Monday, June 25, 2007

new microsoft surface is here!

I saw this in development via the web about three years ago, and now out of (seemingly) nowhere microsoft launch it as "Surface", based on the silverlight platform, it is the next step in the 'flas' type platform where web/interfaces are now multimedia rich applications, the surface platform just adds the touch sreen world to this and combined makes my job as a web developer tough (I am not complainin though).

No more will people be happy with flat, no media websites, they will want by default a feature rich site that works on all browsers with embedded video, sound, moving living information.

To be honest I am happy, the 'web' at last can break free from its static life (I am not a great fan of flash as its not SEO friendly, silverlight is written in XAML (text) so can be 'read' by search engines) and move into the realms of desktop software where everything is live now not waiting for a click of a mouse etc.

It may be a while before Surface and Silverlight make it into everyday websites/stores, when it does it will definately change the face of both highstreet and web experiences and bring them so much closer.

Monday, June 18, 2007

semi conducter geekness

It is amazing who you meet at weddings.
I was chatting to a guy called B , who said he was an engineer, he was german over 2m tall.
His job is to make things smaller, if you have ever thought to yourself, 'there is no way thy can make my mobile any smaller' and then a week later you see they have.... Well B is one of the men on the planet that understands all of those IT articles that explain how stuff is stored onto semiconducter chips (ie flash memory.....). Not ony does he understand it he has a pretty good idea how to fit more information into the same space.

The smallest amount of space we can have curenntly without going into quantum physics is one atom big, from memory we are in the 600nm (Nanometre - approx 3 atoms per nanometer), so if moores law holds true we will be naring capacity shortly (a few years...) Oh no he says that is only if we use 2 dimensional storage....

I cant recall alot of the conversation after this I was just like the thought of a 200Gb SD card, a few years ago these were limited to 32Mb of storage, now you can but 4Gb cards, albeit pricey.

It looks like the age of solidstate storage is going to hit shortly and the ideas are endless, can you imagine downloading an entire DVD and storing it on a piece of silicon the size of a grain of rice?
Its all poosible before we even get to quantum ideas.

You sometimes forget there are people out there who are passionate about their job, we take them for granted but thout people like B and the companies they work for we would still be draggin briefcase size mobile phones around while waiting for the post to arrive...

hats off to all those who do the work we all take for granted!