This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Boxes and Arrows has an interview with Adam Greenfield on his new book, Everyware. “Increasingly invisible but present everywhere in our lives, [computing] has moved off the desktop and out into everyday life — affecting almost every one of us, whether we’re entirely aware of it or not.”
Khoi Vinh reports on computer technology in Vietnam. They’re wired for broadband and Windows still dominates.
The $100 Laptop being designed by the MIT Media Lab was recently unveiled. It’s a bright green, has a hand-crank for recharging the battery, flash memory, USB ports, networking, etc. The target audience is children in third-world countries.
George Dyson visits Google on the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. A quote from a Googler — “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” — highlights a quasi-philosophical question about Google Print…if a book is copied but nobody reads it, has it actually been copied? (Or something like that.)
Interesting rumination on the possibility of flash memory-based computers. “In two years I have a feeling that Jobs will announce an Intel-flash iBook that will be the thinest laptop ever made boasting the best battery life of any current machine”.
Biologists are beginning to simulate living things by computer, molecule by molecule. They’re starting with E. coli, but they’ve still got a long way to go.
Apple introduces a touch-sensitive squeezable mouse.
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. This influential essay that introduces Bush’s Memex concept was published 60 years ago this month.
DataTiles project from Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Watch the movie for how it works…reminds me a bit of the computer systems in Minority Report.
Cringely on the future plans of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. MS is shipping their own PC, Apple is pushing into video on demand, and Google is building a massive supercomputer with the help of their customers.
Scientists at Princeton have made a crude computer out of bacteria. Earlier work showed “they could insert DNA into cells to make them behave like digital circuits [and] perform basic mathematical logic. The latest work expands this concept to vast numbers of bacteria responding in concert.”
Socials & More