Geek culture

Background … As a hands-on IT director in a mid-sized company like mine, I have to come to terms with the fact that some users are bound to use Apple products and that they are most likely going to end up asking for our help. Given this fact, we…

Spiria employees are encouraged to spend some time at work on pet projects that support skills development. One of these projects, dreamt up by developer Marc Tesson, was to pilot a radio-controlled boat through an Android application. A team of…

Ashley has type 1 diabetes. Like more and more patients, she decided to take charge of her future rather than wait for solutions from the health industry. Thanks to technology and the open source movement, it is now possible to “hack” your disease:

The blockchain is a technology based on shared, decentralized ledgers. A ledger is a list of transactions that are copied and saved on several different computers, rather than centralized on a single server. Each transaction (or group of…

ConuHacks is a yearly event that takes place at Concordia University, in downtown Montréal (Québec). This 24-hour hackathon is an opportunity for more than 650 students from all over North America to excel by working together, and to meet industry…

Bitcoin is a very secure and stable crypto-currency; no wonder it’s been dubbed “Virtual Gold”. But when it comes to everyday transactions, it’s too slow and expensive, and can only process around 10 transactions per second. Many other…

New beginnings are ripe for predictions, and as another year draws to a close, let’s look to see what experts and analysts foresee for the year ahead. Moving beyond the all-pervasive “artificial intelligence” and the “Internet of Things,” here are…

How does Elon Musk find time to sleep? In 2017, while at the helm of both Tesla and Space X, Musk unveiled a prototype for an electric semi-truck that’s set to revolutionize the transportation industry, he presented a rocket that could take…

At its recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced it had been working on a programming language for a non-existent machine: the quantum computer. The language was mostly developed at Microsoft’s Station Q lab in Santa Barbara, which the company…

The iPhone X, to be released on November 3, will include a fun little feature that is turning out to be a surprise hit for Apple: Animojis! These “animated emojis”, mimicking users’ facial expressions, stole the show at the unveiling of Apple’s…

Next month, Tim Cook and his team at Apple will finally be unveiling the latest incarnation of its smartphone, the iPhone 8. As always, the geekosphere has been rife with speculation about specifications and details; but this year, rumours about the…

With 21 million people, Beijing is the world’s third-largest city. With such a large and ever-growing population, how can traffic flow be maintained? Better yet, how can the trips of some 10,000 taxis be optimized in real time to ensure the best…

The GIF image format — the proper pronunciation of which is still up for debate — is already 30 years old, and going stronger than ever!

Autonomous transportation is the latest thing, and large tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon, including Tesla, Apple, Alphabet/Google and Intel. In fact, Intel recently made quite the prediction: by 2050, “the passenger economy” (a term…

The concept was popularized in the early 1970s with “Game of Life”, a two-dimensional cellular automaton dreamed up by John Conway. Olivier gives us a primer and explores its vast applications in the IT field.

This year, at its tenth annual developers conference, Google once again set the stage for several significant announcements signalling the future direction of the Silicon Valley behemoth.

Google unveiled a new tool able to recognize and complete a drawing. This command performance is made possible thanks to neural networks and machine learning.

From the very first payment cards at the beginning of last century, to today’s Apple Pay and Google Wallet, transactional innovations have had a hard time getting accepted. Even the latest “smart cards” seem headed for failure. The payment methods…

Marilyne, our enthusiastic and passionate UX/UI designer in Gatineau, shares her impressions of the WàQ conference. She thoroughly enjoyed the 2017 edition of this event, which is already in its 6th year.

Here’s yet another one of our predictions for 2017 that seems to be coming to fruition: the rise of personal assistants. Since Apple’s Siri in 2011, the technology powering this product/service has come a long way, and the market is now competitive.

The Stack Overflow report is based on a survey of tens of thousands of software developers from 213 countries and territories around the world.

In a recent blog post, we mentioned Machine Learning as one of this year’s 7 biggest technological trends. Here is one of the more fascinating applications of machine learning we’ve seen lately.

Every New Year brings in a new batch of smartphones, some of which are already generating quite the buzz. Here is a sneak preview of some of the most highly anticipated models.

Two years ago, the 3D printing was all over the news, in both specialized and mainstream media. Everyone was talking about it, and major retailers started offering 3D-printed products to the general public…

Facebook has just made a surprising announcement: it is going to open a start-up incubator in Paris, called Startup Garage. This is the first experience of its kind for Facebook, and will help up to 15 startup companies fine-tune their projects in…

What will 2017 look like on planet tech? No-one can make definite predictions and there are too many variables for us to actually know what’s in the pipeline, but a forecasting exercise at the beginning of the year is always fun and…

Sammy Kamkar, security researcher, whistleblower and expert in “applied hacking”, recently revealed his latest masterstroke, which should worry Web users and IT security managers alike. PoisonTap, a device running on an inexpensive Raspberry Pi…

For the acronym lovers out there, here’s a new one: GAFAM. It refers to the hegemony of the Big 5 of IT and the Web: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

This week, Microsoft and Apple presented their respective visions of the future of computers, and more specifically of laptops.Microsoft first unveiled its new Surface Book 2, which is more powerful and has more battery. Apple, on the other hand…

The hegemony of Moore’s Law over the IT industry is reaching its predictable end. In just a few years, we will look back on the 1965-2015 half-century as the golden age of microprocessors.What is Moore’s Law?Gordon Moore’s maxim has been so bandied…

At the crossroads of design and technology, 3D printing keeps us in its thrall. As it spreads to ever more fields, it is extending beyond models and prototypes and on to serial production, or additive manufacturing. The entrance of heavyweights in…

Just about everyone knows that augmented reality is used to catch Pokémon with Poké Balls. Those who keep up with tech news know that virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are the future of video games. But few people know that VR/AR is…

We were among the lucky few to be top on the list to receive Microsoft’s Hololens (thanks go out to our contacts!). [For those of you who may have missed it, we have already written one piece introducing Hololens.]

[Illustration by Alex Asfour.]

Tabulation Separation … Ever heard of a breakup caused by indentation? She’s a space cadet, he’s a tabsolutist. Could such a piddling detail spell the end of a relationship? That was the storyline of last Sunday’s episode of Silicon Valley…

We’ve got one! We were able to get our hands on a HoloLens, though not before we parted with US $3,000. At the beginning of the month, Microsoft shipped the first wave of Development Edition HoloLens to selected developers and business partners. For…

56,033 developers from 173 different countries responded to the annual survey run by Stack Overflow, the well-known Q&A platform dedicated to programming. The results of the survey, first run in 2013, provide a good snapshot of programming and…

Last weekend, the Google IO version 2015 event took place over two days in San Francisco. Here is what particularly caught our attention.

The Myo armband, from the Ontario company Thalmic Labs, does a great job at meeting this challenge. This device is placed on your forearm and detects nerve impulsions in your muscles in order to transmit your gestures to a smart phone, an automation…

During Jared Spool’s Web presentation in Quebec City, he argued that there has never been a better time to be a designer. After years of non-recognition, more and more companies such as Apple and Cirque du Soleil are recruiting talented…

Having nurtured a passion for video games since my youngest age, I’ve always told myself that one day I’d create my own game in which there would be an incredible and fascinating story – a story so unbelievably powerful that players wouldn’t be able…

The empire we will study this week is a real monster. IBM. The so-called “Big Blue” has often been the preferred supplier for countless companies. It was once said that no one has ever been fired for buying IBM products. But today, even…

The next empire we will study in the “Ne obliviscaris” series is Xerox.

Ne obliviscaris. If you have ever visited the lobby of the Parliament Building in Quebec City, you may have noticed this sentence on the Marquis of Lorne’s coat of arms: “Beware of forgetting”. Although this phrase was written over…