TechWorld

One of the most common pieces of advice you'll get as a startup is this: Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure. I've heard this advice over and over and over at startup events, to the point that I got a little sick of hearing it. It's not wrong. Putting aside the fact that every single other startup in the world who heard this same advice before you is already out there frantically doing everything they can to hire all the best people out from under you and everyone else, it is superficially true. A company staffed by a bunch of people who don't care about their work and aren't good at their jobs isn't exactly poised for success. But in a room full of people giving advice to startups, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in that room: It doesn't matter how good the people are at your company when you happen to be working on the wrong problem, at the wron...

In 2006, after visiting the Computer History Museum's exhibit on Chess , I opined: We may have reached an inflection point. The problem space of chess is so astonishingly large that incremental increases in hardware speed and algorithms are unlikely to result in meaningful gains from here on out. So. About that. Turns out I was kinda … totally completely wrong . The number of possible moves, or "problem space", of Chess is indeed astonishingly large, estimated to be 10 50 : 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSnAiXKU7h8&w=420&h=315] Deep Blue was interesting because it forecast a particular kind of future, a future where specialized hardware enabled brute force attack of the enormous chess problem space , as its purpose built chess hardware outperformed general purpose CPUs of the day by many orders of magnitude. How many orders of magnitude? In the heady days of 1997, Deep Blue could ...

Since I started working on Discourse, I spend a lot of time thinking about how software can encourage and nudge people to be more empathetic online. That's why it's troubling to read articles like this one : My brother’s 32nd birthday is today. It’s an especially emotional day for his family because he’s not alive for it. He died of a heroin overdose last February. This year is even harder than the last. I started weeping at midnight and eventually cried myself to sleep. Today’s symptoms include explosions of sporadic sobbing and an insurmountable feeling of emptiness. My mom posted a gut-wrenching comment on my brother’s Facebook page about the unfairness of it all. Her baby should be here, not gone. “Where is the God that is making us all so sad?” she asked. In response, someone — a stranger/(I assume) another human being — commented with one word: “Junkie.” The interaction may seem a bit strange and out of context until you realize that this is the Facebook page...

Our kids have reached the age – at ages 4, 4, and 7 respectively – that taking longer trips with them is now possible without everyone losing what's left of their sanity in the process. But we still have the same problem on multiple hour trips, whether it's in a car, or on a plane – how do we bring enough stuff to keep the kids entertained without carting 5 pounds of books and equipment along, per person? And if we agree, like most parents, that the iPad is the general answer to this question , how do I get enough local media downloaded and installed on each of their iPads before the trip starts? And do I need 128GB iPads, because those are kind of expensive? We clearly have a media sharing problem. I asked on Twitter and quite a number of people recommended the HooToo HT-TM05 TripMate Titan at $40. I took their advice, and they were right – this little device is amazing! 10400mAh External Battery WiFi USB 3.0 media sharing device Wired-to-WiFi converter WiFi-to-WiFi bridge to...

I've been happy with my 2016 HTPC , but the situation has changed, largely because of something I mentioned in passing back in November: The Xbox One and PS4 are effectively plain old PCs , built on: Intel Atom class (aka slow) AMD 8-core x86 CPU 8 GB RAM AMD Radeon 77xx / 78xx GPUs cheap commodity 512GB or 1TB hard drives (not SSDs) The golden age of x86 gaming is well upon us. That's why the future of PC gaming is looking brighter every day. We can see it coming true in the solid GPU and idle power improvements in Skylake, riding the inevitable wave of x86 becoming the dominant kind of (non mobile, anyway) gaming for the forseeable future. And then, the bombshell. It is all but announced that Sony will be upgrading the PS4 this year, no more than three years after it was first introduced … just like you would upgrade a PC. Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it's looking increasingly likely that the company will release an updated version of the ...

Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It's practically a rite of passage . I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my driver's license, my first thought wasn't about the girls I would take on dates, or the road trips I'd take with my friends. Sadly, no. I was thrilled that I could drive myself to the arcade any time I wanted. My two arcade emulator builds in 2005 satisfied my itch thoroughly. I recently took my son Henry to the California Extreme expo , which features almost every significant pinball and arcade game ever made, live and in person and real. He enjoyed it so much that I found myself again yearning to share that part of our history with my kids – in a suitably emulated, arcade form factor. Down, down the rabbit hole I went again: I discovered that emulation builds are so much cheaper and easier now than they we...

I don't think we computer geeks appreciate how profoundly the rise of the smartphone, and Facebook, has changed the Internet audience. It's something that really only happened in the last five years , as smartphones and data plans dropped radically in price and became accessible – and addictive – to huge segments of the population. People may have regularly used computers in 2007, sure, but that is a very different thing than having your computer in your pocket, 24/7, with you every step of every day, fully integrated into your life. As Jerry Seinfeld noted in 2014: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR1ckgXN8G0&w=560&h=315] But I know you got your phone. Everybody here's got their phone. There's not one person here who doesn't have it. You better have it … you gotta have it. Because there is no safety , there is no comfort , there is no security for you in this life any more … unless when you're walking down the street you can feel a hard rect...