During last week’s iPhone leak saga, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, reached out to Gizmodo with a story: The morning of the iPad launch, an engineer showed Woz an iPad for two minutes. For this he was fired.
Apple is ruthless
April 27th, 2010Sony gives floppy drives a death blow
April 26th, 2010The days of the 3.5-inch floppy disk are now officially numbered.
Sony, which boasts 70 percent of the anemic market, announced Friday that it would end Japanese sales of the ancient storage medium in March 2011, according to a report in the Mainichi Daily newspaper.
The 3.5-inch floppy was a ubiquitous and necessary component for storing and transferring files between personal computers for nearly three decades. Sony pioneered the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981, eventually replacing the 5.25-inch floppy disk that had previously been the popular storage format.
However, as the size of files and programs grew, the floppy disk was pushed aside by inexpensive and larger-format storage medium. Thanks to the creation of storage methods such as CDs, DVDs, Zip, and USB drives, Sony saw its Japanese sales of floppies decline from a record 47 million disks in fiscal 2002 to 12 million in fiscal 2009.
Most other floppy disk manufacturers had long since pulled out of the market, and Sony itself has already ceased sales to most of its overseas markets.
Certainly the writing had been on the walls for years. With the release of the iMac in 1998, Apple was the first computer maker to take the plunge and eliminate the floppy completely. Dell followed suit in 2003 when it dropped the floppy as standard equipment on one of its Dimension desktops.
I remember when the HDFD drives came out; I couldn’t afford to by a 10 pack of diskettes, they were $80.00 a box (a lot of money for a middle school kid). :ast time I purchased a pack of diskettes they were around $5.00. I guess it won’t be long before flash drives get to that price and they will be the media of choice (which is now DVD’s).
Don’t let Vendor Hype Take You Down the Wrong Road
February 15th, 2010To identify the right CRM solutions for your business, you first need to understand what CRM is. Customer Relationship Management is a way of doing business and it requires a strategy from which you will define processes that can be supported by people and software.
Where most folks get it wrong is by confining CRM to the sales organization, or customer service or marketing. The fact is, each of those areas is a critical part of CRM and there could even be an impact in some of your back office groups as well. Read the rest of this entry »
What does CRM stand for anyway
February 15th, 2010We’ve all heard acronyms thrown around at one time or another. They are a way of life today, and not likely to go away anytime soon. It’s hard for the average person to keep up. When you hear the lingo flying around, you might be thinking to yourself, am I the only one that doesn’t know what this stands for. You are not alone. There are a number of people, me included, that often don’t have any idea what all these acronym’s stand for and are too embarrassed to ask for further definition. One such acronym that has been around for years is CRM. So just what does CRM stand for? Read the rest of this entry »
Scope of Artificial Intelligence in Business
February 15th, 2010Within the corporate world, A.I. is widely used for complex problem-solving and decision-support techniques in real-time business applications. The business applicability of A.I. techniques is spread across functions ranging from finance management to forecasting and production.
In the fiercely competitive and dynamic market scenario, decision-making has become fairly complex and latency is inherent in many processes. In addition, the amount of data to be analyzed has increased substantially. AI technologies help enterprises reduce latency in making business decisions, minimize fraud and enhance revenue opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »
Artificial Intelligence
February 15th, 2010The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is “the study and design of intelligent agents” where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.
John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality. Read the rest of this entry »
Data Mining Promises To Dig Up New Drugs
February 15th, 2010A robot scientist that can make informed guesses about how effective different chemical compounds will be at fighting different diseases could revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry by developing more effective treatments more cheaply and quickly than current methods. Read the rest of this entry »
Electronic Health Records Need Better Monitoring
February 15th, 2010The push is on for health care providers to make the switch to electronic health records but it is hard to tell how well these complex health information technology systems are being implemented and used, writes a health informatics researcher at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in a Feb. 3 commentary in JAMA, The Journal of the American Read the rest of this entry »
Questions About Java’s Future
February 14th, 2010Oracle Corp.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems marks a strange step back to the future of computer industry that raises questions about the outlook for Sun’s hardware, Java software and the database giant itself.
To date, the $22 billion Oracle has defined itself by a simple, bold statement. “We are the world’s largest enterprise software company,” it claims in the opening of its latest annual report. Read the rest of this entry »
Sun/Oracle merger: why the public sector should worry
February 13th, 2010Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems should worry the public sector because the enlarged entity could lead to price hikes and “vendor lock-in”, according to an IT analyst.
Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, public sector IT, Ovum, told FutureGov that the deal will hold appeal to some public sector agencies because the new company can offer an “application to disk solution”, which may be seen as a lower risk approach to IT procurement. Read the rest of this entry »