Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: tablet

  • The so called tablet revolution is about my fridge

    Some of you might remember the “smart fridge” idea.  More than a decade ago some companies had made horribly expensive fridges which had built in computers and a touch screen.   You could surf the net, watch movies and generally do most of the things you ended up doing with your laptop parked on the kitchen table.

    There is a fine line in understanding New Media which most people get wrong.  New gadgets should not be viewed like Swiss Army knives.   It isn’t about what they can do.   Much like the top of the range Swiss Army knife, you know, the one with all the extras…well you can’t really carry that around in your pocket.   Which sort of defeats the purpose as you leave it in the car all the time “just in case”.  For all our Twitter, news aggregations, Google search intelligence, mobile apps and different ways to get to these things the correct way to understand all the different technology, all the hardware, the software, the apps, the search engines, the databases is as the ingredients of a very special personalised menu in our brains.

    It is a menu we all make up as we go along.   We consume media via our own understanding of the different options.     When you are about to fry an egg to eat you might think “hey, I wonder what is happening in the world?”   You then turn that need into an action which depends on what you have available and how you perceive those options.   It would have been a transistor radio.  Then a TV in the kitchen or – worse still – a very loud TV in the lounge that you just listened to while annoying everyone else in the house.  Then that laptop in the kitchen streaming your a TV channel for news.  Or your favorite news aggregator, Facebook updates or Twitter timeline.   Most of us missed the futuristic $5000 fridge with the touch screen and now people are getting to tablets.

    A tablet is essentially a smart TV.  Mainly for consuming information as passively as possible.  When they perfect the systems that detect eye movement you won’t even have to scroll up and down those Facebook status updates manually.  So just give them better way to attach them to a fridge and we can call it a day.

    The so called tablet revolution was essentially about how to stick another screen on my fridge.

  • Oscar Pistorious, Olympic cheating, mobile phone processors and the PC upgrade problem

    When I first read that an athlete was using “blades” I thought they meant servers.  Blade servers are rack mountable computers.   For anyone involved in computing infrastructure part it is part of the everyday lingo.   You try to find the best combination of CPU power, SSD storage if you can and other nerdy things that will end up making a difference when you crunch or serve data.   So maybe this guy was analyzing his technique with the help of multiple servers like I have seen them do in swimming or other competitive sports at the highest levels.

    Turns out he is using prosthetic limbs.   Which possibly give him an unfair advantage.   His lower leg is more than 2kg lighter than his competitors.  Others focus on aspects where he is slower due to these blades.   My question is really quite simple:

    What if the company making Oscar Pistorious’ blades give him a new model which shaves a second of his time?

    Suddenly he would be scoring olympic gold and possibly breaking records.   The same body, with just a small tweak in the prosthetics, would be able to produce much different results.   What if he and others decided to start at the high jump?   Suddenly we would all be discussing the technology in their blades rather than the athletes.   What if he started to run 1500m instead of 400 and he always started really slow but then steamed ahead in the second part of the race as his competitors (without blades) got tired in the lower part of their legs but his blades continued as always?

    Progress in sports results follows a pretty linear path.   (With the exception of certain sports in Mexico due to the altitude.)  As the human body reaches its limits this tails off.   In technology we have Moore’s law but in fact, the perceived benefit to the user of a PC is tailing off.   For more than a decade Intel has been worrying about this, Microsoft has been trying to think of CPU intensive tasks we would really find useful enough to justify constant upgrades.   Mobile phones is where the action is, where you see adverts for “dual core” or “quad core” processors and actually care.   These pocket wonders playback HD video with ease, do voice recognition (with not so much ease) and multitask pretty effectively.   Some of us rely on them to actually get work done, so speed is crucial.   We are willing to pay for it.   When netbooks appeared, people groaned about the puny Atom processors.   Zoom forward, repackage the same thing as a tablet and nobody cares!  It is the job of the user interface to hide the technology.

    It is clearly not a good long term strategy for the Olympics to allow athletes like Pistorious in the Olympic Games.   Unlike mobile devices which cross over boundaries, competitive sport is a show, a spectacle, an idea.   If my next mobile phone opens up documents twice as fast I will be happy.  If it responds as fast as a real secretary to my voice commands I will be ecstatic.   But if Pistorious’ next blades get him halving some Olympic record the whole planet will be annoyed.

     

    Note:  Just a few weeks after I wrote this post, Oscar Pistorius affirmed my conclusions in the worse possible way.   After losing the 200m race in the Paralympics he complained that his opponent “cheated” by using different blades than he did!  If you see the race, the way the Brazilian caught up with him was indeed rather ridiculous;  which simply highlights the problem I was writing about.