Austin Innotech 2006

I went to Austin InnoTech today and here are the jumbled mess of notes taken on my cell phone.

Soyring from IBM speculated that the Paper Industry might be threaten by Organic Light Emitting Diode "newspapers". These are printed once and then updated daily from an embedded chip.

The Baby Boomers retiring and there are not enough replacements for all the high tech workers.

Labor arbitrage in India and China coming to an end as labour cost there are rising.

Starbucks pays more for health care than for coffee beans.
We need a single standard for health care records that are kept by the patients to avoid misdiagnoses from doctors without the complete health picture.

David Smith vp Technology Futures
The average cell phone is replaced every 11 months.
1/2 of our economy comes from industries just l0 yrs old.
More people read newspapers online now than the carbon based ones.
We are leaving age of physics entering age of biology.

Sarnoff's law N
Metcalfe is law N-squared
Reed's law 2N

In 2001 the US spent more on tort litigation than on R&D.
Most Companies make tech decisions by looking in the rearview mirror

Kert Peterson on Scrum.
Scrum is a project management frame work not a software methodology.


Scrum 4O% turnover is common in an organisation transmuting to Scrum. People are held accountable daily and some don't like that.


Vista preview by Kevin Remde
A funny thing happened during Kevin's preview of Vista - a popup window appeared and informed us that it was checking his digital rights for playing a video in the background.

Vista's Search tools can search new tag words of documents. In the properties dialog box is a field for attaching tags to a document. This looks interesting, but I don't know how many people will have the patience to enter these.
I liked the ability to go back to previous versions of a document.
Vista can use a USB memory stick as virtual memory, which kinda makes sense since it could be faster than a disk drive.
Finally, low priority background tasks will be given lower priority for I/O, making the experience better for the user.
Vista has hard drive failure detection like John Gibson's SpinWrite.

Overall I was impressed with the demo of Vista - it's catching up to the Mac in so many ways. But like many Microsoft projects it's dissappointing in how little they have progressed.