technology

Christmas With The Service Outage

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Remember Christmases when the outages of Netflix or Steam wouldn’t have been factors?  It was only a few years ago when it wouldn’t have been as noticed or even regarded.

Of course now we can add large-scale technical glitches to other holiday annoyances like non-working Christmas lights, traffic, closed businesses, and crowded airports.  I wonder how used we’ll get to them.

I imagine not very.  We expect instant service from our technology, even if we usually accept much less.  However I imagine Netflix and Valve know this and will work to correct things for next year.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Our Gifts To The Historians Of The Future

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Well, Chris Brown got into a Twitter tussle with a comedienne.  Warning, strong language, and a reminder of what a sexist jerk he is, if you needed the reminder.

Meanwhile, The Complex put together a list of Donald Trump’s 50 stupidest tweets.  I rather imagine they had to pare it down a lot.

So now between Twitter, screenshots, articles, backup databases, and browser caches, this kind of moronicism is archived forever.

Think of the future.  Think of the historians who will go through this digital embarrassment festival and what they’ll do with it.  History may have been written by the victors, but these days history is written onto disk drives, waiting to be discovered.  Hideous secrets and embarrassing truths will be dug up again and again.

History a hundred years from now will not be the same.

You’re welcome future historians who read this.  Also, kinda sorry about this crazy.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

So What’s Next For Apple?

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We here at the fan-to-pro group have a mailing list we discuss things on, including tweets, news, etc.  This came partially from my discussion on what’s next for Apple.

And namely, I’m not entirely sure – because it’s hard to know where anything goes next.

Look, Apple was successful.  They defined markets and products.  They defined designs.  They’re being imitated.  They’ve done well – but as we all know, there’s always the question of “what’s next” which is kind of hard when you’ve come as far as they have.

Except I think the question applies to a lot of technology companies.

Where does anyone go from here?

  • The norm is portable phones that are small computers.
  • The norm is tablets that are flat slates of computing power.
  • The norm is slick and powerful laptops.
  • The norm is portable music, portable books, portable video – portable everything.

So we’ve all got a lot of powerful stuff that does all sorts of things out of SF films and technophilic fantasies.  Hell, I’ll say we’re further along technically than I’d ever dreamed 10 years ago.  The problem is I’m not sure what’s next for any company.

Television?  Gaming consoles?  Being subsumed into other devices.  Social media is established.  Until we start implanting things it seems we’ve hit a great pinnacle of This Stuff Is Awesome.

So what’s next for Apple?  Hell, what’s next for any technology company?

For those of us who can figure it out it’s a fantastic career advantage, or a chance to even found a business.  It’s just we won’t always know when we’re right until it’s too late . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.