Computers and Computer Devices What is one of the most annoying things about 3D printing? Some will say nothing, it is revolutionary, but others may complain about having to wait as an object is built layer by layer. This may soon become a thing of the past as a new method for 3D printing has been developed by engineers. It will allow an object to be created in a different manner. This method which would use a block of treated resin would not only increase the speed of creating an object, but reduce the cost and make it easier to print very intricate objects and designs. Did you ever wonder what were the top trends in computer science today? If you did here they are, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, and Cybersecurity. Artificial Intelligence is progressing rapidly, maybe even too fast, but we will find out soon enough. When we think of AI (Artificial Intelligence), many of us think of robotics which is another burgeoning field which depends on AI but not all AI has to do with robotics. Let me give you an example. Your car is getting more dependent on AI every year. Some might say in a few more years it might even qualify as a robot on wheels. Self-driving cars are full of AI and are close to being perfected. AI is also used in many other things like advertising for example. Did you notice all the ads you get when you look at something you are interested in buying? You keep getting them even after your purchase for a week or more. AI lines up things that agree with what you looked at and feeds the adverts to you in hope you will buy for its advertisers. AI is also used in many places to keep track of things which are not only associated with you, but in one of the fields I mentioned above. Cybersecurity is that field and has gotten so complex AI has become a necessity in protecting computers and websites. It has worked to different degrees depending on how often it is updated and what areas it has been designed to protect. The best protection software is updated many times every day. It is also used to find faults in computer systems and hardware. Many people don’t realize hardware which is controlled by software can have its software hacked. Quantum Computing is getting more advanced all the time. Many make a claim I don’t believe, but I could be in the minority on this one. That claim is a Quantum computer can’t be hacked. I have heard this so many times in the past about digital computers and software and yet it was always accomplished in tests and in criminal actions. The argument is the Quantum computer is too complex to be hacked, but I believe nothing made by man is one hundred percent secure. Especially computers. If I used one Quantum computer to break another’s security, I bet it could be done, especially if the computer being used to break in had more Qbits than the one creating the code. I guess time will tell on this and I will get a lot of reasons why I am wrong. We are getting closer to human looking robots all the time. A type of synthetic skin has been created which mimics human skin. Robot bodies have been created which are less bulky and more human like. One fault which needs to be dealt with is the jerky movements of the head and neck. It just isn’t quite there yet. Some of the robots look so real it is hard to tell they are robots. In the past I have shown videos of these incredible machines. Some believe cloud computing is the future. Supposedly everything we need will be kept in the cloud and downloaded to us as we need it. The truth is there is something called edge computing which many experts believe will replace much of the data kept on the cloud. Basically, edge computing means the data we need will be in the computer where it can be used very quickly without waiting for it to come down from the cloud. One of the reasons edge computing has become necessary is the split second decisions needed to be made by autonomous systems needed in self-driving cars where reaction time is very important. A split second could be the difference between an accident and not. There are many other devices available to be connected to our home computers. The first modem I had many years ago was so slow it took all night to download a small file and sometimes stopped in the middle of the download. The cable modems are incredibly fast compared to that old modem and can download a large file in seconds, a file which I would have not been capable of downloading in the old days. While thinking about cyber security we usually don’t think about our modems. Last year I was checking out my modem software and was astonished to find I had many different hackers on it who tried to get into my home system which I have protected with the best software I could find. Thankfully they were not able to get any further. I was able to knock them all off that software. Printers have also gotten much more capable and faster than when I started computing. There were no ink jets in those days. Printers used pins and a ribbon like a typewriter. The pins would form the letters and numbers. When the first color printer came out it also used pins. I had an early Canon color printer and printed a color picture on it which was very crude. As we all know, they are great for printing color photos today. There is a special printer which copies works of art and does such an incredible job; the law requires it to label the pictures as copies. From what I have been told, even the thickness of the paint is represented in different areas of the picture. Today we have hundreds of devices our computers can connect to and maybe even more. I have a microscope which can be run by the computer and use the monitor screen to view what I am looking at and take a photo of it. Many of us dump our photos from our cell phones to the computer and save recordings there. We are getting the ability to do more every day and even run our homes from the computer. This would have amazed people years ago.
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