The popularity of Pokemon Go is really no mystery – it has its roots in our hunter gatherer evolution. Pokemon Go was an App that was just waiting to happen. It’s a perfect storm. It is the scavenger hunt brought into the modern age. But more importantly it recapitulates what our ancestors had to do to survive. It taps primal and… Read More
The Higgs Boson and Machine Learning
Technology in and around the LHC can sometimes be a useful exemplar for how technologies may evolve in the more mundane world of IoT devices, clouds and intelligent systems. I wrote recently on how LHC teams manage Big Data; here I want to look at how they use machine learning to study and reduce that data.
The reason high-energy physics… Read More
What’s the Biggest Number?
Time for a little fun again. Most of us played this game when we were kids. It fairly quickly degenerates into “infinity plus one” or the even more preemptive “whatever you say next plus one”. But if you’re not allowed to use infinity and you have to name the number and demonstrate how you get to it, is this still interesting? For mathematicians… Read More
A Software Company Making Hardware
I’ve been a daily Facebook user for many years now and it keeps me in touch with family, friends, some business contacts and even a handful of high-tech companies. My first impression is that Facebook is a very successful, cloud-based, social platform staffed with software developers and a few marketing mavens. On closer… Read More
Limits to Deep Reasoning in Vision
If you are a regular reader, you’ll know I like to explore the boundaries of technology. Readers I respect sometimes interpret this as a laughable attempt to oppose the inevitable march of progress, but that is not my purpose. In understanding the limits of a particular technology, it is possible to envision what properties a successor… Read More
Loving it when a Qualcomm plan comes together
Corporate layoffs are always a touchy subject. I think that’s because there is skepticism that one round of layoffs can turn into two, then if business still doesn’t improve the spiral accelerates into more rounds. Too many rounds indicate management didn’t really have a clue what was going on in the business, instead trying to … Read More
Reducing Data Centre Cooling by 40%
Living in Oregon has many benefits, including access to cheap electricity thanks to the plentiful river systems that provide hydro power and a growing green power business fueled by wind and sun. Many of the world’s largest data centers are located in Oregon for access to this cheap electricity, and Google has a sizable investment… Read More
Technology, Shakespeare, Linguistics and Combatting Terror
My brother Sean is working on post-doctoral research in linguistics, especially the use of language in Shakespeare’s plays. Which may seem like a domain far removed from the interests of the technologists who read these blogs, but stick with me. This connects in unexpected ways to analytics of interest to us techies, and ultimately… Read More
Why Is The Modem Still The Unsung Hero Of Mobility?
The unsung hero of the mobile world is not the CPU, it isn’t the GPU, it isn’t even the memory. All of those components have grown extremely quickly in recent years in terms of processing capability, capacity and the ability to shrink thanks to improvements in process technology. The CPU and the GPU seem to get all the accolades, too.… Read More
Microsoft Raises The Mixed Reality Bar Yet Again With New Holographic Platform
There have been many hardware and software developments over the past 18 months in the worlds of AR and VR. However, most of them solely existed only within the separate realms of AR or VR. Many within the industry, including I, eventually see VR and AR merging into some hybrid reality that fluidly moves between the two. Some companies… Read More
Beyond Traditional OOO: A Time-Based, Slice-Based Approach to High-Performance RISC-V CPUs