Weekend tech reading: Origins of the "post PC" buzzword

Matthew DeCarlo

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Post PC era buzzword: Net pioneer and MIT futurist David Clark used it first in 1999 I've been examining the whole "post PC" buzzword that everyone is using these days on the eve of the Windows 8 release. I first heard the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs use it in 2007. But then I found out that David Clark, a senior scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) thinktank, not only coined the term first in 1999 speech called the Post-PC Internet, but he made a number of predictions about the future of technology going out a decade. A New Domain

Tracing the influence -- stolen images in games Imagine you're a game producer in the late 1980s, a week before the deadline and you still haven't got a cover for your game. Exhausted from crunchtime, you tell your illustrator to just rip off some Schwarzenegger action movie to get the job done. Careful, your subordinate might take the order all too literally! When artwork in video games seems to look too realistic to be actually drawn by the artist, then it actually might be too realistic, as many vintage games have stolen images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games. Hardcore Gaming 101

Infographic: YouTube's top 1,000 channels reveal an industry taking shape YouTube is still the pesky younger sibling of television, which is the wicked uncle of Hollywood. But the social video site is slowly becoming a formidable medium in its own right, creating new business models and spheres of influence for -- literally -- a million rising stars. OpenSlate, which describes its services as delivering "actionable information about the value of online video to advertisers," recently put together an infographic analyzing the top 1,000 YouTube channels. ReadWriteWeb

Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the biggest troll on the Web Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres). "It's amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office," he said with a nervous laugh. Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. Gawker

Nintendo tears down Wii U to show off single-chip IBM/AMD CPU + GPU One of the most interesting aspects to new console design is only indirectly related to the device’s game performance. Internal design — how components are laid out, integrated, and cooled — is vital to building a reliable machine. Until quite recently, this aspect of design only attracted consumer interest if something went wrong. Each generation of consoles has had issues, but the Xbox 360′s famous Red Ring of Death catapulted design problems into mainstream discussion. ExtremeTech

home at the end of Google Earth Separated from his older brother at a train station, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan found himself lost in the slums of Calcutta. Nearly 20 years later, living in Australia, he began a painstaking search for his birth home, using ingenuity, hazy memories, and Google Earth. It was just a small river flowing over a dam, but to five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan it felt like a waterfall. He played barefoot under the downpour as trains passed nearby. When night fell, he would walk a couple miles home. Vanity Fair

A complex logic circuit made from bacterial genes By force of habit we tend to assume computers are made of silicon, but there is actually no necessary connection between the machine and the material. All that an engineer needs to do to make a computer is to find a way to build logic gates -- the elementary building blocks of digital computers -- in whatever material is handy. So logic gates could theoretically be made of pipes of water, channels for billiard balls or even mazes for soldier crabs. WUSTL

How people profit from your online mug shot and ruin your life forever This July, Yolina (not her real name) was giving a language lesson to one of her students over the phone when he said he had something to tell her. She hadn't always taught over such long distances before -- she was in California, her student in the Midwest -- but after being laid off from her 14-year job as a community college language instructor last year, she's taken odd gigs whenever she can get them. Gizmodo

Free, open source VirtualBox lags behind VMware and Parallels Our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout took a deep dive into the two most successful commercial virtualization products for the Mac, but many of you had questions about VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software currently offered by Oracle. Both Parallels and VMware offer plenty of features for home and business users, but is VirtualBox an acceptable alternative for the cash-strapped? Ars Technica

Is this shopped? Truth, lies, and art before and after Photoshop We humans are insatiable visual gluttons, peering into the empathic peepholes of Flickr photostreams and scavenging the hyperactive junk food gestalt of Tumblr. The internet has practically trained us to gorge ourselves on a kaleidoscopic mess of images. But in the photographic community, there has long been a recurring tension around the boundaries of fact and fiction in this chaotic onslaught of aesthetics. The Verge

Hulu struggles to survive the influence of its parent companies It's an unseasonably warm summer day, and Jason Kilar is "in the zone," as he puts it, buzzing around his Santa Monica, California, headquarters, putting the final touches on a massive redesign of Hulu, the streaming TV and movie service he runs. Despite the heat, and despite a deadline that is only weeks away, the boyish 41-year-old CEO looks calm and collected. (He always looks this way, actually.) Fast Company

AMD preps layoffs that could hit 30 percent of its workers Advanced Micro Devices is prepping for layoffs that could impact a significant percentage of its staff, CNET has learned. The company, which makes processors for PCs and servers, could let go 20 percent to 30 percent of its employees within coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, though they added that the number of affected workers might also be lower. CNET

Eric Schmidt can’t wait for self-driving cars, won’t predict when Google Maps come back to Apple You wanted new news from Eric Schmidt about the state of the Apple-Google war? So did all of us. But the Google chairman was mostly mum on that subject. He was happy, however, to tell Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about how "life changing" it was to ride in a Google-built self-driving car. AllThingsD

News image via ShutterStock

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Arnold Schwarzenegger as Arnold Schwarzenegger as Arnold Schwarzenegger in Arnold Schwarzenegger's 8-bit Gun Rampage 3?
 
It is interesting how the article writer totally vilifies the game designer culture. But no mention how the pyramid on the dollar bill is a rip off of the Egyptian culture. For obviously they are the ones who built it first. And no one seems to land military aid to civilians getting bombed by a tyrant government. America only steps in if they have oil ha? We free Iraq or Afghanistan but screw the Egyptians and the Libyans. They have no oil. We don't appreciate that culture and the pyramid art we ripped of for the dollar bill.
 
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