July 2013

There were 2 posts published in July 2013 (this is page 1 of 1).

What will you do with an internet and devices millions of times more powerful?

I keep thinking about the inevitable exponential growth of technology and how it relates to CPU Processing power, Storage capabilities and Data transmission speeds, and then I ask myself what would I do with technology 1 billion times more powerful than the one we have.

If you haven’t noticed, things are getting really powerful, really tiny, and really fast already.

And companies like Google are starting to show hints of what should be done with all these.

Look at the new Google Maps, it’s pretty amazing, and it’s only going to get better.

When you interview at Google there’s one question that keeps coming to you almost from all the people that drill you “How would you make the internet faster?”

It seems Google’s answer is to take over the internet at every layer, they have indexed it like nobody else, they’ve created a browser that’s now taken the majority of the market share and made it really fast, they’ve built application layer protocols faster than HTTP (SPDY), they’ve also seen the exponential adoption of mobile devices and created an operating system for it, and devices for it, and more recently they’re even providing internet access at Gigabit speeds one small city at the time (which is all an experiment for what’s to come)

Then you see them experimenting with very primitive versions of wearable computers (Glass) and if you start putting the pieces together, for example, they were crazy enough to have cars driving around the world to have “Street View” in Google maps… how on earth would you be able to go all the way and digitize reality itself? You put computers on people’s heads and record everything into digital information.

I can see a future where Google will be able to ask you to record whatever you see around you, inside or outside a building, they’ll have your position, your orientation, and best of all, since there will be so many of us willing to collaborate in exchange of some stupid incentive (or perhaps none), they will be able to record reality from almost any angle possible to have a full representation of reality, perhaps even in real time, I think these are the kinds of things that are possible when you have incredibly fast CPUs, incredibly huge storage, and incredibly fast transmission speeds when you have incredibly ubiquitous internet access (remember that Balloon project?)

And that’s just what this little mortal has thought of in relationship to their Google Maps product.

I think Google Glass and an application of this sort will bring forth interesting legal challenges, like, what if you don’t want the inside of your home or office to be in google? how do you prevent anyone from capturing everything and making it public?

Other scary applications that I see possible are real-time face recognition coming from a Google Glass facebook app, then the name “facebook” will really make sense. And best of all, a lot of people (after major debate and laws have been passed with respect of not being scannable by strangers) will actually want to be recognized by strangers, maybe there will be social benefits to complete unanimity, it will all be really interesting.

19 Reasons to switch to eBooks/eReaders

So I’m tired of evangelizing eBooks/eReaders in person and I guess I’ll do a lot more good by writing this so that you can share it next time you want to convince a friend to live in the year 2013 and stop the mad romanticism about the handicapped physical books, it’s just ludacris reading a book on paper unless it has no digital form.

Here is an ever growing list of why I prefer eBooks to physical books
(got more reasons, leave a comment below)

  1. They are cheaper.

  2. They are available immediately, no need to order, wait, or move physically to get them.

  3. They never get lost.

  4. They don’t take any space, or weight, this brings many added benefits to the world:

4.1. You can have a library of thousands of books with you wherever you are, on different devices (since they can be stored in the cloud)

4.2. You will free a lot of shelve space at home/office, which also means less dust being created at home.

4.3. If all students were forced to use eBooks they wouldn’t have to carry such heavy backpacks which can deform their spines.

4.4. If all students used eBooks exclusively, there would be CO2 emission reductions since that’s a lot of weight that doesn’t have to be transported by cars/buses/trains.

  1. You can read them on different devices: e-readers, computers, smartphones.

  2. You can copy and paste.

  3. If you lend them you never have to beg your friend to give the book back, it comes back to you automatically.

  4. You can search inside them.

  5. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, a dictionary is always there for you, just touch/click the word in question.

  6. The same book may come in different languages.

  7. You can change font types, font sizes, color of the screen, margins, line spacing.

  8. You can have lots of bookmarks, you can navigate your bookmarks.

  9. You can read them with the light turned off.

  10. You can read them with one hand, turning pages is effortlessly. Awesome when you go out for a walk and you have only one hand available.

  11. No more wrinkled, stained, or broken pages.

  12. You can share your highlights on social networks.

  13. You can open a web browser right from the book if there’s a web reference.

  14. There’s no such thing as “out of print”

  15. It learns your reading speed and tells you how much time left you have on the current chapter or the whole book.
    …

need more reasons?
or you will keep reading books because you like the smell of paper, even though there’s really a lot of stinky books out there.

are you still using cassette tapes, vinyl discs, hell are you still using CDs?

Make the switch, you will enjoy reading like never before.