11.16.2010 by Kevin Creighton
If you think the strip searches by the TSA are invasive,
you ain't seen nothin' yet.
Privacy advocates are sounding alarms over recent comments that Microsoft’s Xbox CFO Dennis Durkin made concerning the advertising potential the Kinect has by being able to peer into your home, and see what you and your family and friends are all about.
Presumably the system could also be used to get age, race and gender data from whoever is in the room, and though I doubt the system is advanced enough to recognize specific brand labels that might be laying around, it’s not far fetched to think that could happen eventually.
The marketing side of me just *drools* at getting demographic data like this, but the decent human being side of me recoils at the thought. Hopefully there are enough decent human beings at Microsoft to stop this idea in it's tracks.
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11.04.2010 by Kevin Creighton
Is the PC (even in laptop form) dead? Are smartphones the new personal computer?
- It's always with you: You've heard the saying, "The best camera is the one you have with you"? The same is true for PCs, and in this case, it's your smartphone. (Ignore for a moment the fact that your smartphone is often the camera you've got with you, too.) Most of us don't have the physical endurance to lug a laptop around everywhere we go, and even if we did, pulling it out every time you want to check your email is a pain most of us aren't willing to endure.
And the other bullet points in the article are just as interesting.
I've been using Macs since, well, The Mac, and I've been using laptops since my
ol' pen-based, 486-driven Compaq. While I do lurves me my MacBook Pro, the fact is, aside from processing images for the web and some design/presentation apps like Dreamweaver and Keynote, 90% of what I do with my MacBook can be done an iPhone, and 99% of it can be done on an iPad.
5 years from now, we'll look at the desktop PC as a kind of personal media/file server, and laptops as an iPad with a keyboard.
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