Another new hope for solid state storage

If this storage technology pans out it seems to me that it would have the potential to eliminate hard drives as we know them. The remaining questions I didn't see addressed is expense of scaling up production and number of read/write cycles it can survive.

Businessweek's Geekiest Article Ever

BusinessWeek writes about the application of D&D to designing user experiences for websites. I just love the taking of something that would seem completely unrelated and applying it to a problem.

The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

PBS Newshour's blog has a guest column on an issue that really bugs me. The executives of tech companies gripe about how few workers they have who meet their needs. Do they really? How exacting are the job descriptions they use? Do the people they bring in using H1-B visas really meet those requirements or are they just useful in that they'll do anything to keep those visas including working absolutely insane hours, having no family or social life and never even thinking about asking for a raise? After all, if you hire an American they might do something entirely unreasonable like taking time off, expecting reasonable compensation given their expertise or some other shocking and completely unacceptable behavior for an employee. I've read articles about this issue online at sites like ComputerWorld, CIO and others and have seen IT professionals in the comments section mention that they don't recommend to their own children that they consider IT as a career. If you want students to consider STEM careers, do something about what's happening to the employees in STEM fields.

STEM education and STEM jobs aren't a silver bullet for U.S. unemployment

Computerworld writes about some of the facts concerning tech jobs. While software jobs and some other math related professions are doing OK they're not really booming. But engineering jobs in the more technical areas of the profession like electronics engineering are declining. Even the status of jobs in chemistry isn't as rosy as a general push for STEM education would seem to make it. Remember that the government is cutting back on funding for scientific research and most modern corporations are doing the same. Something that has the greatest potential to provide for our future well-being is being slowly strangled in the name of short term gain.

DVDs and Blu-Rays will still be relevant for a while yet

This columnist for Forbes understands that but still misses one of the biggest reasons why. He addresses the fact that if you're picky about picture or sound quality streaming isn't going to provide the absolute best experience. He brings up other facts but misses one of the absolute biggest obstacles in the real world to media streaming taking over the U.S. market.

Our pathetic broadband quality is a major barrier not only to streaming taking over the media market but to fully utilizing the potential of high speed internet for education, remote medicine and other benefits we probably just haven't thought of yet. There are areas inside major metropolitan areas where you can't get broadband, believe it or not. I work for a small chain of funeral homes and cemeteries. They have a location in Leavenworth Kansas. It's a town with a bit over 35,000 people in it and considered to be part of the greater KC metropolitan area. To this day I haven't been able to get useful broadband at that location. Then you work your way "down" to smaller cities and towns and rural areas and it only gets worse. If you can find it, decent bandwidth is expensive most of the time.

Netflix and its gaming cousin, GameFly, are a much more reasonable answer for millions of Americans when they want to watch movies, television series or play video games and will probably be staying that way for years to come.

Los Alamos National Lab has had quantum-encrypted internet for over two years

It will be very interesting to see when this actually starts rolling out. I do believe the DoD will be the first ones to have it, though.

ORBX streaming tech could revolutionize computing

CNet reports on ORBX streaming tech, which seems to offer a lot of promise in reducing bandwidth for demanding streaming applications.

GIFs are cool now?

If you've been around the internet for a while and maybe even its precursors such as BBSes you know the GIF has been around for a while. 25 years in fact. New Republic as a very good article on where it came from and where it's at now. It's really amazing that a humble little graphic file format could become such a flexible and wide spread phenomenon.

Danger, Jane & John Doe Computer User! Don't buy the retail copy of Office 2013.

PC World informs us that it is definitely true that if you buy a retail copy of Office 2013 instead of using Microsoft's "rental" system to acquire it is tied to the one computer forever. If the computer dies or you just need a new one with more capabilities your old copy is useless. You have to buy a new one. I think this is a rip off of the highest order no matter how badly Microsoft wants to switch from selling retail copies to perpetual leasing of their software if you want to use it. I think I'm going to tell everyone I know that buying a retail copy of Office 2013 is a very bad idea.