2 Robots

I am a digital pack rat. I used to keep piles and piles of floppy disks all over my room. Cabinets were full of them. This included software I had bought (or “borrowed”), school work, creative writing, and source code I had written. Later, I moved it all over to CDs, and then to DVDs. [...]

A colleague recently asked me who I thought would win the mobile phone wars: Apple or Google. He suggested that Android is a better horse to bet on because Google has virtually unlimited resources to spend until Android dominates the mobile phone market. From reading around the Internet, this seems to be a common misconception.

The expectation of an emerging dominant platform for smart phones comes from general experience with the PC industry, where there has been virtually a single platform for decades. However, the cell phone business is very different from the PC business: while market forces pushed the latter towards platform consolidation, there are several factors keeping mobile platforms distinct. Factor in Google’s self-stated motivation for entering this market in the first place and it becomes clear that the current fragmentation of smart phone platforms isn’t going to go away any time soon.

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Six months ago I took my iPhone into a hot tub with me. It wasn’t on purpose – I had it in my bathing suit pocket (because, where else would you carry it?). I immediately realized my mistake, and rushed to dry it off. If you search the Internet, you’ll find that the beat thing [...]

The VOX External Hard Drive (v1) is a solid is a great and near-silent external hard drive for almost any purpose. Like other external hard drives, it will work with all the major operating systems: Linux, OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista without any problems. It comes pre-formatted as a single NTFS partition. Read on for the full review.

For the past few years, I’ve been using a Mac Mini as my main HTPC. This has worked out really great, as the Mini is a small, quiet piece of hardware, and generally Apple’s iTunes/Frontrow is simple, intuitive, and impressive as a content management system. As my collection of media grew, I started to run [...]

Hard drive technology is fundamentally broken. The main problem with hard drives are that they haven’t been able to keep up with Moore’s Law. While computers have gotten faster and faster, hard drives seem to have topped out some time ago. At the same time, the total storage capacity of drives has continued to increase. [...]