Showing 1 - 10 of 96
Marketeers have simple choices
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/02/2026
» If you use a mobile phone for playing any games, then typically along with that comes all of the advertisements and marketing presentations. First however, there is the "free download", this means you can download it for free, install and run it. After that, things may not be free at all. This is to be expected as advertising is one of the few ways to make any income from the games being played by millions of people across the planet.
What to expect in the year ahead
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/12/2025
» The coming year will be full of artificial intelligence, robots and a Starlink communications experience that will have many moving from their current providers. Let's dig in with my predictions for 2026.
Microsoft put on the naughty step by Aussie regulator
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/11/2025
» Microsoft has been at it again. The Competition & Consumer Commission in Australia has started a legal process against the Redmond giant for apparently misleading users of the policies for its Microsoft 365 bundle. Microsoft advised users with a Personal and Family plan that "to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription".
Android is now the new Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/09/2025
» Some may be wondering why have I used an Android phone up to now compared to, say, Apple iPhone? In the beginning, it was for the following four reasons -- a headphone jack, a removable battery, the ability to insert an SD card for storage and the ability to load a program into the computer. That last part may sound a little strange but a 12GB device with 1TB of storage and a graphics unit built in is a computer now. The "program" loading here means you can put your own operating system on the device and install applications, bypassing the Play Store. So where are we now? No headphone jack, no SSD support, no removable battery and based on a recent announcement, no ability to "side-load" programs any more. In other words, Google phones have now or will soon be turned into iPhones.
AI will overpromise and underdeliver
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/08/2025
» Let's start with a few brief comments on the current state of artificial intelligence. Specially targeted and trained AI models are improving. These are things like detecting something in an X-ray or hunting for potential chemical candidates for a compound to attack a specific condition. Generating pictures and videos is also improving rapidly, and by the end of the year the majority of people will not be able to tell the difference between the real thing and the AI fake. Large Language Models are still unpredictable and can give false or fake answers depending on the structure of the prompts, so be careful with the answer you get from these. The current corporate buy-in for AI is well beyond what it can deliver. This is driven by marketing, not the actual state of capabilities. My prediction is there will be a lot of out-of-pocket organisations of all types disappointed by results.
Online Safety Act is a bad joke
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/08/2025
» The UK now has their Online Safety Act (OSA) and Australia is blindly following in their footsteps. In the UK it didn't take very long for the tech aware under-18s to bypass all the rules and regain access to adult content. Think about it, if China can't completely block everything do you think the UK had any chance? There were some creative solutions but the most common was a simple Virtual Private Network (VPN). In related news, some VPN companies reported a 1,400% increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.
Is your internet speed too slow?
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/04/2025
» How important is a good internet connection? This is one of those how long is a piece of string or what computer should I get questions. Back in the day, it was a huge jump from zero bits per second to a 2400 Baud modem. People and businesses were willing to pay a large sum to get connected because it opened up a new world of possibilities, ranging from not needing to go to the library as often and being able to sell and market products online. When and how often you paid for the next upgrade depended on your use case and the capabilities it provided. The next major jumps in speed were 4800, 9600 and 14400bps and everyone jumped to one of these as a next step. During this period, the mid 90s, the T1 at 1.544Mbps was the imaginary godlike speed we all dreamed about but didn't have money to afford. That speed provided real time video conference calls and was limited to government and large business concerns that typically involved a dedicated screening room. This was also when the concept of data compression started to gain popularity as you could send more with less bits.
Microsoft's quantum conundrum
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/03/2025
» If you've been keeping up with quantum computer news, you will have seen the Microsoft Marketing announcement on topological q-bits and a potential quantum computer in a few years. I was planning to write about this in some detail, but it turns out the reality may not meet the marketing. Surprising, I know, but the announcement implying Microsoft has q-bit technology ready to go and scale is speculative. They don't have any physical models, just some tests and a theory that has already been challenged by the physics community. It will take a while to go through all the published data, but the Microsoft quantum computer could be decades, not years, in the future, if ever.
AI, LLMs still got those data blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2025
» The past weeks have been very heavily tilted towards artificial intelligence (AI) news. Before I cover some of it, a reminder that generative AI (gAI) is not the same as General AI (G-AI). The former is where the model can make some inferences, the latter is an AI system that can perform just like a human across multiple subject areas.
Doom, not gloom kicks off my 2025
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/01/2025
» Over the years, the game Doom has been ported onto some amazing platforms including a pregnancy test kit screen. The latest iteration of this practice has turned up in a version that will run in a .PDF file. If you are like me, then this will cause your mental processing to pause for a moment and your next thought may well be: "Wait, what?" The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed to present documents in a manner that is independent of the software, hardware and operating system showing them. While it does this well, some malware writers have exploited its complexities.