Freyburg

Our temporary home in the burbs for two weeks until we head to Japan. Note the computators everywhere.

Back in 1960, a state of the art computer cost millions of dollars, weighed thousands of pounds, and was slower (by an order of magnitude) than an average chip in today’s cellphones. Physicist and science popularizer Michio Kaku (whose BBC series “Visions of the Future” is awesome, btw) breaks down where computing is going in the next ten years. Computers will be ubiquitous, mostly invisible, and profoundly shaping and transforming our civilization. Sounds good to me.

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Noah Hutton is working on a documentary chronicling the quest to reverse engineer the human brain and then create a simulation of that brain. The potential for AI, medicine, and philosophy is essentially limitless if these eggheads pull it off, and there’s a good chance they will. Once the project is successfully completed, the film will also be finished. But the trailer above is as enticing as the possibilities of silicon-based intelligence. (grabbed from Boing Boing).

Yes, an infomercial for a Mac Performa. With 8 (count ’em!) megs of RAM! Scary that my iPhone is a quantum leap in capability compared to this brick. And in actual fact, an iPhone is also many times more powerful than a Cray supercomputer of yesteryear.

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

A news report from 1981, detailing how people might one day read their news in electronic form, online. Like that’ll ever happen. More importantly, these cats are rocking the TRS-80 Color Computer, my first compubeast.

In addition to running around filming the day’s events at Microsoft Tech Days, I also had a chance to film a swearing in ceremony for Joey Devilla, who just finished his probationary period at Microsoft, and is now in his words a “Sith Lord.”

Not so long ago, it was an accepted truism that “no-one wants to watch TV on their computer.” But the profusion of streaming video, podcasts and web series has changed attitudes dramatically in the last couple of years. According to a recent article in the New York Times, more and more people are getting rid of their television and watching their programs online.

To me, this move makes sense. Online gives viewers more options in more locations, and with a wider choice of programs, not all of which are the product of Hollywood. A reasonable analogy would be the trend away from land-lines towards using mobile phones exclusively. There will also be room for living-room content; I for one still have my television, though it’s rapidly becoming more of a peripheral for my Xbox and a dvd-playback device than anything I’d watch actual TV programs on. Especially now that Ive discovered Livestation, which streams BBC World News, Al Jazeera and many other news channels right to my computer.

Apple updated the iPhone system software to 2.2 late this week, and so far I’m impressed. New features include street views (for some cities) in Google Maps, a redesigned Safari, and the absolutely welcomed ability to download podcasts directly into the iPhone from the iTunes store. Never mind that the process is a little clunky, just the fact that I can do it is pretty impressive. Equally cool, bit not as glitzy, is the fact that you can now hit “update all” to update your apps, and they’ll update all at once. More importantly, the icons now stay just where you left them, rather than you having to move them around every time a feature gets changed. Other than that…it’s the same iPhone as always. Apparently Apple has added a bunch of “emoji” icons, which is important to the Japanese market, but doesn’t do much for me.

Funny, and damn, this looks pretty good for a web video.