Robert Dow

Mozilla’s Firefox crashes about every hour on my machine. I get a polite dialog box that asks me to report it, and I do, and then the noble open source browser tries diligently to restore the pages I had open before it had its hourly heart attack. Firefox doesn’t smoke, eat fatty foods, or lack exercise, but it does have … Read more

Doesn’t always mean you win AMD and Nvidia have been leaders in being first; Intel, ARM, Apple, Samsung, and others have been quick, but seldom first. Qualcomm has had some firsts.  First-to-market (FTM), also referred to as first-mover advantage, or FMA, can often gain a significant advantage if it is the first entrant and gains a competitive advantage through control … Read more

They can deny it all they want In the second week of April 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the neo-economic arm of the DoD, DoE, DHS, NSA, and FBI, told Intel to take 50,000 of its Xeon processors out of the truck they were in and put them back in the warehouse—they weren’t going to get shipped to China … Read more

As always, the year begins with CES, at least if you work in technology land, and if you don’t, you’re probably not going to be reading this brand-new shiny issue of the TechWatch Quarterly, unless … hi, Mom! This year, CES brought us so many things including connected cars, 4K TVs, and the threat of 8K TVs, robots, drones, intelligent … Read more

Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a year or two, three max, autonomous cars will be operating on the highway, but probably not in city and residential streets. However, we won’t instantaneously have highways filled with autonomous cars. About 100,000 cars are built each year, and there are more than 3 million cars on the road, so at that production rate … Read more