Month: April 2005

Infomania: research on the loss of IQ from IT

The BBC News has a story titled, ‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana (April 22, 2005.) A study for Hewlett Packard claims that some are getting addicted to messaging and that this reduced intelligence. The study was led by Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College, London.
This was from Geoff T.
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Business Blogging

Blogs Will Change Your Business is a long and thoughtful article on blogging from a business perspective. I’m not sure I’m convinced that businesses will be able to dominate the blogosphere, but the authors make a case for how businesses can adapt blogs to business uses. (Swamp us with high production blogs and who will bother with the amateurs?)
The article gives examples of businesses and how they have used blogs and discusses how blogging can establish consulting credibility.
The article is by Stephen Baker and Heather Green, and has a May 2, 2005 date line as the cover story for the upcoming BusinessWeek Magazine. This is thanks to Terry Flynn.
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More on Moore’s Law and the original magazine

Apparently there has been a search for a mint copy of the original 1965 Electronics magazine in which Moore’s article proposing Moore’s Law appeared. Well, now a copy has been found, see BBC NEWS | Technology | Moore’s Law original issue found. It was under the floorboards of a hoarder. (Why under the floorboards and how was it found? Because his wife complained about the mess!) Double thanks to Judith Altreuter for alerting me to this and then pointing out a typo.

Vocal Village


Vocal Village is a project by Mark Chignell and company at the University of Toronto. I knew him when I was at U of T and he had just arrived. Now his team is doing neat work across the spectrum of multimedia and usability. Vocal village is an audio conferencing over IP solution that has some neat features like spatialization and a visual interface.

Adobe buys Macromedia

According to the Guardian and other sources Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.1 billion (USD), Adobe downloads Flash for £1.8bn or Macromedia – Press Room : Adobe to acquire Macromedia. Stephen Elop, who I believe did CS at McMaster, will be head of worldwide field operations. Rob Burgess who also was at McMaster joins the Adobe board.
What does this mean for the multimedia software industry? Not good – we now have only one major provider of tools with an almost monopoly over our tools from Flash to PhotoShop. Time for some new competition.

Moore’s Law: What if

The BBC has a nice little article about that perennial subject, Moore’s law, that proposes “the number of transistors on a chip could double every 24 months”. See Law that has driven digital life, by Jo Twist (is that name for real?) The story raises an issue that comes around every … well … 24 months – will Moore’s law hold as we get to the physical limits of current chip technology.

Even Dr Moore is surprised about the longevity of the observation, but he admits the “law” has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I’m more interested in what would happen if computing ceased to appear to be improving technologically. What would happen if we couldn’t make faster and smaller computers? What would happen if the culture of computing couldn’t assume the hardware would improve dramatically and continually? We are addicted to the futurism and hype(r) of computing – for there to be a slow down would change the subculture.
Then again, will the industry even admit if things did slow down – if we did hit limits? That’s the nature of technology – there is always an improvement in your future.
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EFF Guide to Blogging Safely

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) (published April 6, 2005). I find it amazing that people need to be told that someone will eventually read what they publically write – blogging is like gossiping – if you talk about people in public, even if in a small public, it will eventually get back to them. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t be ashamed for everyone to read (even though they won’t).
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