The future of the black box flight recorder explored. This article was taken from the August 2011 issue of Wired magazine.
Leave the Driving to It. Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse. Windows XP's retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today.
Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system. Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security. The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one.
In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. The success was remarkable for an operating system whose reception was initially quite muted. It faced tough competition from Microsoft's other operating systems. 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021. How to See the Invisible. Everybody’s amazed by touch-screen phones.
They’re so thin, so powerful, so beautiful! But this revolution is just getting under way. Can you imagine what these phones will be like in 20 years? Today’s iPhones and Android phones will seem like the Commodore 64. “Why, when I was your age,” we’ll tell our grandchildren, “phones were a third of an inch thick!” Then there are the apps. That term usually refers to a live-camera view with superimposed informational graphics. Palantir, the War on Terror's Secret Weapon. Everyone Speaks Text Message. What Is Sony Now? Sir Howard Stringer remembers when 2011 was going to be wonderful.
“This was the first year of the payoff,” he says, “and next year was going to be the second.” As chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Sony (SNE), Stringer had spent six years trying to return the Japanese icon to its former glory and open a new era of growth. Sony expected an annual operating profit of at least $2 billion, its best in three years. A batch of new products was headed for store shelves, including its first tablets, a compact 24-megapixel camera, and a portable PlayStation player. Sony was also preparing to launch a global network that would connect the company’s movies, music, and video games to all its televisions, tablets, PCs, and phones—an iTunes-like digital platform.
Transcript. Mike Daisey My only hobby is technology.
I love technology. The Social Graph is Neither. Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism - Conor Friedersdorf - Entertainment. These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010 Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.
Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards - America's only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn't read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. It was put together before I began my current gig at The Atlantic.
The Art Of Storytelling WASHINGTON MONTHLYDirty Medicine by Mariah Blake Thomas Shaw invents breakthrough medical devices. Empirical Software Engineering. As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up Greg Wilson, Jorge Aranda Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences.
After all, what could be “harder” than ones and zeroes? In reality, though, the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which long ago traded in the gut-based gambles of “Mad Men” for quantitative, analytic approaches. A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories.
The Resignation of Wadah Khanfar and the Future of Al Jazeera. The Professors, The Press, The Think Tanks—And Their Problems. Top 10 Pictures That Shocked The World. It has often been said throughout time that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Any picture may be worth a thousand words, but only a few rare photos tell more than a thousand words. They tell a powerful story, a story poignant enough to change the world and galvanize each of us. Over and over again… Death in a Box. The truth and consequences of reporting from a war zone.
Tencent: March of the Penguins. It’s hot and crowded in the Shatang Internet Café in the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, where some 300 young factory workers sit amid flickering lights and discarded cigarette packs.
At one computer, Zhou Qingqing chats with her boyfriend about 600 miles away in Zhejiang province using QQ, the popular instant messaging software. March of the Penguin: Ars looks back at 20 years of Linux. The Linux kernel was originally created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, and first announced to the world on August 25, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Nadia Shira Cohen. Escalation in Digital Sleuthing Raises Quandary in Classrooms - Technology. The Curious Science of Counting a Crowd. On June 4, a huge crowd gathered in Hong Kong for a vigil to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.