Category: Blog
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To get away with planned obsolescence, just call it DRM
The idea that customers just “license” software products instead of owning them has manifested and I see a daunting development in the consumer electronics world that could potentially lead to products becoming obsolete because the associated software is deemed obsolete by the manufacturer.
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The Thing With SUV Crash Safety.
Unfortunately, it’s true that a heavier car (like an SUV) is often safer, simply because it’s heavier.
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Thunderbolt Target Boot Mode
Macs still have this incredibly useful, not very well-known feature: target disk and target boot mode. In combination, they allow you to boot one Mac using the boot partition of another Mac. Why is that useful? Well, here’s the number one use-case: If you have a MacBook – a portable work computer – but need…
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The Turing Test loop: Extrapolating the reCAPTCHA Development
For robots to serve us better, they need to be able to tell the difference between humans and other, potentially malicious robots. Every time we prove we’re not a robot through reCAPTCHA, robots get a tiny bit smarter. This means that in the future, the threshold for proving that we’re not robots will go up, which means that we’ll have…
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Why Paywalls Don’t Work
I don’t have a problem with paying for quality content and I believe, a large number internet users don’t either. If millions of people used to pay to have their newspapers delivered, why shouldn’t that work in the internet age? Especially in the last few years, with adblocker user base steadily increasing, online newspapers would…
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Dithering Explained – For Humans
Dithering is a technique used to mitigate the loss of depth in a quantization process of any signal and is often used in computer graphics to reduce the perception of “steps” and increase visual fidelity. There are different approaches to this and the original concept is way older than computer graphics. However, even though it’s…
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The vicious loop of urbanization and the internet
Urbanization is typically self-reinforcing. People move to urban centers (or places convert into urban centers) because there is better infrastructure and coverage of services like education and shopping opportunities. Parallel to that, whenever people are living close together, infrastructure and amenities can be more efficiently provided. This means that urbanization leads to more urbanization. As…
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Widespread usage of public transportation isn’t just about cost; it’s about User Experience!
Getting more people to use public transportation isn’t just a financial question.
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obsolescence by software
As the software running the internet of things gets more and more complex, it won’t even require hardware failure to render our future cars, refrigerators or toasters obsolete.