Fairfax Tech Talk Column

Do you remember the original Pixar/Disney Cars movie? It was launched back in 2006 and was somewhat successful. It grossed $462 million at the box office but also generated $10 billion in merchandise sales in the five years after its release – both figures which I contributed to! In one scene, Doc introduces us to Bessie, the “finest road paving machine ever built!” Bessie was towed behind Lightning McQueen to lay asphalt on a road. The idea that a piece of equipmen ..

Amenity. The main driver for deciding where to live is that all-encompassing term ‘amenity’ which can really mean what you want it to mean. I looked at a population heat map in Australia from the turn of last century and the country was smattered with many small dots as people lived where they worked. Then two major disruptions occurred. Firstly, in 1908, Henry Ford had the first of fifteen million Model T Fords roll off the production line. Colonel Harley Tarrant assumed ..

A moth navigates by transverse orientation. It keeps the dominant light source at a certain position in relation to their body to guide them. When we turn on a light on our verandah, those same moths keep flying around the light until they finally meet their demise. As much as they try and resist, the decoy of the light is too much. In a similar way I was up at 4am on Wednesday this week. As much as I wanted to sleep and read about the event in the morning, the lure of yet another Apple  ..

I don’t sing. I am not against songs or music but I believe it is important you know your limitations. Holding a tune is not a talent I have so I don’t wish to subject people around me to listening to terribly out of tune singing. Similarly with technology. It is important to know limitations. No matter how advanced the technology, there are always limits. They may be high limits or limits we never dream of reaching, but there are limits nonetheless. It was many years ago ..

Futurist. It conjures up the image of a person sitting in a darkened room with two hands placed on a large orb floating over a table with an unsuspecting victim waiting to hear if they should move to Toledo. In this context, possibly a better term might be charlatan. The real futurist spends a significant amount of time researching the past, looking at historical movements, investigating breakthroughs and combining all the available data to build some form of roadmap to where a partic ..