I sympathize with this fellow’s wish. I’d love to have a single really fast connector for everything, including video. I don’t know that it will ever catch on though, outside of Apple computers. I lived through the time of serial ports, parallel ports, AT connectors, PS/2 connectors, and the like. USB caught on, not because [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Business category.
“Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions”
ZDNet has a roundup here, everything from IBM’s fateful 1980 decisions on MS-DOS to this year’s HP TouchPad debacle. I thought it was interesting, as a my-God-it’s-horrifying-but-I-can’t-look-away kind of thing.
“Reusable Printer Paper”
In 1985, the Wall Street Journal had a quote from an unnamed Xerox executive to the effect that “we’ll have a paperless office when we have a paperless bathroom.” Well, paperless bathrooms are here, but offices still use a lot of paper. In a bid to reduce that, Xerox has come up with self-erasing reusable [...]
“Financial Conspiracy Theories”
I generally ignore conspiracy theories. The more you know about history, probability, and human nature, the harder it is to seriously attribute malicious intent to things that happen by random chance, or as a result of public and well-known systems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was (probably) a legitimate conspiracy. The claim that Kentucky [...]
“Bacterial nanowire discovery could revolutionize bioelectronics”
An exciting discovery: [...] Similar to the flexibility of artificial nano-wires, the conducting properties of the Geobacter biofilm could be manipulated by simply changing the temperature or regulating gene expression to create a new strain, for example. By adding a third electrode, the biofilm can act like a biological transistor, able to be switched on [...]
“And a Barista Will Lead Them”
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, points out a Bloomberg article about the CEO of Starbucks Corp. urging other business leaders to suspend donations to political campaigns “until the Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally disciplined long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.” Other than armed revolt, that’s likely [...]
“In Defense of Hard: When Easier Isn’t Better”
Before I sold it, Project Badger was ugly. Almost painfully ugly. It wasn’t a deliberate decision — I’d have made it pretty if I’d had the time — but our customers wanted what it did, not how it looked. When BigCo bought it, the first thing they did was slap a new name on it [...]
“Microsoft ribs Google’s ad tech with ‘Gmail Man’”
You’d think that a company like Microsoft would come up with something better written, better acted, and altogether better thought-out than this. Disappointing. (I’m not a big fan of Google, but I’m far less a fan of Microsoft, given that they’ve done their damnedest to sabotage any progress for at least the last ten years [...]
“Creativity”
Scott Adams points out a possible link between creativity and boredom. I can see where he’s coming from, in that when you’re bored you’re more likely to think of something creative than when you’re too busy to think, but I’m pretty sure people can be creative even without boredom, at least in the area that [...]