Victor Rozek
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As I See It: The Wheeler Dealer
May 19, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreUnless you have been in a protracted digital coma, you have probably noticed that the Internet is starting to look like a dead man walking. And if you have a high tolerance for duplicity, you may find it amusing to watch the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) go through public paroxysm deciding on the least offensive way to dress the body for viewing.
Officially, the FCC exists to “regulate interstate and international communications.” But like most regulatory agencies, unofficially it is an industry front group. Nonetheless, it is classified as an “independent U.S. government agency,” which sounds suspiciously oxymoronic. And that
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As I See It: What’s In Your Wallet?
May 5, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThe Weimar Republic had a big problem and its name was inflation. But it also had a solution, and its name was print-more-money. Which it did with reckless abandon. So much so that its currency, which was valued at 4.2 Marks per U.S. dollar at the outbreak of World War I, hyper-inflated to over 1 million Marks per dollar by 1923.
Which is why a man who wanted to buy a loaf of bread could be seen pushing a wheelbarrow full of money to a bakery early one morning. When he got there the bakery was not yet open, so
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As I See It: Old Hephaestus Had A Bot, A.I.A.I.O.
April 28, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIn 1956, Nathan Rochester approached the Rockefeller Foundation to apply for a princely grant of $7,000. He said he wanted to throw a little shindig at Dartmouth University, where the minds of mathematicians and computer scientists could run free exploring what must have seemed like a fanciful and distant notion at the time–the creation of intelligent machines.
He probably would have been dismissed outright, but Rochester was no garden-variety, star-struck futurist. He also happened to be the chief engineer of the IBM 701–the first general purpose, mass-produced computer–and therefore had the requisite gravitas to pacify the normally conservative moneymen.
By
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As I See It: Ned Ludd Has Left the Building
April 7, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreAlthough historians are much too stuffy to admit such things, it was the desire for sex that launched the Industrial Revolution. And contrary to accepted thinking, it all started about 200 years earlier than the dry retelling of history would have us believe. As earth-shaking occurrences go, it was surely unintended, a solution to a private problem that, one could say, went viral.
And although the event has been relegated to historic footnote status, it is worth recounting because it also spawned a notable oddity: a Luddite of royal lineage.
The year was 1589 and the Reverend William Lee was
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As I See It: The Sleeping Giant
March 31, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt was high noon at the SXSW corral. Ed Snowden, seated before an enlarged image of the constitution (ours, not Russia’s) called out the tech community. Of course it’s hard to sound intimidating when you’re calling people out from an undisclosed location through seven proxies. But in a time when speaking the truth is considered seditious, extreme caution has become de rigueur.
Snowden’s message was simple, although the telling of it is fraught with complexities. His famous/infamous (chose your modifier) revelations about the NSA’s drift toward global Big Brotherhood have been met with applause and condemnation. Hero/traitor, courageous/cowardly: how software
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As I See It: The New Face of Followership
March 10, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThere is a great deal implied in the classic cartoon greeting attributed to extraterrestrials: “Take me to your leader.” Notably, that such a person exists, and that he or she is empowered to speak for the rest of the community. It exposes a hierarchical bias that assigns power and decision-making to a single individual. And it presumes that the only decision that matters is the one at the top.
And so it has been for most of recorded history. Whether in the statehouse or the workplace, hierarchy has been the unquestioned leadership model favored by dominant cultures since humans began
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As I See It: Peeking Under the Hood
February 24, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThere would have been no AS/400 without it; no iSeries or System i or Power Systems, no servers of any kind, and no cloud in which to assemble them. Without it, there would be no smartphones, no tablets, no Internet. In fact, without some advanced evolutionary form of it, we would probably still be trolling around the African savannah looking for food. The “it” refers to the three pounds of our neuroanatomy that are the source of all human progress and invention: the brain.
If that was not immediately obvious, it is because (please forgive the pun) we don’t give
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As I See It: Googling The Future
February 10, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreStop the presses! (Or whatever the digital equivalent of that would be.) Nick Bilton sees the future of technology and its name is Google. OK, so Bilton may be more perceptive than prophetic, but given the direction of industry drift, his analysis appears to be spot on. Looking at the galaxy of tech giants greedily circling the sphere of 21st century opportunity, there are signs of orbital decay.
Microsoft and IBM have lost their sizzle. Like Greece they’re still cashing in on their Golden Age, but time and technology seem to be passing them by. Both Facebook and Twitter
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As I See It: MLK And The NSA
January 27, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreFor those of us who lived through those terrible days, it would be impossible not to reflect on the life of Martin Luther King as the nation again commemorates his birthday. But there are now two-plus generations who were not yet born when King was assassinated. They know him in sound bites, as a civil rights leader who had a dream. They perhaps notice that every year, shortly after Christmas, he is prominently mentioned in the media. But what happened 50 years ago is shrouded in the haze of history. Over time, legacies are encapsulated by granting a day off
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As I See It: ITCare
January 13, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIf you’re a mouse but aspire to grow into something as large as an elephant, evolution may oblige you, but it will take about 24 million generations–give or take a mass extinction. But there are faster ways. You could become a government program. Conceived through the biological mastery uniquely resident in the U.S. Congress, a mouse built to government specifications instantly becomes an elephant. Just add money.
Thus we have the grotesque specter of Obamacare. All 1,990 pages of it. Neither fish nor fowl, it crawled out of the primordial ooze of the healthcare lobby, a fully formed pachyderm. But