DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
562 clips, strongest first.
As American carriers begin offering music downloads, Dr. Dave predicts that increasing phone storage will make combining the phone and MP3 player natural and eventually displace dedicated players. The passage captures a recognizable mobile convergence prediction shortly before the modern smartphone era.
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Dr. Dave describes early phones that could place calls through either a cellular network or nearby Wi-Fi and calls the merger a development he had followed for years. He sees mainstream potential but warns that the service is immature and remembers that a home wireless network can still turn into a wrestling match.
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After a fatal plane crash in Manhattan, Dr. Dave reports that a television cameraman used a Palm Treo and a cellular connection to send aftermath video when a full professional camera was unavailable. He describes it as the first use of this kind of phone video by a major news outlet and emphasizes the value of timely images despite limited quality.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve compare a discounted 1997 Power Mac and nine gigabyte drive with dramatically faster and larger 2005 equipment available for similar or lower prices. Their astonishment captures the extraordinary rate at which personal computing capability increased while hardware costs fell.
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In 2005 Dr. Dave and Evil Steve ask whether Bluetooth and other external interfaces could eventually expose increasingly computerized cars to malicious software. They distinguish an unrealized risk from a present incident while recognizing that failures in traction and wheel control could carry consequences far beyond a crashed desktop computer.
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The interview turns from contemporary drive failures to the deeper problem of keeping digital records readable after media and devices age. Williams says memristor storage might last centuries or thousands of years, then explains its synapse-like behavior and potential for analog learning systems; even Evil Steve's Terminator joke becomes a serious exchange about designing safeguards into future machines.
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During Apple’s September product update, Dr. Dave says the company appears on schedule for an early 2007 cell phone with music and camera features. He expects it to look and feel appealing because Apple makes products people enjoy touching, months before the iPhone announcement.
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Asked what will matter in the coming year, Dr. Dave predicts slower-than-expected early adoption of Vista and Office, stronger processor competition from AMD and a good year for the Xbox 360. The unedited forecast is valuable because listeners can now compare a working consultant’s expectations at the end of 2006 with what actually followed.
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A special Google logo leads Dr. Dave and Evil Steve to mark Dennis Gabor’s 110th birthday, the invention of holography and the contributions immigrants have made to American life.
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Dr. Dave says engineers translate difficult ideas for ordinary listeners, then describes electron spin states as an understandable zero-or-one picture of Spintronics and MRAM. The short passage captures his instinct to make advanced technology approachable rather than intimidating.
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Reacting to Apple’s newly announced third-generation iPad, Dr. Dave distinguishes a strong incremental upgrade from a revolutionary product. The screen impresses him, but he argues that many iPad 2 owners would not have a compelling reason to replace their existing device, capturing a contemporary response to a major product launch.
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The guest cautions against underselling established Wi-Fi standards, which already exceeded many home Internet connections. The reason faster 802.11n mattered was a new job: moving movies, photographs and music throughout a home while improving whole house coverage.
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With Facebook reporting 750 million monthly users, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve pause to imagine a social network reaching a billion people—an unusually clear on-air snapshot of social media’s rapid 2011 expansion.
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Mike Downey describes the gap between rich desktop web experiences and much simpler phones, then predicts that faster networks and smarter devices will produce a major expansion of mobile media within two years. Dr. Dave agrees that 2008 may be an important turning point.
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Before Ford formally announces Sync, Dr. Dave describes Microsoft software bringing hands-free calls, email and music into the car. Dr. Dave and Evil Steve immediately wonder about distraction, viruses and whether increasingly connected vehicle systems will remain safely isolated from driving controls.
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ARM’s Cortex-A15 announcement makes Dr. Dave anticipate far more capable phones and tablets while immediately asking what that performance will cost in battery life, using his overclocked Palm experience as the practical counterweight.
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Holding a once-impressive five-gigabyte miniature spinning drive, Dr. Dave traces the rapid transition to solid-state storage and argues that quiet foundational changes can matter more than glamorous devices. The comparison leads to a characteristically skeptical question about whether tablets solve a real problem or repeat the short-lived netbook craze.
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John Ambrosio remembers early display lasers that were roughly six feet long, required major electrical power and water cooling, then explains how semiconductor materials and optical engineering reduced the system to a box only inches across. Dr. Dave uses the contrast to make a difficult engineering advance understandable to a general audience.
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Mike Downey explains that Flash began with John Gay and Robert Tatsumi’s SmartSketch idea for natural drawing on early pen computers. Customer feedback turned it into animation, the Internet created a need for lightweight vector graphics and Macromedia quickly expanded the technology.
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The show records Google CEO Eric Schmidt leaving Apple's board as Android and Chrome OS move into Apple's core businesses, a concise marker of the growing rivalry between two defining technology companies.
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After once doubting whether the Stop Badware Coalition was accomplishing anything, Dr. Dave says Google’s participation may give the project practical impact. He explains the new warning shown before identified malware sites and acknowledges that filtering will never be perfect.
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Dr. Dave describes the newly introduced Google Calendar while it is still labeled beta, highlighting natural language event entry, automatic Google Maps links, iCal support, invitations and published calendars. The features he finds novel make this a useful record of a service that later became everyday infrastructure.
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Google Cardboard delights Dr. Dave because its virtual-reality viewer uses ordinary material and a phone instead of expensive components. He sees serious creativity in the playful engineering and appreciates a design goal that makes a new experience simple, fun and inexpensive enough for far more people to try.
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Dr. Dave introduces an early Google Labs experiment that reordered search results partly around simpler layouts for people using screen readers. He explains how crowded pages can make search exhausting and accurately frames the service as an unfinished experiment rather than a polished solution.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
