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Crashes Needn’t Be Fatal
Daniel Lyons 11/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
Many of us have suffered a data-destroying computer crash. But some stories are better than others. Josh Diulio, a marketing exec from Monroe, Mich., left his HP laptop sitting on a ledge on the balcony of his apartment building while he ran inside to get a drink. When he came back a crow was perched on the open laptop. The crow, startled by Diulio, leaped up and away, tipping the laptop just enough that it fell seven stories to the street below—where, just for good luck, it was run over by passing cars. Then there's the tale of Duncan Mowatt, a graphic designer in Seattle, who was having trouble with an external hard drive. The cause was a mystery until one day Mowatt's girlfriend picked up the drive and saw thousands of ants and ant larvae pouring out of it. She freaked out (as one might) and threw the drive across the room, where it smashed into Mowatt's laptop and wiped out its hard drive, too.
LETTERS
Golden Age, Gone?
11/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
Readers mulled the implications of the collapse of Wall Street's storied firms, our Oct. 13 cover story. Capitalism is a "double-edged sword," one said, as another dubbed the bailout "madness." And one cast it in perspective."Today's crisis is one of those unavoidable events that occur under freedom."
Today’s Forecast: Cloudy
Daniel Lyons 11/1/2008 12:00:00 AM
Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems used to call it "the big friggin' web-tone switch" ("Web tone" being the digital successor to "ringtone"). IBM dubbed it "on-demand computing." Others have called it "grid computing" and "software as a service." The latest name is "cloud computing," and it's the hot new dance craze—er, tech trend—that's sweeping the computing industry, generating so much hype that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking at a conference recently, felt moved to bash the whole cloud phenomenon as just a fad. "Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane," Ellison said.
TECHNOLOGY
'Open Wide...'
Barrett Sheridan 10/16/2008 12:00:00 AM
As the U.S. presidential debates have shown, Barack Obama and John McCain can't agree on much. One rare exception: electronic health records. Obama has proposed spending $50 billion to help doctors and hospitals digitize their files and build patient databases. McCain agrees that electronic recordkeeping could lower costs and save lives—say, by helping doctors more easily recognize which patients are on dangerous drug combinations.
TECHNOLOGY
New Software Turns PC Into TiVo TV Recorder
9/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
THE INTERNET
Like A Super Hero
Barrett Sheridan
Clad in a comfy black t shirt and jeans, Blaise Aguera y Arcas stood onstage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, California, early last year in front of a projection screen that ran the height of an entire wall. On the screen was a tapestry of hundreds of high-quality digital documents and photos; one image, a scan of an ancient map of the world, had more data than most hard drives. Ordinarily, interacting with—and making sense of—such huge amounts of data would be tedious, if not impossible. Anyone who's tried to work with a 10-megapixel photo on a laptop screen knows this. But the new program Aguera y Arcas was demoing, dubbed Seadragon, made every transition seamless and lightning fast. The audience saw the patchwork quilt of images become a single shot of the façade of Notre Dame cathedral—and in another instant, a close-up of a gargoyle's tooth.