I’m blessed with far too many friends to possibly send a physical greeting card to you all, so I hope you’ll accept this virtual facsimile from my family to yours. This year I was overwhelmed with incredible support from around the world, and today I want to send some warm thoughts back to all of you. I’m wishing you a very Happy Holidays and an amazing New Year. I hope in 2014 you find as the kind of simple joy my two jingle dogs experience when dashing through the snow.
No, that post title is not intended metaphorically. I am today quite literally writing about an honest-to-gosh saw. Over the past few months I’ve come to realize what a really wonderful thing it is to have the time for occasional idleness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pulling late nights and weekends when necessary to get something done that needs to be done, but by and large I’ve been far more successful in working a full day and then stepping away to enjoy what’s around me. As we’re into winter now, I’ve spent a bit of time the past few months stocking up on firewood. For me, that entails collecting fallen trees then cutting, splitting, and stacking the resulting pieces before you know, burning them.
In times of change, when routine parts of your life are removed, critical parts that helped to define your identity, it’s easy to get unsettled. When your all-consuming macro focus suddenly widens to reveal infinite paths of opportunity ahead, it’s easy to get disoriented. These times are valuable times, and in these times it’s important to not ponder what’s behind, but rather what’s right here — the skills, the knowledge, the values, the friendships, and the passions that have driven you to your current heights. It’s these things that will keep you on sure-footing as you climb toward opportunities ahead.
Over the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of thinking along these lines, not only re-evaluating the skills and opportunities that earned me the incredible privilege of your audience, but pondering how it is that I can and should best apply those going forward. (I’ve also, I confess, spent a bit of time playing the videogames I’ve missed over the past few years. There’s been no shortage of tinkering in the garage, too, but we’ll save those details for another post.) I’ve been lucky enough to speak with, and listen to, a number of very talented individuals across a variety of industries — tech journalism, auto journalism, media relations, entrepreneurship, and product development to name a few — in a sort of quest to help identify which of those paths of opportunity will take me where I want to go.
And where do I want to go? A place where I have the freedom to investigate and dive deep into those topics that interest me most. A place where I can engage in compelling conversations with people creating amazing products and technologies. More importantly, a place where I can continue to have an open and transparent dialog with readers and followers. A place where I can continue to earn your trust and respect and work with those who have earned mine.
And so it’s with no shortage of pride, but I confess a little bit of nervousness, that I tell you I’m joining the CNET team. CNET is a place run and fueled by many talented people who I know and trust and respect, and I’m honored to now be able to count myself among them. I, too, had some concerns and doubts after the unfortunate happenings of CES 2013, but after lengthy conversations with numerous folks at many levels I’m confident that the dynamics that culminated in what went down in January have been altered. I’m confident that this is a place where I can freely say what should be said without fear of displeasing a corporate overlord. Without that confidence I wouldn’t have signed on.
I want you to be confident, too. As always, I believe that transparency and open dialog are the most important parts of building confidence. That’s part of what I’ll continue to bring to the table at CNET. While my primary role will be creating great feature content, a very important part of my job will be fostering open discussions with you the readers. I promise to neither rake muck nor bury my head in the sand, just to shoot straight and tell it like it is. Both sides of the story. As ever, if you have concerns or doubts, I want to hear them.
While the tech and auto news scenes are heavily saturated, there are still plenty of compelling untold stories just waiting behind the curtain. When the pace of the news cycle is this intense, few writers have the luxury or patience to dig deeper, to not only answer what a given thing is but why it is. What factors contributed to its design, to its performance, to its features, and to its cost? And then, after the reviews are posted and the industry moves along in its never-ending obsession over what’s coming next, how does what’s here now actually fit into your life? Each new product and technological advancement has a story. I’ll be working to comprehensively, and respectfully, tell those stories
I’ll be focusing on the worlds of both consumer technology and transportation, gadgets and cars, those two areas I’m personally most passionate about. I’ll also be contributing to show coverage and, yes, doing some liveblogs at big events, too. You’ll be seeing a fair bit of me soon enough, and I can’t wait to get started. It’s an incredible opportunity, and for that I am very thankful.
Happy Friday, dear readers. Let’s get right to it. This ultimately was a slow week on the tech news front, but it got off with a bit of a bang thanks to the long-awaited revelation of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. It’s a conceptual means of high-speed, low-cost transportation that harkens back to many concepts of the ’50s and ’60s. Namely: a train able to go very fast thanks to a near-vacuum enclosure. Air resistance and imperfect tracks are the biggest limiting factors to train speed, and Musk’s concept of a windowless, aluminum enclosure kills both birds in one, dual-barreled shot.
Hello again, folks, and happy Friday. Apologies for the lack of updates this week, but it’s been a busy one. Let’s take a look at the week in tech news and dig right in to what I consider to be the biggest story: the discontinuation of the Lavabit service. In a heart-wrenching open letter to the service’s users, founder Ladar Levison writes about making an impossible decision: “to become implicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He’s made the noble and tragic choice to take the latter path.
As noted by Xeni Jardin in her post on the subject at Boing Boing, the secure email service recently gained notoriety thanks to its use by Edward Snowden. Lavabit actually dates back to 2004, offering an alternative to advertising-driven and, presumably, easily cracked Gmail accounts. I confess to thinking little of the need for the service at the time, but recent developments have certainly caused me to reconsider my former “Well if you’re not doing anything wrong…” stance regarding online privacy. Jennifer Granick over at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society has a brief run-down of the implications. It’s well worth a read.
The service now appears dead, though perhaps existing in a state of suspended animation is a better way to put it. Levison seems to have no interest in handing over the keys to the US Government, but that he’s asking for donations to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund shows a bit of hope for re-awakening at some point down the road. Now would be a lovely time for a molten carbonite joke and mix in an obscure Han Solo reference, but I’m sorry to say that levity doesn’t quite feel appropriate for this particular story.
Welcome, dear readers, to the Weekly Tech Overload, in which I boil down the last seven days of tech news for easy consumption on a lazy Friday afternoon. Whether you’re too busy to follow the blogosphere churn or still can’t bring yourself to rebuild your Google Reader sources elsewhere, here’s your opportunity to get caught up on what you’ve missed.
We’ll start with the biggest product unveiling of the week by far: the Moto X. Dubbed the anti-iPhone by Roger Cheng at CNET this is, if you fan away the hype, a pretty typical Android smartphone. It has a 4.7-inch AMOLED display that gets by at 720p while pictures come in through a 10 megapixel rear camera or two megapixel front-facer. Inside there’s a rather complex suite of CPUs and GPUs powering the whole thing that Moto has thoughtfully branded as eight cores worth of “contextual computing processors” and “natural language processors,” as explained at Ars.
PR-speak aside, what you have is a pair of dual-core Snapdragon S4 processors running at 1.7GHz and an Adreno 320 GPU, plus a pair of other custom chips for doing fancy things like hopping into Google Now whenever you say “Okay Google Now” — even when the phone’s display is off. I confess I’ve long-since tired of saying “Okay Glass, take a picture,” far preferring to just reach up and hit the damned shutter button, and I think X users will quickly find themselves forgetting their own predefined command. That’s not the only gimmick. Moto also announced a set of NFC tokens you can clip onto your clothes to unlock the phone without a pass code. These won’t ship until sometime in the future, but it doesn’t really matter when because no one will buy them.
For many of us, at least those of us who have reached a certain age, our first experience driving a Ferrari came in the Sega classic Out Run. Just a few arcade tokens earned you the opportunity to race down a perfectly smooth road along a perfectly scenic beach with your perfectly blonde mistress cheering you on from the lone passenger seat. Drifting past slower traffic without crashing wasn’t particularly difficult, but should you manage to hit a palm tree there was still no reason to fret. The car would tumble, safely deposit you and your significant other by the side of the road and then magically re-appear, right-side up and ready to resume.
Things are rather less perfect in the real world, where the roads are rarely smooth and the weather rarely pristine. Likewise, though your passenger may have lustrous blonde hair, you may very well find yourself needing seating for more than two. In this uncomfortably real world we also find ourselves hauling groceries in the back and maybe even some luggage for a long weekend in the country.
Believe it or not, here in the real world there exists a Ferrari that is equally at home screaming around perfectly smooth tracks as it is making its way across cracked and crumbling roads. It has a 651 horsepower V-12, accelerates from 0 – 60 in 3.7 seconds, can take you down the road at 208 MPH, seats four (reasonably) comfortably, and has one of the most technologically advanced transmission and differential setups ever seen in a car. Can it possibly be worth its asking price of $300,000? Put those grubby tokens back in your pocket because we’re going to take this real-world supercar for a spin to find out.
And we’re back! It’s been nearly six years since I put this, my own site, on pause. At the time I was too busy managing dual careers to keep this fresh. Then, once I switched over to Engadget in 2008… well, suddenly I seemed to have no free time at all. If you weren’t familiar with Digital Displacement back in the day, don’t worry. What was then focused almost exclusively on racing games will now be my personal portal for all things I deem worth writing about. Hopefully you’ll find them worth reading about, too.
As to what sort of things you can expect, tech will always be a big focus for me, but there’ll be plenty of diversions into the automotive space along the way — and please don’t hold it against me if I go on a bit about my new-found love for road biking on occasion. Is there something you want me to cover? Drop me a line and I’ll have a look.
As to what I’ve been up to since, well, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling and speaking with a lot of amazing people in a lot of divergent fields. Great conversations, all. What exactly the future holds for me still remains to be seen, but there’s plenty to be excited about.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back with something longer for you to enjoy soon.
In case someone comes stumbling across here looking for the latest on racing sims and news, unfortunately this blog is going to stay dormant for awhile. But, if there are any readers out there who are still subscribed, I wanted to at least let you know what I’ve been up to.
I’ve been keeping busy blogging elsewhere on more general-purpose topics. I’m happy to say you can find me over at Engadget posting about gadgety things, and doing much the same at Switched as well.
On top of that (and my job) I’ve been writing a book on Facebook application development, which is dragging on (much to my publisher’s chagrin), but the end is in sight. You can learn more about it on its Facebook page.
Thanks all, and hope to see you online or at the track!
As you can probably tell by the lack of updates, Digital Displacement is in a bit of a holding pattern. I’m greatly appreciative of those who have volunteered content over the years (yes, years), but alas most of the updating here has been provided by yours truly, and yours truly simply hasn’t been able to keep this site updated of late due to a number of conflicts. Sadly, those conflicts aren’t going to change for some period of time.
So, this is just a little note to say that the site isn’t dead per se, but it’s going to be awfully slow for a little while. If anyone wishes to take over, please post here and I’ll be in touch, as I’d love to see the site continue. Regardless it will continue, but not for a little while at least.
Thanks to my readers, and I hope you have a great off-season waiting for the weather to warm up and the sticky tires to come out again!