[I wrote this upon the announcement of Jobs' retirement in August. Jobs reinvented himself, the companies he managed, the personal computer (which he can also get partial credit for inventing in the first place) the music business, and the telephone. To name just a few items.] At National Review Online, Nick Schulz waxes elegiac about […]

iPads, OH YEAH! Image via Wikipedia As recently as a year or so ago the introduction of the iPad kicked off (once again) an old, old debate about whether the tablet presents a viable computing platform. I believe even iPad Kool-Aid connoisseur Stephen Gordon may have made a snarky comment or two at the time. […]

Here’s a headline that would have been gibberish not long ago: Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad vs. Galaxy Tab: What to consider My co-blogger will tell you that this is no contest and that the iPad wins hands down. I’m not so sure. iPads are awesome gadgets but this decision rests on (among other things) […]

What comes after the computer mouse? Perhaps a multi-touch GUI like this:

When I was preparing to go to college back in 1987 my father bought me a computer that lacked a hard drive. That’s right kids, we loaded our programs with 5.25 inch floppies back then. But it was a pain. So, with a little cajoling (and throwing in my some of my own money) I […]

If this story isn’t a premo example of the power of the wisdom of the crowd, or self-organizing processes, I don’t know what could be: Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at […]

I found this announcement at Kurzweil’s web site: Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but as a “computational knowledge engine,” it’s quite different from Google and other search engines. Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can […]

I finally got an iPhone last week. I love gadgets, but rarely am I an early adopter. I tend to wait awhile, see how the early adopters do, wait for the bugs to be worked out, and then… if all looks good… jump in. I believe I waited just the right amount of time for […]

TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense Stick with it to the end — you don’t want to miss the wristwatch.