Developing Upwards

Looking at Science and Technology over the next year is one thing, but its far more fun and far easier to make wild guesses that cover the next decade! There will be at least one machine capable of carrying out a phone conversation that passes the Turing test. This is bigger than it sounds, because you can fail the Turing test and still be smarter than a lot of people, these days. The end of the decade will likely see annoyingly friendly automated phone services and websites, first as terribly novelties and slowly as useful, subtle additions to our user interfaces. When you click the wrong thing in Firefox and mutter, "Ugh, not that!" and it corrects it for you, you'll finally stop finding it annoying. Automated photo and video manipulation is going to get weirdly good. I mean, this stuff is going to creep you out. People will delete their ex from entire collections of videos and photos without a trace, like they never existed (not a bad thing). Weird, is inserting peopl...

I made a few long-term predictions in conversations over the past week about science in the next century. Focusing on only the next year is much more challenging. Also, I'll be proven wrong much more quickly. Mass market CPU/GPU hybrids are going to make netbooks and tablets very viable machines. HDMI outputs will make them powerful docked machined, capable of replacing a laptop realistically. Intel might have dropped the ball, but Nvidia's Tegra chips are going to prove this in the early half of 2010. Cheap DNA tests are going to be a noticeable social problem. We're going to see numerous news items this year about disgruntled parents trying to prove some fear with a few stolen strands of hair and a self-addressed envelop from a shady testing company. The legal and social implications aren't going to be pretty. At least one eBook reader will be released with color support in the US market. TMOS displays will appear in netbooks and phones. Our display technologies will ...

Call them New Year's Resolutions or whatever else you want, but we all should have some goals and we should lay them down. Of course, I'm not sure if its better or worse to make these goals public. I'm just doing what feels natural. I'm going to move this blog away from Blogger and Blogspot and self host. I've spent the last couple days building a new server, for personal and future business use. I really like the setup I've built to launch and manage a bunch of domains easily. It should be a piece of cake to set up, but migration I'll have to look into the details on. I will launch up to ten websites in 2010. Some of them will be very small and nifty. Some of them will be undertakings and hopefully profitable. I'll put more focus to my "Personal Brand" and to my business as an actual business, rather than a dude who does stuff for cash. I won't let that business face become cold, however. I will read 50 books. This one is tougher, because ...

I couldn't have chosen a cheesier headline. I'm breaking my "How To ..." pattern of titles, but I figure this is probably for the best, and when better to make a refreshing change? I still want to post more How To articles, but I don't need to stick with the pattern for everything. It gets difficult to twist some titles into the right shape, anyway. Prediction posts are always a big thing the week before and after January 1 and years ending with 0 always have even more of them. Why should I miss out on a great meme that only comes around once a decade? I'm going to mix it up a bit and give you more than a top ten predictions on some random topic: Developing Upwards presents, My Top Five Lists of Top Ten Predictions for 2010 This originally was written "My Top Ten Lists ...," but damn if I don't wanna do that! I apologize for anyone who just let out a huge groan. You can skip them, if you want. The plan is to post one Top Ten Predictions list a da...

UPDATE: Fixed 'Response' to 'Respond' in title. Sorry about that. We all have to do it, so I might as well take my turn. First impression: no surprise here. There are expectations in two forms here. We can expect certain things to come of this and we can expect certain things to disappoint us about this. There is a third, external expectation that techies will divide into a camp of people who think its Rilly, Rilly Important and a camp who thinks you're all wasting your time . I mean, gosh, its almost like this is exactly like any other topic we split down some arbitrary middle about. Get over it. I Expect To Like: Cheaper netbooks Installing Chrome OS on old hardware I Expect To Dislike: Feeling like I have an OS that won't let me install anything but a browser Not being able to install Android Apps Not being able to run real Chrome on Android Having no way to persist the state of a Javascript VM, so that I can close applications or save memory on long run...

So this is my obligatory start-of-2008 post. I know I haven't written much lately, but work was busy and then there was the holidays, and I'm making a commitment to really revitalize my blog. Part of that may be that my adsense, after years of blogging, as only hit half the required minimum balence for payment . But, I'm not in it for the money. Not unless there was a lot of money in it! For 2007 this means... that I need to wrap up the last year We moved back to North Carolina when the Pennsylvania winter cleared up, and I'll admit that the summer was a bit rough. I lost my most steady contract when funding went sour, shortly before the movie, but you know what? Staying home with the family was great without a lot of work to be done, and we got by OK. I enjoyed the time. After a while, I started CharPy, the Charlotte Python Group. We're still small and growing, but the first meeting gave me a lead on a full-time position at SocialServe.com, where I'm now happil...