, 3 min read
You have probably heard of virtual-reality (VR) headsets. Three of them are coming out this year: Facebook’s Oculus Rift, HTV Vive and the PlayStation VR. Moreover, Samsung has produced a Gear VR unit for low-quality VR. These devices replace your TV or your monitor with goggles containing…
, 3 min read
I can’t predict the future, nobody can… but I think betting on the future is a good intellectual workout. It forces you to think beyond your day-to-day activities. In 2012, I bet $100 with Greg Linden that by 2015, tablets would have replaced PCs. Greg wrote an analysis of the outcome but the…
, 2 min read
Back in the early 2000s, I was a given an expert report that outlined the future of computing. Regarding software, the report foresaw the absolute and uncontested dominance of Microsoft operating systems. Back then Apple was basically dead. Linux was a niche player on everything but servers (and it…
, 1 min read
The world changes but we often do not pay attention. Did you see these changes coming? Paper dictionaries being good as door stoppers and not much else. Major conservative newspapers stopping the presses and being solely available “on computers”. The median age for viewers at major TV networks…
, 1 min read
The simplest and safest way to live your life is by cultivating “sameness”. Look around at what successful people do, and do the same thing. All your cool friends go to college? Go to college. They all work in a start-up? Work in a start-up. All your middle-age friends take up Pilates, take up…
, 2 min read
PC sales have entered a slow decline. Today, you can literally work on your Microsoft Office documents no matter where you are, no matter what computing device you have. Predicting the short-term future is easy: the next smartphones will be more powerful. The laptops will look more and more like…
, 1 min read
Whenever I meet young people, I alway stress how their future will be very different from the present. To anyone who lived through the first Great War (1914-1918), they would have thought that the Second World War, if it were to happen, would be quite similar in nature. But, in fact, nothing of the…
, 2 min read
Most languages like Java and Go, come with standard pseudo-random-number generators. Java uses a simple linear congruential generator. Starting with a seed value, it generates a new value with the reccurence formula: seed = (seed * 0x5DEECE66DL + 0xBL) & ((1L << 48) - 1); The seed…
, 3 min read
In my previous post, I reviewed some of the predictions made in the famous science-fiction book Rainbows end. The book was written in 2006 by Vernor Vinge and set in 2025. The book alludes to a massive book digitalization effort under way. When the book was written, Google had initiated its book…
, 1 min read
As a computer scientist, it is natural for me to view the brain as a computer. And though computers have different abilities, they are also very much all equivalent at a fundamental level. You have machines that can read and execute instructions. Some machines can run faster, others can hold more…
, 1 min read
When I was in high school, the most powerful computer money could buy was the Cray 2. The thing would require a room all by itself. I don’t know how much it sold for, but an old MIT article says that it cost $140 per central-processing unit hour. In other words, if you had to ask how much it…
, 5 min read
Bruce Sterling in a famous scifi novelist. One of his most celebrated novels was written 20 years ago: Holy Fire. It is a near-future novel, set in the late XXIst century. Sterling set it about a century in the future from the time he wrote it. Near-future novels provide a set of “predictions”.…
, 1 min read
In What does technology want?, Kevin Kelly argued that technology is on an evolutionary path. In some real sense, technology is alive and growing. It seeks out to improve itself at an ever faster rate. And it seems that technology currently loves software. The difference between a recent processor…
, 9 min read
Techno-optimism For several years now, I have grown more optimistic about the power of human innovation. Despite the barrage of bad news, the fact is that we are richer and healthier than we have ever been. Yes, I might not be rich or healthy compared to the luckiest among us… but on the whole,…
, 2 min read
Programming If you want the world to get progressively better, you have to do your part. Programmers can’t wait passively for hardware to get better. We need to do our part. In particular, we need to better exploit our CPUs if we are to keep accelerating our software. Early in 2015, I wrote a…
, 1 min read
The new Intel Skylake processors released this year (2015) have been met with disappointment. It is widely reported that they improved over the two years old Haswell (2013) processors by a mere 5%. Intel claims that it is more like 10%. Intel is able to cram many more transistors per unit area in…
, 5 min read
Sadly, it is easy to forget that what we know is all but a tiny fraction of all there is to know. Human beings naturally focus on what they understand. The more you learn, the stronger this phenomenon tends to be. Irrespective of any biological mechanism, I believe that it is a form of “aging”…
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The virtuous circle of fantasy
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It has long been observed that progress depends on the outliers among us. Shaw’s quote sounds a true today as it did in the past: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the…
, 5 min read
I cannot predict the future, but I can look at the recent past. What happened in 2015 as far as technology is concerned? Many things happened that, had I predicted them in January 2015, people would have thought I was slightly mad. Let us review some of them. Amazon sells a fully functional tablet…