Add Symantec to the growing list of Silicon Valley companies bifurcating themselves into separate units. First came Hewlett-Packard, which is spinning off its computer/printer business from other core activities.

No, the new companies won’t be Hewlett and then Packard.

Next came eBay, which is ejecting PayPal.

Today the announcement comes that Symantec is ejecting the Norton branch of their operations from their archiving, backup and other activities.

Who’s next?

Forbes

It’s not a matter of if they destroy us, it’s a matter of when.

Vanity Fair

The tech industry has a terrible reputation for taking local jobs and sending them overseas. After all, labor is cheaper in some other country.

Labor was cheaper in some other country.

As the world educates itself and raises its standard of living, the cost of exporting jobs is catching up. Don’t believe for a second that this change means that those jobs are returning. They aren’t. Instead, they’re being replaced by automation.

This change shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. The big corporations are always looking for cheaper labor, which helps pad their bottom lines and keeps the stockholders happy. That’s sad because it’s the customer who gets shafted; automated anything — especially support — isn’t better than having a person involved.

True, some tasks can be automated effectively without any loss of quality. That situation has been inevitable since the industrial revolution. However, quality isn’t the issue here; it’s making money.

I also see an impact with regards to the minimum wage in the US. While I support indexing the wage to inflation, raising it too much prompts business owners to replace low-wage workers with automation. This trend may snowball in the coming years as consumers tolerate more automation and the corporations condition us to accepting crummy service.

Article

Pretty much anyone can guess that using a smartphone while driving isn’t the safest thing to do. In most states where such a thing is outright outlawed, they do allow you to use a phone “hands-free.” Turns out that’s even more distracting.

Article Link

*sigh*

Some people just have too much time on their hands . . .

(Mute your speaker before playing the video.)

The Verge

One of the holy grails of computer graphics is the ability to realistically render a human face. Apparently that quest is now over.

Check out the video (link below) and determine whether or not you think the human head rendering is realistic. It’s scary.

The next step is to render a robotic face that looks realistic. How much longer until you think that happens?

Huffington Post Tech

You think nothing of having Wi-Fi today. Laptops, desktops, mobile devices, coffee shops, even the car dealer has Wi-Fi. But in 1999, Wi-Fi was a new thing.

Business Insider does a quick look back at how amazed the MacWorld crowd was in 1999 when Steve Jobs introduced the iBook and it’s amazing wireless Internet access.

Business Insider