Blog

While I was out at a meeting, my meticulously neat wife armed herself with a feather duster, donned protective pink rubber gloves, and viciously, mercilessly straightened, organized, and dusted the desk in my home office. My desk was clean, but the results were suboptimal. Continue Reading →

Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the "Universal Translator." While Gene Roddenberry's epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show. Continue Reading →

Apple finally added a "Buy Now" button to its Mac Pro page, and no one was more excited to go Mac Pro shopping than me. I have been waiting for this computer for quite some time. It will be a replacement for the four-year old Mac that is the center of my home studio. Continue Reading →

LinkedIn published its "Top 10 Emerging Jobs" list on Tuesday and -- no surprise -- most of them are tech jobs. Coming in at number one is Artificial Intelligence Specialist. Continue Reading →

If you've ever played Pokémon Go, you know that Pikachu was just pasted on top of whatever you pointed your camera at. About a year ago, Pokémon Go creator Niantic announced that they had worked out how to let Pikachu hide behind real-world objects. The technique, called occlusion, was demonstrated in a video, not on an actual device. Yesterday, Google announced the tools to solve the problem. Continue Reading →

Snapchat will launch on December 18 a new feature called Cameo that will allow you to put your face onto short looping videos. This is a "shallowfake," meaning that you know it's fake, and so does everyone else who is watching. There is no attempt to fool anyone. It's basically a better version of Elf Yourself. Continue Reading →

The word "hoax" has come into sharp focus recently and it has caused more than a few of my friends and colleagues to assert that the mainstream news media is "rigged." This is not a new subject, but it is newly relevant because of the current political climate. I'm not going to defend the MSM. But I am happy to explain why a certain famous media critic likes to say, "The media is rigged. Big League." Continue Reading →

Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo has a track record of accurate predictions. His recent investor note focuses on what the 2020 and 2021 lines of iPhones might look like, and one prediction stands out: Kuo believes that there will be at least one completely wireless iPhone in the 2021 line-up. No Lightning port, no USB-C port, no place to plug in cables of any kind. Continue Reading →

Peloton (the exercise bike company) watched $942 million in market value ride into the sunset in a single day. The value destruction was due to its controversial holiday commercial. The internet didn't like it. But... did the punishment fit the crime? Is this result an unfortunate outlier, or are there lessons to be learned? Continue Reading →

In engineering parlance, getting closer to the "edge" means bringing computational resources closer to the user. To do that, you need a bunch of stuff to line up. In an ideal world, you'd combine powerful cloud resources and a low-latency high bandwidth network. That's exactly what Amazon and Verizon plan to do. Continue Reading →