Mokka mit Schlag » Tech

In a recent article in MacWorld about the porn industry adopting Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Strategy Group makes a bad mistake:

I love the whole pornography concept simply because porn is still the number one money-making use of the Internet. But I don’t believe the porn industry will drive the format. Like any other industry, it will supply what the consumer wants

Here’s his mistake. (more…)

The track logs from my GPS unit look like this:

Format: DDD  M/D/Y H:M:S  -4.00 hrs  Datum[108]: WGS 84
ID	Date Time	Latitude	Longitude	Altitude
L	ACTIVE LOG
T	01/13/2006 14:15:56	40.63935	-74.02917	22.2
T	01/13/2006 14:18:57	40.64027	-74.03097	17.9
T	01/13/2006 14:20:36	40.64095	-74.03195	27.1
T	01/13/2006 14:22:53	40.64061	-74.03347	26.6
T	01/13/2006 14:26:08	40.64065	-74.03324	26.1
...

It occurred to me that someone must have integrated this with Google Maps and I was right. GPSVisualizer can convert these into a Google Map like this one:

(more…)

Nothing’s so dated as yesterday’s futurism. In 1993 naming a high-tech magazine “Wired” must have seemed really hip. Today “wired” devices are yesterday’s tech. No one wants a mess like this one, but everyone’s got one:

Slowly that’s starting to change. Network, speaker, microphone, mouse, and keyboard cables are already going wireless. Disks, cameras, and monitors are going to follow. By the end of this decade, most systems should have a power cord and nothing more. By 2020 even the power cord might vanish. It’s obvious the future belongs to wireless. After all, every cable you can remove from your system is one less leash tethering you to your desk. 802.11 is de rigueur for notebooks and increasingly common in desktops. Cell phones let us communicate from anywhere. Infrared remote controls freed us from commercials and gave rise to the clicker. And Bluetooth is rapidly becoming the preferred way to connect computers to low bandwidth peripherals like keyboards and mice.