The Great Geek Manual

If you thought that you were pissed because you still don’t have a jet pack, you may not want to skip this link. The Usborne Book of the Future is a book published in 1979 predicting the sorts of technology that would be in use in “the year 2000 and beyond”. Some of the beautifully illustrated pictures detail the interiors of space stations and floating cities, while others detail expected advances in artificial technology.

The book is entertaining and fascinating. It also happens to be completely free and available online.

Source: The Pointless Museum

Here’s something I never thought I would write: I just read a fascinating article in The Ladies’ Home Journal.

The article is a list of predictions for the future from an issue that dates back to December 1900. There are twenty-nine predictions in all, and some of them are shockingly correct, despite the fact that they must have sounded like science fiction at the time. Others didn’t come true, but they really opened my eyes to just how far a century of progress has brought us.

Just take a look at these three technological predictions that have actually come to pass:

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

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Brajeshwar’s Blog has an interesting article this week. He asks, are you a programmer or a coder? What’s the difference you ask? Read on…

Are programmers and Coders the most neglected link in the Software Development Chain? Coders are like smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmers that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions of the large program. Read the rest of this entry » » »