Technology and Social Addiction » Innovations http://www.anasrifai.com Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:58:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Smart Grid – Hackers are Smarter http://www.anasrifai.com/innovations/smart-grid-hackers-are-smarter/ http://www.anasrifai.com/innovations/smart-grid-hackers-are-smarter/#comments Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:56:15 +0000 admin http://www.anasrifai.com/?p=34 As always, innovations is controlled by fear and most security experts are apparently not as smart as hackers.  Security experts are warning against digitally based electricity distribution and transmission system known as the “Smart Grid” due to their speculations on hackers ability to hack into the system leaving millions of households and business without power.  Given the many advantages of having a nationwide “Smart Grid” technology implantation I just don’t see why such technology cannot be protected efficiently especially when such systems are built, implemented and maintained by individuals who are smarter than the feared hackers.

I’m not going to describe and analyze the technology as much as I would like to focus on the fact that fear is limiting innovation and in most cases the wrong people are hired to do such projects.  Innovative individuals and extremely smart engineer find it difficult to work on such projects for corporations that choose not to pay them more  than what they would make if they just run their own small businesses.

So to stop the hackers, we must pay innovative individuals the right money, otherwise, power will be out for few minutes until backup systems go online, if there is a backup system. Knowing how most corporations cut corners to save money, such technology could be problematic at first but eventually the system will be perfected.

]]> http://www.anasrifai.com/innovations/smart-grid-hackers-are-smarter/feed/ 1 Future home computer of the past http://www.anasrifai.com/computers/future-computer-of-the-past/ http://www.anasrifai.com/computers/future-computer-of-the-past/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:38:49 +0000 admin http://www.anasrifai.com//?p=1 While cleaning my hard drive from old meaningless photos and other junk I stumbled upon this photo of the future, easy to use, home computer.

computer 1950

The steering wheel is just fantastic and I am still not sure what function they had in mind for such an apparatus except for releasing steam pressure from the water based cooling system.

One could only imagine how computers would look like in 50 years, most likely future generations will view my lovely macbook as a ridiculous object the same way we view this fancy computer concept put together by the RAND corporation back in 1950.

The concept of a keyboard has been out there for a while as the input method of choice. As we advance our knowledge in the field of VLSI or even possibly a totally different computing technologies that will unleash new processor speeds, we will witness a shift from physical input device to speech and gesture based input.

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