Posts with tag "future"

Doing the dog paddle to the future

Category: Opinion
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Posted 618 days ago

When I was walking back from getting coffee for myself and my wife I found myself thinking about how we are getting so close to the year 2020 and how much I have seen happen in my world from when I was a kid in the 1960′s.

I have seen president’s assassinated, watched as man landed on the moon for the first time (on my 13th birthday to boot). I have seen students killed at Kent State as they protested for a better world and watched as the War Measures Act was enacted in Canada as a response to the FLQ uprising.

Then as I neared home carrying coffee I realized something. @020 is just around the corner and our world, our society hasn’t gotten any better. In fact it could be argued that it has gotten worse.

There is no Star Trek future beckoning us and chances are it never will be but instead driven into copyright and patent hell if our current technological mess is any indication. Any of the moral and social mores that may have guided a possible future reflective of Star Trek have left the building.

Education: The one resource we can’t afford to screw up – but are.

Category: Technology
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Posted 1120 days ago

This is one of those rare occasions where something I have written at The Inquisitr is something I feel deserves to be cross-posted here.

We live in a society that likes to think that its most important resources are the physical ones like gold, diamonds, oil, or just about anything that can be translated to a dollar amount. However when it comes to the intangible resources we slough them off as if they aren’t important – something that we can worry about later.

The most important intangible resource we have as a society is the education of our children and right now it is in a state of crisis in the US, and to a degree in Canada as well. Like everything else in our society it is seeing massive waves of change and not all of them are for the better. As these waves of change come crashing down around us our children are increasingly finding themselves adrift in a world that has continually downgraded its responsibility to the future by denying children the best of class education that they need, and deserve.

As Alvin Toffler, noted American futurist, wrote in Revolutionary Wealth:

Perhaps the greatest case of wave conflict in America will be paid by nearly fifty million children currently compulsorily enrolled in schools that are attempting to prepare them – and not very successfully at that – for jobs that won’t exist. Call that stealing the future.

Education is about far more than jobs. But the schools, with minute exceptions, also fail to prepare students for their roles as consumers and prosumers. Nor does this system, by and large, help kids cope with the rising complexity and new life options they face in sex, marriage, ethics and other dimensions of the emerging society. Least of all does it succeed in introducing more than a tiny fraction of them to the enormous pleasure of learning itself.

This is what happens when education becomes more about the bureaucrats running the system and the politicians looking to constantly make brownie points. This is why we have states like Texas looking to influence the rest of the countries schools through the textbooks used in classes. It is able to do this because it is the second largest purchasers of textbooks, next to California, and the Texas school board want to adjust what it calls a liberal bias.

Read the complete post over at The Inquisitr

Looking back – looking forward

Category: Uncategorized
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4 comments
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Posted 1270 days ago

lookingback

2009 is looking for the exit door.

2010 is anxiously waiting to start kicking us in the ass.

Looking back:

Yup I’m still a unrepentant procrastinator which means more often than not those emails I always say I’ll get to in the afternoons – they’re still waiting, buried deep in other emails waiting to be answered.

I am still paying the price for my grand rebranding experiment that happened right on top on my experimental magazine style format and I still haven’t recovered from either one.

Canada: 28th out of 30 in the Digital World

Category: Technology
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Posted 1470 days ago

2009-06-08_1629 I have never been shy about my thoughts about Canada’s declining place in our technological world. We have gone from being one of the most respected leaders in technology to being a laggard as we fall behind countries we use to lead. this is something that we could turn around if we had a government that was more interested in being a leader instead of being a lackey to US entertainment industry or Canadian born telecom monopolies.

Or as Michael Geist told the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communication hearing on May 26th

First, Canada is relatively expensive, ranking 14th for monthly subscription costs at $45.65. By comparison, Japan comes in at $30.46 and the UK at $30.63,

Second, the Canadian Internet is slow, ranking 24th out of the 30 countries. It is truly a different Internet experience for people in Japan, Korea, and France, where the speed allows for applications and opportunities that we don’t have. Moreover, Canada lags behind in fibre connections with 0% penetration. Japan sits at 48%, Korea at 43%, and Sweden at 20%. Even the U.S. is at 4%.

Third, when you combine these two – price and speed – Canada drops to 28th out of 30 countries for price per megabyte. In other words, we pay more for less than consumers in almost any other country in the OECD.

Fourth, Canada is one of only four countries where consumers have no alternative but to take a service with bit caps. Almost all other OECD countries have more choice.

I’m not the only one to feel our country is being left behind as there is a real push by concerned groups in this country, the University of Waterloo among them, who want to see this change. Part of that change is a new event called Canada 3.0 which apparently is beginning to snowball, attracting a lot of attention as it attracts over a 1,000 delegates and a growing number of business leaders and politicians.

Prof. Coates said taking a lead in digital media includes everything from developing copyright rules and compensation models for online content, to training and keeping in Canada people who understand this new economy. Among the ideas being floated is something called the Canada Project, a plan to get Canadian content online, starting with the holdings of the national archives and moving well beyond that.

Tom Jenkins, CEO of Waterloo software company Open Text and a driving force behind the conference, argues Canada needs a visionary project to capture the public imagination for what is a dry policy topic. Such a project would play a role similar to the space race, he said, which led to unprecedented technological advances.

Source: Elizabeth Church :: The Globe and Mail

As nice as all these positive thoughts might be I don’t believe anything will happen until we see a change in the federal government – but it has to be a change that includes a real desire to take our country out of this technological morass. that will take a lot of backbone and I’m not sure anyone on our political landscape has one anymore.

2019 via Microsoft

Category: Technology
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Single comment
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Posted 1571 days ago

Ya ya I know it’s Microsoft hype which will never amount to anything so don’t even get started. The video embedded below was part of Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop’s presentation at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. While we may not see much of what this futuristic look of our computer world shows in the video it is still cool none the less.

…. and besides what if even 10% of what you see comes true .. it would still be cool.

hat tip to Long Zheng and Steve Clayton

The web is now about evolution rather than revolution

Category: Technology
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6 comments
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Posted 1571 days ago

Toilet-Paper Sarah Lacy has been hanging out at TechCrunch this past month of February and while I wouldn’t suggest that she has changed the blog into a softer and gentler version of itself she has written a couple of interesting post during her stint there. One of them I kind of took a round out of over at the Inquisitr but her post today was a rather interesting one in that she questions whether if anything happening on the web is even close to be revolutionary.

As she points out

Already, if you think about Web 2.0, the successful companies are building off the technology that was pioneered before—whether it’s the browser, broadband, or the open source stack. Sites like YouTube and Twitter may be technically hard to scale, but are they really technical leaps in innovation, or more of a creative, cultural leap in how existing technology is being used?

Given how we love nothing better than to toss around words like game changing, paradigm shifting, revolutionary and world changing when the only real difference would be like going from single ply toilet paper to double ply, I have to wonder the same thing.

Sure there have been technological improvements as we move forward but when the desktop PC might have been a revolutionary move up from the mainframe era it doesn’t mean in the same breath that the GUI interface is really that much of a world changer from the commandline.

The same goes pretty much for the Web as well. Sure we might be making changes to the plumbing of how it works but really is Twitter at it’s root really that much different that IRC? Is what Facebook and other social networks doing really that much different than what AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy did in the past?

Is there even any way that the web could go through a revolutionary change considering the simplicity of rules and protocols that it was built on?

If we were to have a real revolutionary change or paradigm shift in computing what do you think it will look like?

Blogging hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface

Category: Technology
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2 comments
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Posted 1591 days ago

scrat1 A little while ago Dan Morrill from over at the Techwag blog was good enough to make his e-book Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere available for download – but only for a limited time. Lucky for me that my usual habit of well practiced procrastination didn’t kick and I smartly grabbed a copy of it. It had been sitting in my download folder since that point waiting for me to get around to reading it; which I started to this evening.

While I was still reading the Introduction of the book a couple of statements caught my eye and got me thinking. The two statements referred to the size of the blogosphere – not just the tech blogosphere – but the blogosphere as a whole

If there are 120 million blogs as reported by Technorati, and the earth‟s population is six billion, that is not many blogs in relationship to people.
[...]

While some people are geared towards doing blog spam, splogs, ripping content, and doing things that you might not agree with or even like, when you participate you join the very few, and in some ways very cutting edge group of people who are doing the same thing. It is hard to think that .003 percent of a population can have the influence and the effect on newspapers, television and other traditional media, imagine what the influence would be if one percent of the population would have

Now as much as those of us in the tech blogosphere might like to think that we are the hottest thing going around the fact is that we are a small portion of that .003 percent. That might seem to be a kind of ego crushing fact to consider the let’s take a moment and flip that around.

13 years from now

Category: Odds & Ends
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2 comments
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Posted 2102 days ago

In the going on 20 years that I have been floating around the our world of computers I have seen a lot amazing things in the growth of the machine that we now consider as one of life’s necessities rather than a luxury.

In a post today Robert Scoble (congrats to both you and Maryam on the addition to your family) in a moment of reflection with his son Patrick and fellow blogger Dave Winer wonder what we might be using for computers when his son Milan is 13 years old.

Besides suggesting that it would have 4 terrabytes of RAM and 1,000 terrabytes of disk space he suggests the following as well:

How about a mouse that works off of your brainwaves? How about a computer 10x more powerful than an iPhone that’s embedded onto your glasses? How about a petabyte hard drive? Or a printer that you could fit in your wallet so you could hand out pictures of your kids to friends who wanted them? I’ll be honest, I’m scared by the thought of embedding a computer into my body, but we’ll definitely see those. I’ve already met people who have RFID tags in their hands, which is mighty weird today but might become commonplace over the next decade or so. Imagine buying Starbucks just by waving your hand over the counter and not needing to carry credit cards.

This might be the world that he envisions for our computing future but I think it will take a lot longer than 13 years. Not because of hardware constriction because I have no problem seeing our ability to achieve even a portion of those ideas in even less time than Robert suggests.

The problem I see being is communication; or data sharing, between all the various devices. Even today we have WiFi; which would have to become ubiquitous, but only at the behest of the telecom giants. For what Robert sees, communication would have to become a global and transparent medium that was available without absolutely no downtime and access either freely available or priced in such away that every person would be able to afford it without thinking twice.

When it comes to data sharing we are facing another big hurdle because everyone is trying to protect their turf rather than understanding the need for a true common data ground. Whether it be a common file system shared by all OS platforms, or connection between the OS platforms is seamless and requires absolutely no input from the user the basic fact is that until data can be passed between every possible device without having to pay the OS tax of conversion what Robert see’s in 13 years won’t happen.

Even if all these things do manage to be dealt within the next 13 years there is one huge block to this utopian world of data sharing and that is human nature. Even now we are seeing people seriously question the whole idea of sharing our data in the social network and this is only a tiny fraction of what would be a part of Robert’s future computer world.

A lot more would have to change in our social fabric before computers make that jump to being human embeddable object for the everyday person. I know myself I would never even think of doing anything like wearing an RFID tag or trust a system envisioned by some of these bleeding edge types. As it it is people bitch about fears of MS phoning home or Google storing more and more data.

I know our computing world will change. It is inevitable that some of the things Robert sees will take place – I just don’t know about the timeframe or the enthusiastic adoption being something that will come at a cost many of us are willing to pay.