You can make amazing sci-fi films if you want to with very, very little money and very advanced technology that can run on your desktop.
The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C.
If you are going to store your e-wallet on your own server, don't keep your e-wallet on your desktop, and make sure you use encryption. If you lose your computer, your bitcoins are lost forever.
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
Web GIS allows us to take our systems of record - our traditional server and desktop technologies - and integrate them, bringing them together into a system of systems.
You see people doing Java-based internal applications all over the place, regular desktop applications that are sort of front-ends to the things in the back, or standalone things.
People like rich applications on their desktop, and there is no reason why you can't have both a rich desktop and a light, cloud-based application framework. Why is it always either/or for people?
Wildly successful sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook offer genuinely portable social experiences, on and off the desktop. You don't even have to go to Facebook or Twitter to experience Facebook and Twitter content or to share third-party web content with your Twitter and Facebook friends.
With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.
Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
