Joe Farace

“Where ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.”—Popular Mechanics, March 1949

The above quotation makes you wonder about the nature of predictions because a common fallacy is in believing that technology is always going to move in a straight line and not branch out to form a paradigm shift. Or sometimes people, as in the quoted magazine, just didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. Bell Labs’ John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for research on semiconductors and discovery of the transistor effect in 1947. Yet even today vacuum tubes are not dead and there is a booming if small market in analog audio components. And in our neck of the woods, witness Harman’s announcement of building a factory to make 35mm film cassettes. It might just be too soon to start chiseling film’s tombstone—or not.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.--Andrew Brown

Recently Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen announced that all their applications would move online within 10 years. The same day I saw a headline that "Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic," referring to the nation's second largest...

"Silver white winters that melt into springs."--Oscar Hammerstein II

The idea behind this story was to provide insight into the photo gear I own and use, all of which was purchased from Shutterbug advertisers. During the review process many different photographic products pass through my hands but contrary to what you may think they don't stay there...

"No good deed goes unpunished."--Clare Boothe Luce

Editor & Publisher recently reported that Charlotte Observer Editor Rick Thames apologized to readers when a staff photographer "inappropriately altered" an image of a local firefighter. The original photograph had a brownish-gray sky, while the enhanced image featured a deep red sky and a...