Computer History Day — Part 1

This week my kids are off school for Spring Break. Daytona and Cabo are out of the question for three caballeros ages 10, 7, and 5, but day trips around the Bay Area to learn about this or that are easy. Tuesday it’s San Francisco to learn all about the cable car system for Channing’s report on that topic. And Wednesday will be Computer History Day for the Cringelys.

It’s a no brainer for us to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. That fabulous facility happens to be run by John Hollar, the guy who hired me in 1997 to write for pbs.org. My kids have never been there. But to make […]

By |March 18th, 2012|2012|113 Comments
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How to protect your home from Leprechauns

My son Fallon, who is five, has been worrying about Leprechauns. They’ve been talking in school about St. Patrick’s Day and a lot of that talk involves Leprechaun mischief. They come in your house, make a mess, causing problems of all sorts Fallon says. So yesterday he came up with a Leprechaun defense strategy that I think is worth reading about.

“First we’ll take my money,” said Fallon, “and we’ll turn it into dollars.”

Fallon is a scrounger for change. When he finds money he puts it in a jar. Sometimes he asks me if I have any spare coins and I’ll give him what’s in my pockets. Like the Amish, with Fallon it’s all in and no out so the coin stash has grown substantially […]

By |March 17th, 2012|2012|58 Comments
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Lessons from Redmond

Once DOS became the de facto PC desktop standard in the 1980s, Microsoft perfected a technique called “embrace and extend” and sometimes “embrace, extend, and extinguish.” The idea was to adopt outside technologies, extend DOS to include them, then eliminate as a competitor  the original developer of the technology. This was before Microsoft figured out that it actually needed third-party developers.

Lots of utilities became part of DOS and later Windows this way (remember Stac electronics?). They were initially provided for free to Redmond by their authors with the idea that users would upgrade to a paid version, only users mainly didn’t upgrade because good enough was, well, good enough. So the originating companies then tended to […]

By |March 14th, 2012|2012|52 Comments
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Intel may be dumb but they aren’t stupid

I was already working on a column about AMD purchasing multicore server maker SeaMicro, pointing out what a coup the deal is for AMD, when the story appeared yesterday about an Intel executive claiming the chip giant had been offered SeaMicro and chose to pass on the deal, followed by a SeaMicro board member claiming the Intel exec’s statement was a bald lie. Who is telling the truth here?  Who is lying?  And does it matter? It is my opinion the answers are that both are telling the truth, nobody is lying, and none of it matters very much. Here’s why…

Remember Bill Clinton saying in a deposition that the […]

By |March 9th, 2012|2012|39 Comments
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Siri’s big brother from Google

With today’s introduction of Apple’s iPad 3 or iPad HD or whatever the hell they end up calling it, I think we’ll be entering a pretty Siri-ous phase when it comes to mobile Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Apple has a winner in Siri, its iOS digital assistant app, and knows it, so we’ll soon be seeing all-Siri, all the time in Apple products to come this year including, no doubt, Cupertino’s own big-screen TV. But this is not to say that Google’s Android will be far behind. There are stories popping-up about Google doing its own Siri-like app. But I expect Google to go significantly beyond Siri capability and I base that belief […]

By |March 6th, 2012|2012|81 Comments
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