Archive for June, 2011

Phone wars

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

So whats going to be the phone that is going to win the phone wars, well there is 500,000 android activations every day now according to Andy Rubin, so while the love affair with the IPhone may be still going strong, the market is pushing for open and its looking like android is the way it is going, at 500,000 activations, its hard to see apple coming back, unless it brings out a cut price IPhone, By the way who is Andy Rubin he is one of the founders of android

 

 

Need aerial TV coverage but got no helicopter

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

The guys at mikrokopter.de have come up with a camera that will fit on a microcopter, and then it will follow you around from around 50 to 100 ft. have a look at the video, as words don’t do it justice. I can see some great applications for this, or doing the WRC (World rally car) coverage on the the cheap, or the skiing trip, etc.

 

MikroKopter – FollowMe on the Wakeboard from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

More clouds, and add men

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Heard this on the radio, a company offering cloud services in there data center, so now the cloud services have moved to the data-center, but in this case just it sounded in my humble opinion one data-center. well that will work!, But I thought that to original premise of a cloud was that it was utility computing, on a service that was distributed, so that if one data-center goes down the data-center in a different location will stay up. so spend your money wisely, a cloud service needs to be distributed, and clustered. That it would have at a minimal specification two of everything, one of each located in a different building on a separate power gird, and preferably power from a different supplier. I think that too many sales persons have swallowed the book on cloud computing, but have only glanced at the specification rather than the detail.

Kindle 3 test drive

Friday, June 24th, 2011

So I stumped up the €150 euros for a kindle, Why did  i buy it? Well I needed to read PDF’s on the move and I didn’t want the hassle of printing them off. I bought the wireless version not the 3G version, as I didn’t think i needed to buy a book when I was out in the sticks as I won’t read books that quick! So how is it going with the kindle… Well not too bad, its ok for PDF’s but the screen is actually too small for PDF’s so a bigger screen is the way to go here. I’ve shown it to a few people and every one thinks that they need to touch it, as they think its an Ipad like device. I think it needs touch too, but at the price point, I don’t think you can get to a touch screen.  the e-mail doc delevery system is really good, so I can see this working in a big way, and its a nice way to send docs to a device, no need for messy cables etc. and its free through wifi

More speed captian

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

Speed worth talking about, The PCI Special Interest Group has started a plan to develop a variant on PCI Express 3.0 that would challenge the Thunderbolt format from Apple and Intel, its planning for a 32Gbps PCIe cable. This cable will able to channel power as well as data through to devices up to 10 feet (3m) away. They are looking at shipping products ideally before June 2013, so if your buying a laptop around 2013, might be worth holding off to see if you can get this connector, It could be like getting caught with USB 2.0 just as USB 3.0 comes out. More info here

Iphone to keep people alive

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

AliveCor, a small company that developed an iPhone 4 case with a built-in ECG is now making a device that will work with your iphone or ipad, so your be able to look at your heart going bump…. bump……. bump. Now a nice app for this would be compare your heart beat, so that you could rank your heart against other hearts, then do a top ten hearts. more on medgadget.com

tables war continues

Monday, June 20th, 2011

HP are now getting into the tablet game officially with a new tablet running web os, it will be selling in the states on the 1st of July for around $500 so might even come to these shores for €360, so it looks like the tablet war is going to be won on price.

Looking for a cheap tablet

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

Thought tablets were cheap… they are now. the low-cost $35 tablet codenamed ‘Sakshat‘ with funding from the Indian government, looks set to role off the production line in the near future, it has had 6 months of a halt on the job, it should be interesting to see what comes out of it.

icufflinks

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

An now for something completely different, some icufflinks these will be all the new rage for xmas!
icufflinks

Thanks adafruit.com

clouds and things

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Clouds and clouds, every where their are clouds! but what really is a cloud, well it a marketing term that is used to sell computers in my humble opinion.  In reality its clustered computing exposed to the Internet, then its a case of how big a cluster you want and if you want it private as in all to your self and managed e.g. VMware or Redhat etc., or your want to buy a piece of computing from this cluster, so for example amazon.com EC2 offering, so you pay for a piece of computing time from amazon. I maybe oversimplifying this definition, but with so many buzz words floating around, i think people should have some idea what they are going buying. i was going to link to wikipedia on this, but the marketing men have been there too.