Technology

Amazon Is Aggressively Pursuing Big Oil as It Stalls Out on Clean Energy

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Amazon Is Aggressively Pursuing Big Oil as It Stalls Out on Clean Energy

In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centers with 100 percent renewable energy. Apple, Facebook, and Google made similar pledges two years before that, and pressure from consumers and environmental groups drove Amazon to follow suit. For the next two years, the tech giant made admirable strides toward achieving its goal, bankrolling large solar plants and wind farms. Then, it stopped.

Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM – IEEE Spectrum

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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM – IEEE Spectrum

In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.

Ultimately, IBM was big and diverse enough in talent, staffing, financing, and materiel to succeed. In an almost entrepreneurial fashion, it took advantage of emerging technologies, no matter where they were located within the enterprise. In hindsight, it seemed a sloppy and ill-advised endeavor, chaotic in execution and yet brilliantly successful. We live in an age that celebrates innovation, so examining cases of how innovation is done can only illuminate our understanding of the process.

This is a rather fascinating story about the history of the technology.

Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers | Ars Technica

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Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers | Ars Technica

Almost every aspect of our daily lives is now shaped in some way by computer code. Yet the average person on the street has no idea how this all works or just how much influence developers now quietly wield in society. Tech journalist Clive Thompson is on a mission to change that with his new book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. Before he was a tech journalist, Thompson was a high school hacker who taught himself to code on early personal computers like the Commodore 64. His prior book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, pushed back against the doomsayers convinced that new technological tools are rotting our brains, arguing that such things actually boost our cognitive abilities. With Coders, "I wanted to give the average person a glimpse into who coders are, why they have the priorities they have, what their passions are, what their blind spots are," he said. "So that the average person can understand a little bit more the warp and woof of this digital world that coders have created for us."

Ostrich

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In recent weeks, since quitting most social media, I guess I’ve become a bit of an ostrich when it comes to following contemporary events and news, but I don’t really care. I don’t have one of those fancy color televisions or cable, I don’t pay attention to the television news. I do occasionally turn on my transistor radio to catch up what they are saying on NPR News, follow some of the political podcasts, but I am not caught up in the 24 hour news-cycle like so many others are today.

I’m not totally cut off from them media. I do read the newspapers and trade publications as part of my job, but I’m not somebody who does it recreationally. I check NPR.org a few times a day and often read the trending article in Mozilla Firefox’s Pocket. But I don’t spend endless hours going down that rat hole — but sometimes there are interesting essays out there to review. But not all the time, as I lack Internet access at home.

Listening to Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds, John Denver, and generally music recorded a half century ago, further isolates myself from the modernity I find so distasteful. I’m cynical, and I don’t like modernity. While I use a contemporary laptop, with modern versions of web browsers, Quantum GIS, and other security updates, I like my XFCE Window Manager, which in-style hasn’t changed in 25 years — and using easy-to-use terminal apps for my purposes.

I walk or take public transit around town, rather then motoring. I like my big jacked up truck, but I really hate motoring, especially in locations with speed restrictions and traffic lights. I spend my weekends in summer months in the wilderness, although I do like having electricity, my truck camper, propane camp stove, and my propane heater in the cold weather. But I don’t do campgrounds, except when there is no other option. And I doubt I would ever stay in a motel, unless there was absolutely no other option.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t like direction of contemporary society with colorful screens and ‘modern’ ways of living.

Camera shy

How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies

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It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies

This addictive effect is why Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, calls screens “electronic cocaine” and Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” In fact, Dr. Andrew Doan, the head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the US Navy — who has been researching video game addiction — calls video games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (Greek for drug).