Robert Dow

They’re not “Gs,” they’re “Ss” It’s pretty exciting to think of a supercomputer in a chip, but then I guess that all depends on what you’re calling a supercomputer, and I doubt we’d get much consensus. The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia (published by the Computer Language Company) says a supercomputer is: The fastest computer available. It is typically used for simulations … Read more

“Maybe we need to know ourselves a little better before we are able to successfully extrapolate how AI would behave—and the risks involved.”—Leo F. Fernandes Blue Boy. Quasi, an animatronic robot designed by grad students at Carnegie Mellon University, shows a “sad” face. (Courtesy IEEE Spectrum and Tom Altany) Stimulated by the comments of Kurzweil and my own underlying interests … Read more

Now you can get a mobile phone that’s either made of chocolate, pretty in pink, or tattles on you if you’re lying. Or you can wait a while and get one with no buttons and a decent sized screen. You can already surf the web, check your email, your location, listen to music, watch TV, play games, send text messages, … Read more

Once again, during the seasonal second quarter PC sales have slowed. And just as seasonal as this yearly regular slowdown is the panic that grips Wall Street, as they seem to discover, like a pack of ducks for the first time, that the market doesn’t always go up, month after month. Imagine—the PC market is like the stock market: it … Read more

Grandma used to tell me, Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire. Grandma was right about most things. Who’s buying who or building what? There’s been a lot of speculation recently about the CPU and GPU companies. Will Intel buy ATI? Will Intel buy Nvidia? Will AMD buy ATI? Will Intel enter the GPU market? Here’s what I think, and some of … Read more

Not small as in Lilliputian or pygmy, or small as in weak or puny, but, well, tiny, and shrinking all the time. E. F. Schumacher popularized the notion, and the term, in his landmark 1971 essays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful), and although his original thesis is long forgotten, the term isn’t; and so today I am applying it to the handheld and PC … Read more

If you write for a living, expressing your opinion and making forecasts, you can be expected to make a few mistakes. When that happens, it can be embarrassing. In the extreme it can be damaging to whomever you’ve inadvertently, and ignorantly (but hopefully never maliciously), misrepresented. Everybody makes comments and statements they wished they hadn’t—ask the president of the U.S., … Read more

If the markets we serve continue to consolidate I may have to go to work for a living—gack! What company would have me? I’m old, cranky, have an inflated opinion of my worth, and I’m hard to manage—hmmm, except for the old part, I guess I’m like most folks in SiVal. In the last 12 months we’ve watched our four … Read more

Companies need a venue—they are hungry for a place to speak I remember the party we had in 2001, the “Thank god we don’t have to go to Comdex” party. We had it several times years later—it was always a relief to skip that and the drudgery of Las Vegas. CES was nice in 2002 and 2003, mostly because it … Read more