Kyle Brady: Blog » Technology

“Technology As Evolution, Not Devolution” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:31:26 +0000

New column at Technotainment Revelations on True/Slant:

In various publications, slamming the Internet, technology, and multi-tasking has become a favorite habit, and Frontline: Digital Nation (PBS) is no exception. Simultaneously slamming technology as the culprit of memory loss, decreased productivity, social problems, lifestyle problems, and the general degradation of humanity, such programs overlook the obvious: technology, and specifically the Internet, is much more about evolution as a species than a brain-destroying side attraction.

Go check it out.

“The Mouse Is Dead, Long Live The Mouse!” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:14:40 +0000

New column at Technotainment Revelations on True/Slant:

There’s been some buzz recently about the pointer device for computers known as the mouse, and how it compares/fails/reigns king over similar options like the touchpad, but with the reveal of the not-so-interesting iPad, an interesting concept has appeared: what if the touchpad and mouse were merged?

Go check it out.

“Tech and Entertainment Predictions for 2010″ [Self]

Kyle Brady — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:59:38 +0000

New column at Technotainment Revelations on True/Slant:

As the last in the pair of year-end lists, the following ten items are predictions for technology and entertainment for the coming year – in no particular sorting order.

Go check it out.

“Let’s Stop The Nonsense, OK?” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:10:36 +0000

New column at the Inquisitr:

If you’re one of the people that goes insane and hyper-joyous over things like Twitter Lists, you need to seek medical help – these “features”, used in the loosest sense of the software term, are not something to get overly excited about.

Go check it out.

The F-22: A Bureaucratic Failure to Understand War [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:05:52 +0000

War is unpredictable and largely unforeseeable – most especially in the manner in which it will be fought.

Why, then, does the United States continue to insist that the “future of war” for America will be mostly in the guerrilla style seen with terrorist organizations? Has both the Pentagon and Congress forgotten the lessons of military history? In preparing a country for future self-defense, or aggressive actions, focusing on the struggles of the present inevitably fails to meet the needs of the future, producing technology and methodologies that is hopelessly unsuited to the now-present theatre of war.

The street-by-street method of war currently being used by American military in counter-terrorism efforts is relatively new, and all branches of the military were largely unprepared for it – in terms of both training and equipment. However, modern troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern locales are almost exactly opposite their peers of a decade ago: their training, equipment, and weaponry is designed and tested heavily to cater to their needs in the closed-in, chaotic environments. The retooling of the military, with a heavy focus on the Army, for urban battlefields has taken many years, but resulted in better personnel gear, the reliance on (and improvement of) unmanned drones, and a rethinking of certain military strategies.

However, the Middle East, and other counter-terrorist or black ops conflicts, are not the only battlefields. True, America is currently embroiled in physical conflicts that classify as counter-terrorism, but other threats from various sources could easily erupt into more violent interactions that would be more akin to “classical warfare” – such as North Korea, China, and Russia. These potential conflicts, or even wars, would be much different from the United States’ current military interests.

In terms of sheer manpower, all three of these potential enemies outnumber the American military by significant ratios – fighting such countries in “hand-to-hand” combat would be both pointless and devastating. These conflicts would be fought, and won, in a more traditional manner resembling more the World Wars than Afghanistan: via air and sea power. Despite this simple, and obvious, fact, funding has been continuously cut to “next generation weapons” over the last decade to focus on the lowly footsoldier, rather than devastating and effective weapons that could start, fight, and finish wars without the death or injury of any American military, and the F-22 Raptor is merely the latest and most public example.

Congress, along with President Obama, has stopped the financing of additional F-22 Raptor fighter jets, claiming that the current 187 Raptor jets in the fleet is enough to serve the country. To put that in perspective, that equates to slightly more than three jets per state if they were to be distributed evenly and domestically, or barely enough to canvas each coast with overlapping defensive areas. Basic analysis shows that 187 stealth, nextgen fighters is not as large a force as one might assume, especially given that modern aircraft carriers hold an average of 48 fighter jets, not to mention that most of the airfleet, such as F-16’s, are the aging products of decades past.

This is not to say, however, that air and sea power is being ignored, because they are, most definitively, not. Certain aspects of what could be classified as “future classical warfare” are being heavily invested in, such as space-based laser weaponry, country-wide protection defense systems, and highly efficient/intelligent drone vehicles. But it is the progress of the recent years that presents a worrying trend, not the lack of modern programs: the tendency to eschew advanced weaponry, gear, or otherwise technology for more immediately applicable technology to the current battlefields. Time and time again, empires and countries alike focused on handling their immediate military needs over innovation and the advancement of their future forces, and ultimately met their own demise as a result – Imperialist England and Cold War Russia are simple proof.

Congress, and the rest of American Bureaucracy, are in a unique position to effect the military investments without having the knowledge, foresight, and impartial judgment necessary to make appropriate decisions – similar problems can be found in Congressional oversight of agencies such as the CIA, who are tasked for intelligence appropriation, but are criticized in a public forum for acting, or planning to act, in accordance with their mandate: protecting the United States via operations on foreign soil. The simple ignorance of many Congressmen is astounding, and is only magnified by giving the same individuals the capacity to approve military budgets when they have, on the whole, little to no knowledge of the needs of the military, let alone any knowledge of details outside basic costs.

Admittedly, the combined budget of the United States Air Force, Army, and Navy is quite an astounding figure, rounding out at an estimated $367 billion per year - not including general "Defense Wide" expenditures. This could likely be cut in any number of ways, such as addressing overspending on certain contracts where bidding is inflated on the principle that "the government can afford it". But the place to do so is absolutely not cutting investments in the future, new technology, or any other advancements that could save American lives while retaining, or increasing, the country’s military dominance – the F-22 is just the tip of the government-funded iceberg.

“The Cloud vs. The Desktop: An Irrelevant Argument” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:30:27 +0000

New guest post over at the Inquisitr:

These days, tech pundits and futurists can’t go a week without pontificating on the future of computing, wondering (and arguing) whether the computer will be merely a tool to access “the cloud” or as an application set. Even the most inconsequential software release (or failure) sparks this argument - the most recent example is the release of the Opera browser’s repackaging of a personal webserver.

Go take a look!

“Iran techRising” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:44:25 +0000

I was part of a podcast earlier this week that was just published about the Iran "situation" with Michael Sean Wright and Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins, for nicefishfilms / Thinking Out Loud called "Iran techRising".

The podcast can also be found as a series of videos - the sound quality on me gets bad about 20m in for some reason, though.

A Paperless Society: An Easy Place to Start [Old Content]

Kyle Brady — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:56:32 +0000

Everyone in the tech world dreams of a day when we're a truly "paperless society" - archives are purely digital, there are no warehouses of file boxes, and memos are never printed. Obviously, we haven't reached this (and may never), but PDFs, email, and assorted other digital tools have helped us come a long way: consider the effect email has had on regular mail (aka "post"), and without much afterthought by those using it.

But to reach such a paperless society, do we really need to develop more tools? The answer is obviously yes, but what if a few tweaks to already-existing technology allowed us a step closer?

The best place to start are credit/debit card receipts.

After you get your daily (or not-so-daily) latte from Starbucks, or coffee from Dunkin Donuts, do you keep the receipt? Be honest - most of the time they'll ask if you want a copy, and click an option to not print one for you. Now consider all the other trivial expenses of life... most purchases don't require you to keep the receipt for warranty purposes. Stamps, a tank of gas, movie tickets, etc. are perfect examples.

Additionally, receipts aren't required for tracking purposes, because of the pervasiveness of online banking. I'm assuming that most people use online banking, at least to some degree, which isn't a bad assumption - if you didn't have the option a year ago, your bank probably got bought by someone that provides it.

If your bank is anything greater than a one-off podunk local bank, they have alot of information on you - email is just one of many personal data items. Online banking takes this one step further, and may have information like a cell phone number... Bank of America has mine as a security confirmation tool via a text-message confirmation code system.

Using an online system, a user could specify a set of rules (or use a default set) that defines when they want receipts: price floors, individual retailers, purchase location, etc. Then, at the time of transaction, the bank associated with the card receives the request, and returns data to the retailer about receipt printing, most likely saying "no receipt". An email could be sent to the user with the purchase data (specified beforehand), or kept in a receipt archive downloadable from the bank.

This is merely inserting a small bit of functionality into technology that already exists and is relatively mature - a set of online options, an added return value to the retailer, and maybe an email sent. I'm not suggesting a tech revolution here.

It could be the beginning of a truly paperless society. I don't have exact numbers, but I would imagine not printing 75% of the modern world's receipts would be a huge paper savings - and alot of trees.

Who knows what would follow? Once the public warms to the idea of not worrying about receipts, perhaps paper currency itself can be phased out (saving not only many trees, but billions of dollars a year). Or maybe train/metro/bus/lightrail/subway tickets via cellphones.

I'm all for this, whatever follows.

ArsTechnica Misses the Point (on Holographic Data Storage) [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:40:48 +0000

ArsTechnica did a writeup of a new optical disc technology from GE that can produce 500GB storage on each disc... and they were sneering at it. I'm here to clear the air.

Essentially the discs use a holographic imaging technology to accomplish multi-layer storage on a special material that I'm assuming is a variant of plastic. You can read the tech specs on it if you want. But here's a quote from the Ars piece:

If anyone can make the case for a 500GB optical disc in 2011, I'd love to hear it.

Excuse me? I think that's a little overly critical. Maybe there's not a market for ginormous data storage for the average person... or maybe there is?

Consider that the average music collection today is in the Gigabyte range, and can easily reach double-digits. Personally, I'm sitting on about 65GB of music. Not all of that fits on my iPod, and it sure isn't very portable to other devices since the iPod doesn't facilitate easy data transfers.

Ever tried burning some music for a friend on CDs these days? I've resorted to using DVDs because of the larger storage capacity. Who's to say that a 500GB disc wouldn't be useful? You could burn your entire music collection to disc while you're sleeping, pop it in the car on the drive to work, listen from your work computer, etc. All from one disc.

But this is just the immediate and most obvious use. Imagine the implications.

CD technology paved the way of using a combination of lasers and plastic for data storage, quickly followed by DVDs and now Blu-Ray DVDs, each successor having larger storage and a greater feature set. But non-portable storage hasn't changed that drastically in almost two decades... excluding a small minority of solid-state drives (in things like new iPods, netbooks, etc.), we're still using magnetized plates read by a mini robotic arm.

Solid-state drives have their own glories and limitations, which I won't get into. But GE has made a successful application of holographic technology for data storage. Isn't this important? Yes! Once the method is shown to be successful, others are going to look at how to apply the same ideas to their hardware projects, and experiment with improving it.

We're not going to reach ubiquitous and unobtrusive data storage via solid-state drives, unless something drastically changes - the memristor has potential. But it's definitely not happening with standard hard-disk technology.

Holographic pattern storage is likely the future of large-scale data permanence, or something derived from it. And yet Ars Technica missed this crucial point.

“The Rise of Skynet” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:56:27 +0000

This is my first guest post on a "real" blog... "The Rise of Skynet" on The Inquisitr.

Excerpt:

The reality is that Skynet is quickly becoming a reality, whether we like it or not. And since I haven’t heard of Sarah Connor blowing up buildings, killing people, or traveling through time to avoid robots… I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.

Go check it out.