Ifix it, has done a “ease of repair” analysis on the various tablets out there, it makes for some interesting reading, especially if you enjoy cracking a screen, it looks like, the ages of throw away computers could be upon us!
Details below
Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
Ease of Repair
Friday, March 1st, 2013Making a Nest
Saturday, April 14th, 2012I’ve been researching thermostats, and the market was starting to make me get annoyed, the thermostats on the market seem to be very basic, and then they are expensive, for what appears to be a clock with a relay attached, which is very analogue technology, Some of them have a magic BOOST button, which sounds like its been taken off a “hot rod car” but from what I understand its actually a bypass on the timer for 30 minutes or so.
Then I was have a little read on the web and along comes nest. This company was set up a group of apple engineers, so hence the shininess of the device, but basically is a device that has, wireless, proximity sensor and it usises this to understand how hot and how often you need heat, and also when you are in. So it actually turns on the heat when you actually need heat, when you are in the house, so we shall be doing a little more investigation and I can see a Nest being bought.
Tablets, and deal hunting
Monday, December 5th, 2011I’m looking at Android devices, as there seems to be too much “lock in” on apple and amazon devices.
Talking to Harvey Norman today Monday 5th of December I’ve came across the following:
€449
Toshiba at100 (sold as the Toshiba Thrive in the US)
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/toshiba-at100-1003950/review
The Toshiba, Has got a SDXC card, memory card and has mini USB and replaceable battery, Its also got proper USB ports and a proper HDMI port.
€399
Acer icona
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/26/acer-iconia-tab-a500-review/
3.5mm headphone jack, a mini-HDMI port.dedicated power jack (Means having to have another charger!) and a pair of USB slots: one micro-USB to transfer data to the tablet, and one full-size USB port which connects with both your storage drives and keyboards, just connect this to a usb hub and you be grand.
More reviews are here:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/266915/the-best-android-tablets/
http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/13-best-android-tablets-in-the-world-905504
Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away at age 70
Thursday, October 13th, 2011We 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/
HP getting out of the Tablet game
Saturday, August 20th, 2011Looks like HP dipped their to in the water and didn’t like what they saw, going up against Apple and Android (Google) is not a good starting point even if you did buy Palm. It’s a pitty it would have been good for the industry. It’s a bit like OS2 an old operating system on the PC. It tried and failed, it seems the smart phone business is all to similar to the PC business 30 years ago. We’re going to have two main players, One dominant and one not so dominant, and the one will the open architecture will win, Android has the open architecture, so my money is on this at the moment, but I think the patent wars that are stating could put a stop to Androids development.
Phone wars
Thursday, June 30th, 2011So 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
Iphone to keep people alive
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011AliveCor, 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
clouds and things
Friday, June 17th, 2011Clouds 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.
IPad2 rival
Monday, March 14th, 2011Well it looks like Samsung, has finally said their are going to have a go at Apple, So anyone that considering the purchase of the IPad2, it mgiht worth having a look at below. Its a you tube video on the 10.1 Samsung galaxy tab. It seems to look the business. It will be also nice and open, so it will be developer friendly, so plenty of apps will be a coming.