You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 4th, 2007.
So yesterday was the big race for the DARPA Urban Challenge. The goal is to research technologies that will lead to autonomous battlefield robots that can deliver supplies while navigating traffic. The joint Carnegie Mellon and General Motors team won, completing the race with no major traffic infractions. This strikes me as one of those technologies that in 20 years no one will realize had military origins. We’ll all happily get in our inexpensive robotic taxis running on electricity.
Japanese electronics use is perhaps a faulty bellwether for the American market. Whereas new gadgets are often available in Japan long before they make their appearance (if ever) in the US, there are also interesting cultural differences that don’t always translate popularity. There does seem to be a trend in the area of PC sales, however. An AP article today points out that PCs are taking a less important role in Japanese households with the emergence of smart phones, consoles that can reproduce many PC functions (web browsing, gaming, playing DVDs & music), and flat screen TVs (versus flat screen monitors, say). If you can check your email on your phone, listen to music on your iPod, download music on your Wii, and play games on your 52″ LCD, why would you want a computer in your home? Note: throughout this post I will use the term PC in the general sense of computer, rather than specifically as an IBM-compatible PC.
So this got me thinking about what a PC is good for and why I liked it back in the day (well, I still like it).
