Author - JJ Stewart

Awesomeness in the workplace: VR is coming to business

Yes, we've all seen it in movies.  We have imagined what it would be like to interact with a virtual world.  Some of us have even donned the often heavy and cumbersome virtual reality headgear and other accoutrement -and been left unimpressed.  For the past 20 years, most have agreed that virtual reality is nothing more than a novelty, and not a viable consumer technology.  In the last 3 years however, we have seen a dramatic swing in public opinion and technology advances that are starting to question the classic stance on virtual reality.  With advances in the industry by Microsoft, Google, and Oculus Rift, (lamentably, now a Facebook company) the consumer video game world stands at the edge of a very exciting diving board; waiting to be told that they can jump in.  Virtual reality is coming. Since it is now approaching the tangible world of science fact from...
January 30, 2015By 0 Comments 0Read more...

Why the earliest forms of encryption are still used for super-secrets

Have you ever listened to short wave radio and heard something strange?  A station with no identification has a voice reading a long list of letters or numbers.  We call them number stations and they've been around since before World War II.  The funny thing is that they are still transmitting secret messages open and in the clear for anyone to intercept -but not decode. Why?  Because this is unbeatable encryption that has been used for thousands of years and no one yet has found a way to defeat it without the key and, most likely, never will. Earliest forms of encryption used what we call substitution ciphers.  This is where each letter in a message is replaced by a different letter to make a written message unreadable.  This is, at its core, how encryption still works today.  The first uses of substitution ciphers used what is called shifting.  This is...
October 15, 2014By 0 Comments 0Read more...