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POPSThe Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet ...But I would much rather talk about future possibilities, and so I wrote a few historical notes to provide some context for the 1975 paper, and now can try to discuss some of the more important, and mostly hidden, gifts that personal computing networked together around the world can bring to humanity. Our thought was: but if we can get the children to learn the real thing then in a few generations the big change will happen. 32 years later the technologies that our research community invented are in general use by more than a billion people, and we have gradually learned how to teach children the real thing. But it looks as though the actual revolution will take longer than our optimism suggested, largely because the commercial and educational interests in the old media and modes of thought have frozen personal computing pretty much at the “imitation of paper, recordings, film and TV” level.
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POPSTedTalks: Brain Science About to Fundamentally Change Computing (Jeff Hawkins, 2003) To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think.
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POPSDemocratizing the Information Revolution. The Technological Proletariat Through the illustrative work of Sugata Mitra, an Indian computer scientist, we will turn to Dewey’s understanding of both inquiry and education – how we think and how we should learn – with an eye towards their potential for the ‘furnishing of proper conditions’ that Dewey speaks of in our first quotation. More strongly, this paper shows that Dewey’s philosophy of inquiry and education can provide the model for a mass computer-literacy initiative along the lines of those already devised by Sugata Mitra. Given the enormous amount of tools and information available on the Internet , the possibilities today for communication and learning as selfeducation are fantastic. It becomes our job, then, to explain precisely how we might allow this ‘technological proletariat’ to gain access to the democratizing possibilities of the ‘Information Revolution.’
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POPSMicrosoft going Modular Microsoft's patent for a modular operating system (as opposed to a monolithic kernel) Looks like Gartner was right all along.
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POPSReal DJs Code Live "Livecoding places the human right back in the creative process so you can't really call it 'computer-generated' any more. If we don't see programming music software as musical activity, we're missing an opportunity."