Why Design Matters

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.OK, you're right. Countless articles and great books by brilliant designers have been written on this subject. So, who am I to tell you why design matters? As matter of fact I'm not going to tell you anything new. It just happened that I came across a particularly hideous example of bad industrial design that underlines pretty well that Design isn't merely an ancillary feature but quite to the contrary the most essential aspect of ... Read more

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich eine Kopie benötigte. Auf meine Frage, warum diese ... Read more

Greatness, luck and storytelling

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.Recently, I've done some reading on computer history again. If you're interested in that sort of stuff and haven't read it yet go and have a look at Ars Technica's in-depth series on the history of the Amiga home computer. It's quite a comprehensive piece on a significant part of computer history that's largely forgotten today. This series and other documents such Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil remind me of how far ahead the Amiga ... Read more

Huge Potential For Mesh Networking In Mobile Phones

Apple's iOS 7 contains a highly interesting but until now very much under-appreciated feature that Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity. Another name for this feature is mesh network and it potentially can change the world. Basically, a mesh network is a network topology, in which each participant is connected to every other participant. This results in a dense network that's particularly resilient towards failures and tampering from outside. In contrast to that the computer networks we commonly use for the most part employ a ... Read more

Transcendence

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.Having watched the film Transcendence recently I thought I'd use this opportunity to write a bit more about how the singularity might come about and how it might look like. I have a bit of a problem (to say the least) with the film's overarching anti-technology stance. Then again, the Luddites in the film are terrorists who aren't above killing humans for, well, preventing machines from killing humans. I suppose logic and reason have ... Read more