Riding D-Wave

This is just a bit above my pay grade as an amateur futurist, and a fascinating area that I can only begin to

Is this a quantum computer?

fathom.

When the scientists are squabbling among themselves as to whether this is or isn't what is claimed, then I know that it's going to take a lot of study to even begin to get my head around this stuff.

A special breed of computers able to solve problems that it would take other computers years to crack, assuming they could do it at all?

Check out this article about the D-Wave quantum computer on the excellent BBC Future website.

Big bets on quantum computers (BBC Future)

How does a quantum computer work? (HowStuffWorks)

What is a quantum computer? (The Economist)

Death of the Netbook

       Is it death throes for the netbook in the age of tablets?      

According to this Stuff article, netbooks are on the brink of extinction. Most people may not be aware of this, I guess because they have long since stopped buying them.

What is a netbook?

Well, the term has always confused me and I doubt I'm alone in this.  When netbooks first became fashionable accessories they tended to have a maximum screen size of 10", 1 or  maybe 2GB of RAM, no optical drive and a pretty low resolution screen and graphics capability.  They often ran Windows XP (Vista was a dog so they fell back to the old faithful).  Some ran Linux but that I think was more to keep the price down.

They were popular because they gave people access to surf the web when away from home plus they had a keyboard that made elementary word processing and email tasks not too onerous.  No-one ever expected them to be your first or only choice of computer - they were very much a carry-around websurfer.

New kids on the block

All hail the conquering tablet

So what happened?  Well, the tablet came and blasted them out of the water.  Check the boxes of the netbook versus tablet and it's not hard to see why.  Both will let you surf the web, email, Skype, and store documents and pictures.  But consider what else the tablet can do and it's obvious why netbooks have had their day.

Is the chromebook a worthy successor?

If a tablet's not your thing, perhaps a worthy successor to the traditional netbook is the chromebook.  Like the netbook, this device is limited in power with a very basic hardware configuration.  It relies on its internet connectivity to use the Google Chrome operating system environment to provide all its applications and storage from the 'cloud'.

The market supports plenty of small portable notebooks that are considerably more capable than the netbook ever was. Indeed, some of today's ultrabooks have amazing specifications and a price to match.

Sleek sexy ultrabooks are a long way from the netbook

The netbook was a short love affair but one that I fear will soon be forgotten with just a very small entry in the annals of computing history.

Cheap netbook on the brink of extinction (Stuff)

Sayonara netbook (Guardian UK)

Death of the netbook (LoF)

The ASUS eeePC (Wikipedia)

The Netbook (Wikipedia)

XP exit

Comedy of errors with XP exit

Windows XP has less than 12 months before it it’s officially dead, unsupported, consigned to the history books.  Really, is that important?  Well, for the half million XP computers (yes 500,000) here in lil’ ol’ New Zealand that is important.  (What can the world population be if we still have half a million of the critters?)

How is it that an operating system removed from sale over 4 years ago still has such a large user base?  How can a computer last that long and still be worth booting up each day?  That’s the thing about the maturing computer market.  Step back 10 years and that wouldn’t have been the case.  Technology was changing so quickly and you really needed to keep upgrading just to stay in the game.  But for the last few years a Pentium 4 or above, partnered with a reasonable amount of RAM, a decent sized hard drive and just a budget graphics card is really all you need to surf the web in some style.  Sure, if you like blitzing aliens or want to run the latest first person shooter that spec is going to be wholly inadequate, but for many people, a reasonable web experience and the ability to process some words from time to time is really all that’s required from your workhorse.

A 3 or 4 year PC running Windows XP will tick those boxes.  There’s the rub.  It’s enough.  It represents a $1000+ that I don’t need to spend now because it’s enough.

So what are these XP users going to do come April next year when the evil empire stops supplying patches

All or nothing - I've given up on MSIE on all my machines

and security fixes?  Well, I guess they’ll do what they’ve already been forced to do regarding their web browser – since Microsoft stopped allowing XP users to run their latest IE browsers people have been looking elsewhere.  I tried Firefox and Chrome and was pleased with what I found so the loss of IE for me on my XP machine was no great trauma.  Actually, Microsoft lost me as surfing customer as I no longer run IE on any of my Windows 7 machines either as I'm now a born-again Chromer.

Microsoft are trying to tell the XP user base that they can, subject to some hardware constraints, purchase a copy of Windows 7 for the bargain basement price of $249.  Really?  Does that make any sense at all?

If I’m going to invest $250 in technology I’m not going to squander it on an OS that was never intended for my aging but dependable hardware.  By the time XP's imminent death rolls by I’ll be ready to put that money to good use on a new web surfing device.  And guess what, Microsoft, it may not necessarily be running your operating system.  If you want to lock me in as customer, make it worth my while but don’t wait too long.

Clock ticking for XP users (Stuff)

No more IE upgrades for Windows XP users (Cnet)

Death of a legend

I read with some sadness that Disney has decided to close down LucasArts, just 154 days after acquiring it.  Since launching back in the dark ages of 1982, these guys have brought us some wonderful games, like Star Wars, TIE Fighter and Monkey Island.  A personal favourite of mine was the wonderfully quirky Grim Fandango.

Grim Fandango, a LucasArts game classic

Licensing IP to other game developers

They produced a plethora of games from the Star Wars saga, plus there's the collaboration with the english software house, Traveller's Tales, on the Lego series, which has introduced a new generation of kids to the classic movie franchises.  It sounds like Disney will continue to license the LucasArts IP to other developers - all goes to show that owning the rights to valuable products is where there is always going to be a lot interest.


Sad to see that LucasArts is going but I'm sure that the talent behind the games studio will find good homes elsewhere in the industry.

So long LucasArts (Stuff)

The mouse cleans the house (Forbes)

Disney closes LucasArts within 154 days (TechCrunch)

Shutdown by Disney (SlashGear)

End of an era (ArsTechnica)

Latest and greatest

March 2013 Issue

There's a good article in the March 2013 New Zealand PC World magazine about "Tomorrow's Technology".

I'm a subscriber to the print magazine.  Although I follow this online as well, I do love the glossy feel of the pages and the smell of the magazine when I take it out of the plastic wrap.  No doubt at some stage the article will appear on the PC World website but having just looked it doesn't seem to be up yet.

Samsumg Galaxy camera

I won't spoil the contents by telling you too much but here's a list of some of the highlights from the article:

• TVs capable of following your hand signals
• Big CCD sensors coming to small cameras (more light captured by the sensor means higher quality pictures)
• Tablets and laptops merging more into a hybrid device
• Android-powered digital cameras like the Samsung (pictured)
• Much faster routers (for better streaming to multiple devices)
• Hybrid hard drives that combine solid state and mechanical drive technologies.

These all seem to be simply the next evolutionary stage of now ubiquitous high tech toys.    Nothing startlingly new here but some useful tweaks to improve the user experience.

Galaxy S4

Check out PC World's first look at the new Samsung Galaxy S4.  Maybe there's not quite the same level of anticipation with Galaxy as there is with iPhone but it's getting up there.

NZ PC World looks at the new Galaxy S4 smartphone

The Internet of Things

Connected world

I'm currently considering  the top 10 game changers for technology over the next 10 years.  Now much greater minds than mine have devoted vast amounts of time and energy to this kind of crystal ball gazing.  There are many suggestions and I’ll explore some of them over several posts this week.

One point that most of the tech soothsayers are agreed on is that the internet is at the core of the technology explosion.  That's a safe bet, surely, because it's all about being connected.

We can already see many of the elements that are developing because they are the points of pain for us at the moment.  In no particular order these are:

• bandwidth (needed to deliver all you need as fast as you need it) 
• storage (to retain everything that needs to be kept) 
• processing speed (to crunch the data fast enough not to slow you down).

Each of these pain points has big business working hard to find the answers quicker than the competition and I don’t think we doubt that they will succeed.

How we will be connected is again quite well mapped out.  We know, for example that the current internet address system  is seriously overloaded.  We need IPv6 to provide the capacity to connect the billions of devices we will be using. 

With exponential growth in users, devices and bandwidth requirements we are going to need huge amounts of storage.  The word ‘huge’ doesn’t really do this justice.  Already we are exceeding our size vocabulary since gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes just don’t cut it in the big picture.  Exabytes and zettabytes are what we need to quantify this insatiable appetite for data storage.

Since each and every connected device from your smartphone to your toaster is going to need to remember what it’s doing, local storage is still going to play a big part with flash memory providing that capability.  Flash memory is great for your immediate local storage and processing needs and is already replacing those mechanical devices.   We already use flash memory but expect to see it appearing in much greater capacities in a whole lot more devices.

You’re not going to want to store all this good stuff locally where it could get corrupted or lost and we will no doubt be looking to the ‘cloud’ to provide that storage capability.  We can see that starting already but most people don’t yet trust their treasures to a faceless provider so that is going to have to change.  I’m sure that it will happen and happen pretty quickly.

Data, data everywhere

I’m excited about this technology because it’s something we can readily relate to as it already exists in foundational form.  We use the internet every day.  We know that it's there for us today and it will be there in an improved form tomorrow.

Sure, I can’t fathom the volumes of devices, the speed of transfer and the storage capacities that are envisaged because they are way beyond my point of reference.  I can simply accept that they are huge, they are coming soon and that’s enough for me, for now.