Lacisoft's » The future

Why software is eating the world

lacisoft — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:55:57 +0000

An excellent article published in the Wall Street Journal, written by Marc Andressen who is co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. He also co-founded Netscape, one of the first browser companies and now is in the board of HP.

The article points out a few key facts from what today the software industry became and what its role is in modern society. Education is also mentioned and i fully agree that this one is the key for every individual who is alive and will be born in this society. Without education you have no chance in today’s world.

At the end of the article Andressen says that “I know where I’m putting my money.” Well i also knew for a time now that software, software products and support for software is the place where future is.

An excerpt from the article:

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

and another one

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

lacisoft — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:49:04 +0000

A very interesting video published by BBC Four about the world’s countries and their level of health and wealth.

I’m wondering how long can Earth sustain this ever growing need of resources from our healthier and wealthier civilization.

WordPress upgrade under 3 minutes without leaving admin interface

Google works on self driving cars

lacisoft — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:16:10 +0000

Well it seems that not only i think that automobiles have a way too primitive technology and usability. You should read my 2008 article and see what i was requiring for a modern car. Now Google just announced that they are working on a technology for cars that will allow them to automatically drive from one place to another without a driver. These cars are equipped with video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to detect other cars in traffic. Also detailed maps allow them to navigate to the destination required. These cars that Google created already navigated 140.000 miles without a driver (actually there was someone in the car to take over if something went wrong).

Although these cars are in an experimental phase i think that this is a great progress and a required evolutionary path for the transportation systems of mankind. According to the World Health Organization annually 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents. Also in the US the average time spent commuting is 52 minutes. Imagine that all these lives and all this time could be spared and could be used for progress.

Also when cars will be able to automatically drive themselves probably the number of cars will decrease and we will have less traffic and less pollution. The urge to have your own car will be less smaller and car sharing (as Google says it) will increase. They also speak about “highway trains of tomorrow”, these “trains” could significantly increase the number of people transported giving access to transportation to more and more people.

This is great, but let’s see how soon this can be implemented in our daily life. If it were up to me i would switch tomorrow!

I have some Google Wave invitations

lacisoft — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:52:48 +0000

I’m testing Google’s new revolutionary product Google Wave wich is in closed preview and i have 2 invitations left. If you want an invitation drop me an email at laci[at]lacisoft[dot]ro

Update: I have sent them out, so for the moment i have no invitations left. I will post an update here if i have more.

Chrome Experiments and Extensions

lacisoft — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:27:24 +0000

Or could i call this post just Javascript is the future ?

It seems that Google indeed has big plans with Chrome. That’s why they built in a very advanced and fast Javascript engine called V8. This Javascript engine will allow developers to create highly advanced applications that run directly in the browser without any other plugins, giving Chrome a huge advantage over Internet Explorer and Firefox.

To demonstrate Chrome’s abilites Google announced the so called Chrome Experiments, a handful of applications designed for Chrome. For example there is a Tetris game made entirely with the use of Javascript and CSS, without any other plugin. But the DOM Tetris is just one of many experiments.

Experiments that work very well on Chrome. Google advises us that they may work on other browsers too, but much slower. And i tried to run them on Firefox, some of them worked, some of them not.

Back to Chrome. My opinion is that this is the future, this is how applications will be done. I think that as soon as Chrome is mature enough, even more desktop software will move online so users will just need an operating systems and a browser.

Chrome’s abilities are powerful indeed, most of those who didn’t adopt Chrome yet, did this because of the lack of extensions (Firebug is a killer, you can’t live whitout it). But Google is working on this too, the proof is that there is alredy an extension howto page and i think extensions will land for regular users (easy setup and so on) not later then the middle of this year. Matt Cutts posted already a an example and a short description on howto setup your first Chrome extension if you can’t wait till then.

But when extensions will become something usual for Chrome, the speed and the abilities of the browser will make very hard for the competition, especially for Microsoft to catch up with Google.

HRP-4C – the japanese robot fashion model

lacisoft — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:46:29 +0000

As a kid i often watched Star Trek and one of my favorite characters was Data, from the Next Generation series. I always wondered when we will be able to build an android just like Data.

Well, it seems that we are one step closer. Although far away from Data’s capabilities, HRP-4C, the 158 cm tall japanese robot fashion model can walk, talk, smile with the help of the 42 incorporated electronic motors and will show up on the catwalk sometime next week.

How much Google knows about you?

lacisoft — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:30:28 +0000

I’ve read just now an excellent post about the ways Google is gathering data about you, about us. And if you think about you came to realize that indeed the amount of data Google knows about you is scaring. Even for me, a Google fan. They know what you searched, what you bought, what sites you visit, what are your preferences and so on. We came to the point where Google has more knowledge about an individual then any other entity in the history of the world.

I have faith that Google as a company will not misuse this data. But what about a security breach ? No matter how secure you think you are, there were always ways to compromise that security. And this can happen to Google too. One angry employee, one little security breach and this data can fall into the hands of people not so benevolent. And i didn’t said anything yet about governements who can force Google by law to hand out this data to them.

These questions need answers and actions. We will have to change our behavior and restrict the data we provide to such companies as Google. But how can we do that ? Can we do that ?

Do we need a stupidity filter?

lacisoft — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:48:00 +0000

It seems that rampant stupidity that sometimes flows through the web will slow down once Stupidfilter will be ready.

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The future of internet browsers

lacisoft — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:47:13 +0000

An interesting concept presented by Chris Beard from Mozilla Labs. It is interesting to see how they imagine the future of web browsers. The mix of 3d rendering and user interaction is in the focus of this so called Aurora project.