Si l'homme était dot d'une e-mémoire totale et ternelle. Et si vous pouviez enregistrer d'ici à quelques années chaque instant de votre vie et ainsi vous remémorer chaque seconde écoulée ? C'est le projet un peu fou que défendent deux cadres de Microsoft. En 1998, Gordon Bell, pionnier de l'informatique et chercheur chez Microsoft, se lance dans une aventure technologique sans précédent : la numérisation de tous ses documents personnels.
Photos, annuaires, factures, livres, vidéos, il décide de s'affranchir entièrement du papier et des enregistrements analogiques. C'est le début du projet Total Recall (Mémoire Totale). Peu à peu, le chercheur est pris d'une boulimie d'archivage numérique : il veut enregistrer tout ce qu'il voit, tout ce qu'il entend, tout ce qu'il vit. Avec la conviction intime que cette somme colossale de «souvenirs» emmagasinés sur disques durs constituera bientôt une «e- mémoire» infaillible et éternelle aux applications quotidiennes innombrables. . • Que sera-t-on capable d'enregistrer ? • Sera-t-il possible de tout stocker ? What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.By Neal Stephenson. The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space.
Rockets are a very old invention. The Chinese have had them for something like 1,000 years. Francis Scott Key wrote about them during the War of 1812 and we sing about them at every football game. As late as the 1930s, however, they remained small, experimental, and failure-prone. There is no way, of course, to guess how rockets might have developed, or failed to, were it not for the fact that, during the 1940s, the world's most technically sophisticated nation was under the absolute control of a crazy dictator who decreed that vast physical and intellectual resources should be hurled into the project of creating rockets of hitherto unimagined size. Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large to be worth using them on). 1. 1. 2. 3. The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry Kasparov.
Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky MIT Press, 205 pp., $24.95 In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s.
Conversation, discovery and reputation: tools for navigating the age of abundance « Planning in High Heels. Contemplating the extraordinary wealth of ideas and inspiration coming out of this year’s South by South West Interactive, it struck me that while they initially seemed disparate (visualizing music libraries, social media and revolution, the path to better crowdsourcing), many of the panels and ideas that excited me most had certain key themes in common. Fundamentally, they all addressed the emerging challenge of our time-how to successfully navigate the age of abundance-an age where there is more information, more content and more connectivity that we could possibly have imagined even a decade ago. The power of conversation Unsurprisingly, Clay Shirky was first up to tackle this theme, with a characteristically barnstorming take on social media and revolution.
His start point was that abundance is a profoundly powerful and disruptive political force-the power of abundance to disrupt is a recurring Shirky preoccupation. Abundant media, in this case, escapes the control of regimes. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. Press Info - Letter from Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits. Steve Jobs. I last saw Steve Jobs a year and half ago. I spent an hour alone in his company while he showed me the latest piece of magical hardware to have come from the company he had founded in 1976, the yet to be released Apple iPad. Naturally I was flattered to have been approved by him to be the one to write a profile for Time Magazine and to be given a personal demonstration of the device of which he was so clearly proud and for which he had such high hopes.
Of course, you might point out that he asked for me specifically because he knew that I admired him and that I would write a positive piece, that I was more or less a patsy who would deliver what he wanted. I would not deny that for a minute. Using my white iPhone It is a very dismal business when a great personality dies and the world scrabbles about for comment, appraisal and judgment. The political party that wants to ban PowerPoint | Technology. PowerPoint is ubiquitous, but some people really hate it. Photograph: Alamy Switzerland could become the first country to outlaw PowerPoint presentations if a new party runs in the October parliamentary elections.
Matthias Poehm, founder of the Anti-PowerPoint Party, claims that €350bn could be saved globally each year by ditching the scourge of public speaking. Poehm believes that the software takes people away from their work and teaches them little. On leaving academia seven years ago I vowed that I would never use PowerPoint again. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in having a real discussion about ideas as opposed to force-feeding an increasingly sleepy crowd with numerous graphs and bullet points projected on to the nearest wall.
If Poehm gains 10,000 signatures his party is free to run candidates in the election.