Category: Future

Read about Adedeji Olowe’s take about the future, futurism, and other technologies that could transform the everyday lives for better and sometimes for worse.

Goodbye Hard drives but I won’t miss you

I just read an article where experts said price of SSD will continue to fall. Sincerely that’s the most stupid statement I have read in months. It’s like saying the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

SSD, which is an acronym for Solid State Drive, is basically a bigger USB drive shoehorned into the size of hard disks so they can fit into the same compartment. It’s a means of deceiving computers that they are HDDs but just magically faster. You can read more about SSD here.

I use a Dell Latitude E6540 and a MacBook Pro (which has refused to leave its original packing, tear nylon!). The Dell is one dog of a laptop. It’s big, ugly, heavy and very slow. I was almost gearing to use it as a self-defense tool when I finally got an epiphany that maybe the hard drive may be begging to retire. So I got a Samsung (or was it San Disk) SSD and plopped it in. Whoa, never seen such a transformation. Oh, yes, it’s still big, ugly as sin and very heavy but slow isn’t a word to describe it. After all, a pig with a lipstick is still a pig, albeit a pretty one.

Enough of my katzenjammer!

I have become an unrepentant evangelist of SSDs. I now approve it as replacement drives for my colleagues because, ding dong, it’s affordable. At the last check, a 240GB SSD cost around N35K.

Now for those who have some interest in electronics, trended over a period of time, the price of devices is always inversely proportional to the performance. If this law holds true, SSD will get cheaper and cheaper until it finally supplants hard drives. I have watched this trend for a while and if things go at the rate it’s going, then by 2018, hard drives may become what people do – drive hard!
However other schools of thought think that SSD may never catch up with HDDs in performance but I know that as long as the price is reasonable, the performance of SSD will always bitch slap HDDs any day or time.

So far the consumer SSDs have been coming in the HDD form factor but why should it? New computers are going on sale with SSDs soldered directly on the motherboards which is giving rise to skinnier and sexier laptops.
And it doesn’t stop there.

The IDE and SATA interfaces are hogs, slow and annoying. A prehistoric interface protocol. So guys at FusionIO turned everything on its head – they started putting storage on the PCIe bus, right within server innards. The benefit is that the processor can reach the drive as fast as it could reach the memory. The devices are not for small children though – a typical 2.4Tb bundle will set you back about $28,000. With that kind of price, I will rather save my documents within 2B exercise books.

Back to saner shores.

SSD can transform performance of anyone. It could mean the difference between a good day or a bad one. So let’s do it!

WhatsApp will eat MTN’s dinner

I visited WhatsApp, a close friend, last weekend and I saw him preparing for a large party but the interesting bit’s that he’s gonna serve MTN’s dinner to his other many friends.

Ok, that’s some unwitty joke but hey, I hope you caught the drift.
Some events over the last few months have shown me that the next 2 years may be quite scary for MTN and its colleagues. When you are making $2.6B profit a year, you may feel like part of the Greek gods just don’t forget Nokia and Blackberry.

International Calls Made Easy with WhatsApp

I get to do some travels once in a while. Roaming your phone can be a dog of an activity as it could be so expensive. Before you call me cheap, just imagine what N80 per SMS in Ethiopia means to someone who has never been a minister of petroleum. Rebtel has been a good companion over the years but sometimes the call quality can be very bad. At first I thought maybe because it’s VOIP but then calls to other countries were clear and never cut off. Apparently it seems our Telcos route their roaming calls through some Pentium PCs. You can’t be too sure of these things. My visit to some roaming-charge-friendly countries finally convinced me that our Telcos are rats.
Then WhatsApp call came along.

I didn’t know how good it was until when someone called me on it and I forgot that it was a WhatsApp call. It was clear and best of all free! Nowadays it has become my default calling mode whenever I hop on a metal bird out of the madness of Lasgidi

Local Calls Made Easy with WhatsApp

One of my annoying colleagues has an annoying habit of calling me annoyingly on WhatsApp. Until, wait, the calls are clear! I mean as bad as the Nigeria data network is, the calls are as clear as normal calls and best part, absolutely free!

The Hungry Future

  • What if the WhatsApp call catches on like Blackberry in Nigeria and everyone defaults to it?
  • What if WhatsApp creates a local gateway that allows termination of normal voice calls?
  • What if MTN’s voice income bottoms out?

Some Annoying Things about WhatsApp

Back to your desks, brethren!
 

The strong also fail and it’s no big deal

Sometimes you just need to know when to call it quits. Does that make you a loser? Hell no! Or maybe. You can’t be sure until it’s all over.

The way it is, the most important thing is to win the war but you may lose some battles or side street skirmishes in the interest of overall success of your military or career campaign.

Some stories come to mind – Apple dropping Ping, a social network (I wonder if any of you know about it) like a bad habit when it wasn’t going north. Microsoft quarantined Nokia like a virus and took a $7.6B haircut while at it.

Recently, the folks at Google had a serious heart-to-heart talk with each other and decided that Google+ should go the way of the dodo. Starting weeks ago, Google+ is getting kicked out of Google assets, inclusive of YouTube were forcing users to have a Google+ accounts has drawn backlash.

Which comes to a critical question – how do you know when to throw in the towel and declare the current adventure dead or push through and succeed? The world is replete with anecdotes of people who succeeded despite odds stacked against them. Same world is also replete with anecdotes of those who didn’t pull back on time.

Sometimes life feels like a coin toss with two heads or two tails. The luck isn’t in the spin, it’s in the pick.

Crispr is the new Little Boy

You’ve probably never heard of Crispr but then who has? I bet you are creepier than a centipede that killed a snake if you ‘ve.

I was trolling some biology news of recent when I bumped into an interesting story about gene editing.

By the way, I’m curious about genetics. I once did a genetic algorithm in school which succeeded in messing up my head more than anything else. Since I was already messed up anyway, another dose of scary gene science won’t put me in a worse place.

Crispr, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a genetic basis of gene editing using Cas9, some fancy protein (not your regular protein shakes) that makes this to work.

Don’t let me bore you to tears.

In a nutshell, this technique and protein will allow you to edit any gene in any cell – cut, add, do whatever you like, even if you are under the influence. You can also apply Instagram filters. Ok, that’s a lie, or maybe not! Unfortunately, it doesn’t have UNDO, AKA CRTL Z!

Scientists are already using it to edit a mosquito that won’t be susceptible to Plasmodium, but nobody is sure of what happens after. Chinese are even crazier; one of them edited an embryo, left behind by some unfortunate mum, to remove some lousy ass gene that causes beta thalassemia, a disorder that unhinges human ability to make good red blood cells. Thankfully (for now) it failed.

Realizing the power that this can be, scientists are running around to create rules to govern everyone.
My dear friend, as we all know, some dudes never play along nicely. Imagine terrorists creating superhumans? One that is strong, super intelligent (removes the gene that wants to watch Africa Magic and Telemundo), grows to adulthood in a month and can live forever.

We are doomed! Maybe not.

Someone is going to invent a type of software that can help prospective mothers select genes, behaviors, and have perfect kids. It may even be an Android or iPhone app for convenience. The Blackberry version won’t be released on time, or it may just produce annoying kids. Caveat Emptor! If the price is too high, someone will release a hacked version on Pirate Bay. Unfortunately when the baby is born, baked or cooked, it may come with a natural tattoo – ^^#^^Crispr^^%^^.

I have lost my mind.

Did I mention Little Boy? That was the first atomic bomb dropped. It brought everyone a healthy fear of mortality.

I thought artificial intelligence is going to change the world; I may be wrong, it could be something very crispy.

Short scalpel cut to immortality

I’m assured of immortality.

Ok, if you think my religious inclination has changed, maybe not that fast but then why die, hoping for heaven when I can simply stroll over to the General Hospital Ikeja and get a body swap?

And when I have used that up, I can come back for another as long as I don’t get a bullet in the head.

So says the mad doctor who is going to do a full head transplant in 2017. And not just him, he’s got about 100 assistants for the macabre project.
Hey, before you call him mad, think about how much furor was raised, especially by some religions aunties of mine, when test tube babes were first marinated (or how do you describe the process) in 1978? Today almost all my nieces and nephews are born that way. OK, that was a joke.
What Canavaro, the name of the evil doctor J, is doing is to help some random dude, with untreatable muscle wasting disease, get a new stab at life but the implications are far reaching.

I can’t imagine Mugabe hanging around for another 50 years. Or Putin? Or? Now things look scary doesn’t it?

Just a thought, if my body is old, along with my head and then I get a new body, how about the head? Some shriveled round thing with clammy leather hanging and bobbing perilously on top of a body with six packs? Or could Canavaro just improve his methods so only the brain is transplanted? How do I feel waking up the next morning in a body with tattoos?

If the brain alone is transplantable, would it be the whole stuff, or just my memories? What if some bits of the brain is already worn out from age – Alzheimer and other random gerontological malaises?

Wait, what makes me me? My thoughts? My memories? My one pack? Definitely not!

Could this get less invasive and just a thin slice of brain is transferred? If that’s it, what about if we developed a process to transfer my thoughts and sentience from my body to another? What if I could do a transcendence from my body into a thought machine?

I’m getting confused and it’s a Friday evening. Time I went home before my sanity is sold on OLX.