Friday, December 6, 2013

The End is Near: The End of Moore's Law that is

The jist of the article is this:
"The cost curves are kind of getting flat," Samueli told reporters at an evening Broadcom event at the Tank18 wine bar in San Francisco's trendy South of Market district. Instead of getting more speed, less power consumption and lower cost with each generation, chip makers now have to choose two out of three.
Moore's Law isn't making chips cheaper anymore
The core issue (from a Singularity point of view anyway) is: "Does computing power continue to double every 18mths or so?" If costs and energy consumption level off - that's not good in the long run as now exponential growth works against you in those areas. But, I'm confident that solutions will be brought to those issues as well.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Sexting and everything lives on forever




What's interesting is in the epilogue: When almost everyone sexts then sexts, by themselves, will no longer be career ending. But we, as people, will continue to find ways to embarrass ourselves.

Is it GIF or jiff?

The Kmart ad has resurrected the GIF v jiff war that raged in the early 1990s. I thought this was settled but then some pseudo-intellectuals bring it back up. I don't know why I'm so exercised about this but I am. It was an interesting debate 20 years ago as the community was trying to come to terms on how to describe things.



Do we say GIF (hard G) or jiff?
Do we say J-P-G or jpeg?
Is it dub-dub-dub or www?
Do we say "forward slash", "slash" or leave it out all together?


It doesn't matter what Steve Wilhite says, nor does it matter what CompuServ had in their original documentation. This is not 1993. The pronunciation, as chosen in millions upon millions of conversations over the last 20 years have settled the question.

I got the following quotes from twitchy.com


I don't know why I am so irritated that this religious war is being refought - but, there it is. I find it ridiculous that people make these claims. If they believed what they were saying (as opposed to being pretentious) they would be saying "jiff" instead of "GIF" in their conversations. And yet, I haven't heard it called "jiff" in close to 20 years.