Archive for October, 2011

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away at age 70

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

We seem to be loosing a lot of good people in the computer business, and the Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away at age 70. I know Steve Jobs helped create the the consumer demand for I.T. products but Dennis Ritchie was one of the inventors or the modern operating system, or what we know as Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Some how I don’t think the worlds news papers will fill the front pages lamenting this loss, Which is sad really, seeing with out Denis Ritchie we may not have had the C programming language. Why is that important, well with out the C programming language, we as software poeople may not be able to write programs, which alot of have formed operating systems.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/father-of-c-and-unix-dennis-ritchie-passes-away-at-age-70/

 

The regulator for communications in America (FCC) is looking that all phones will have GPS in them.

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

In America the FCC (the regulator for communications) is looking that all phones will have GPS in them, so that the 999 or 112 emergency call will also send out GPS data also, so that in an emergency The emergency response people can track where you are. While privacy advocats will be up in arms about this, I think this is a good thing for people living in remote areas, but could we do this already, Shouldn’t the phone companies get together with there triangulation data, and add it to there networks so that when a Emergency  call is made, the system will pull in the triangulation data, I know that it may be patchy, were you have only one mast receiving the signal, but a lot of areas are now served by two or more masts. So maybe a bit of inovation is required here, hopefully the rest of the world will follow.

More on:

http://www.mobileburn.com/16915/news/fcc-to-require-gps-in-all-phone-by-2018

Gmail and your privacy

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

Allegedly  Google has handed over one user’s private data to the U.S. government, who requested it without a search warrant.

The contacts list and IP address data of  Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.

more on the link below

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_hands_wikileaks_volunteers_gmail_data_to_us.php#.TpP-gAfK72s.twitter

 

Amazon Kindle Fire tablet

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Amazon are getting in to the tablet game with the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, and it looks like it will be a disruptive product, that will disrupt the market at under $200 or in under €150 Euros aprox. I hope that they will have a strong UI over android. its going to have a 7-inch screen with a Gorilla Glass coating, a 1GHz TI OMAP dual-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and will weigh 14.6 ounces. So the Speck is ok, its not going to set the world on fire, but for the person that wants a tablet, it should do the job. The worry will be how android or Amazon will it be, I dont see any mention of a USB connector, or sound out, I am prsuming that this will be as standard. It also will default to the Amazon market place, so that your app experience will be limited, This means that you can get access to the Android market. So it looks like we are seen a product with a open OS, but it will have a closed data portal. The 8GB of data will be tight if your watching video, but amazon have Amazon Cloud Storage, where the product could kill the market, is in the realm of video, where with whispernet, you can walk from watching the movie on the subway, and have it pick up where you stopped the movie on the subway to your TV in your front room, with out having to fast forward again to the point. IF it works, then it should be very cool. This could be the IPad killer!