portability won me over. So far, it’s been pretty smooth: I had no problems setting up my mail accounts in Mail, and it connected to my home wireless network effortlessly. On the other hand, I had to search the web to find out …
Comparing MacBooks
I am seriously considering getting a Mac, because I want to do something that Macs can do and PCs can’t: write iPhone apps. I’ve narrowed the possibilities down to two models: the 13″ MacBook or the 15″ MacBook Pro. The 15″ is 22% heavier (4.5 vs 5.5 lbs) but it also has 27% more pixels …
Palm pulls one off
Today Palm announced its new smartphone, the Pre, and just as importantly, its long-awaited new software platform, WebOS. Reading the Engadget live blog on the announcement and watching videos on Gizmodo, I am quite impressed by what I saw. Not only is the hardware slick, the software is too. Wall Street liked it as well: …
So that’s what that song is
Last night, an old song that I first heard in high school suddenly popped into my head. I didn’t know the name or any of the words, but I could distinctly hear in my mind the haunting melody and the clear singing but the indistinct lyrics. I also knew it was by the ’90s British …
Writing software for the iPhone
The long-awaited iPhone software development kit is here, and overall I’m pretty impressed with the amount of power and flexibility Apple is giving to third-party developers. Beating Daniel’s expectations, Apple is giving access to the iPhone’s native API. There are a few gotchas though. For example, only one third-party app can run at a time, …