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About 10 minutes ago I came across an article on Huffingtonpost.com that simply mentioned that famous actor Johnny Depp is not dead. Apparently a rumor of the unfortunate demise of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Edward Scissorhands" star in a road accident in Paris was a hoax. This incident though highlights something I've wanted to blog about for some time, namely the hoax was enabled by the real time communication media that we have today on the internet. All it takes are for sufficiently trusted agents online in social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to get the faulty information, for that information to spread rapidly as a "meme" through the internet and soon off the internet into the real world. This ability for information to spread so rapidly is only recent and was born on the backs of real time social media services like Facebook and Twitter. We saw most recently the power of information spread using these tools in the U.S. election o...

It has been quite a while since a technology has built up a buzz as loud as that of OLED display technologies. OLED displays promise to significantly advance display technologies by impacting costs of production, quality of display and utilization of power in ways that previous technologies could not ever match. Unlike previous generations of technologies such as CRT, Plasma and LCD which have variously been successfully used in certain product areas, OLED is the first display technology that enables similar efficiency of use across all existing areas. OLED displays can be made cost effective for use in cell phone displays and as well laptop or desktop monitor displays or even large tv displays. Unlike CRT and Plasma which are fixed to specific use cases (neither can be used on Laptop's or cell phones for example). The main advantages of OLED stem from the fact that the technology uses an organic polymer based diode process to create light of the specific color required directly fr...

A recent article posted in the Wall Street Journal posits that the collectivization of various types of goods or services created by the internet is long term a damaging trend for human societies. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646402192953052.html I think that the author misses truths that have been in place that show that collectivization is not a process that started with the internet but has been with us since we started inventing things. It seems that Mr. Lanier is not properly defining the contexts under which different problems can benefit or suffer from collectivization. He speaks in general terms of the loss of the potential for creators to extract profit from their work but misses that this is and was true of human civilization since we first picked up a rock to use as a crude hammer. New things make old things obsolete and people MUST adapt to what is displaced (be it a former human performance of that task or use of an older product) so as to mai...

I only just last month purchased my first personal cell phone (Samsung Magnet) and that decision pained me..why? The curse of the Engineer, my training means that I have a bit more awareness of what is possible with a given technology when it is released..so often I find myself refusing to purchase things because I *know* the manufacturers can do much better or that something is coming down the line that will obsolete my current purchase. So rather than suffer the slow trickle of certain technologies I give them time to catch up to my standards. During the age of VCR's (I was a teen..I reluctantly bought one in HS in the mid 80's but I knew that in 5 - 10 years the DVD would emerge to make it obsolete) so the one I bought (one of those inside the tv models) was my first and only VCR. I had read of the research being done on the DVD technology in electronic magazines available in my H.S. library. I vividly remember seeing a massive washing machine sized monstrosity of circuit bo...

(The following are reasons I quickly cited in response to an article posted at SAI here , I plan on writing another post to expand on the significance of OLED to come for other areas of technology.) **Posted questions** 1. People are not interested in reading anymore 2. Any PC, heck smartphone can get all the news you want. I have at least 200 RSS feeds currently! 3. The content is just not there. Why buy a magazine for things you read about a month earlier online? *** To your point: 1) People are reading now more than ever, they just aren't reading books, magazines and newspapers they are online reading blogs, links, articles and chat room transcripts. A tablet enables the old format of reading a book or a magazine to merge with the digital medium. Imagine a magazine that you "read" on a tablet but where the images can be tapped to play video, the links expand to side stories, the "pages" slide and swipe across the display as the "reading" process com...