My Personal Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

I was purchasing a new phone for work, and saw that Verizon has the new HTC Incredible 2 listed as an option, if you want to pay $99,999.99 for it! :)

AKA, the Obama Pad

Click here for more info

And this is after AT&T sued Verizon over previous commercials :)

Don't forget, DroidDoes.com

Looks like I'll have to wait another week :( - 11/06/2009


From the email:

Only a few more days until you can get the phone that's location-aware. Voice-recognizing. App-mashing and multitasking. It can connect you to anyone or anything at break-neck speed. It's more than a phone. It's a Droid. Check out the new site today. You’ll find many of the features Droid does for you.
In a world of doesn't, DROID DOES:

• Voice-activated search w/GPS
• High-speed mobile web
• Runs simultaneous apps
• SmartShade messaging

www.DroidDoes.com

Over the last few weeks there has been an increasing amount of buzz about an unannounced Motorola smartphone due to come out some time between late October and early December. Rumored specs include a powerful OMAP3430 processor, 5 megapixel camera, slideout QWERTY keyboard and touch screen, all housed in a super-compact package and running Android 2.0. A handful of potential names have swirled around, included the Sholes and the Tao, but tonight Verizon has made it perfectly clear what the upcoming phone will be called: Droid. And Verizon is positioning it to be a direct threat to the iPhone in a new advertising campaign it launched at the site DroidDoes.com.

- click here for the TechCrunch article

Washington Post - Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal

A recent ad for Vodafone featured Formula One champ Lewis Hamilton piloting his F1 steed, as if it were an RC car, using a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone. Many were fooled, some were not, but really it was just a wishful-thinking play by clever ad people.

But one such convergence of smartphones and automobiles apparently is legit. Computer science researchers at Berlin's Free University worked up this Chrysler minivan that can be controlled remotely by an iPhone app.

The team developed its iDriver app to manage the highly modified "Spirit of Berlin" autonomous vehicle using WiFi and the smartphone's controls. The unit's accelerometer controls steering, accomplished at hand by turning the device, while screen buttons control braking and acceleration. The system also sends a live video stream of the road ahead to the iPhone screen.

- Click here for the full article.

Forget Tickle Me Elmo this year! :)


Related: Military robot 'hops' over walls

What a great message that I needed to hear (and I'm sure a few of you as well :).

"A little web surfing, a little Facebook, a little folding of the hands around the smart phone and spiritual poverty will come upon you like a robber."

Link

Fascinating stuff. This is going to get real interesting as this type of technology becomes more and more prevalent.

REDMOND, Wash. – Sept. 23, 2009 – Unlike the average person, Gordon Bell doesn’t forget.

For most people, the brain simply experiences more than it can handle. The past inevitably fades away, leaving a fuzzy picture that looms into one’s consciousness intermittently at best.

But not for Bell. For more than a decade, the principal researcher at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus has digitally archived every aspect of his life. Conversations, phone calls, photos, CDs, articles, home videos, e-mail — every piece of data Bell has created or consumed has been squirreled away into a database. In effect, he has offloaded the past 11 years of his life into a comprehensive electronic memory bank.

This decade-long data dump has convinced Bell that the frailty of bio-memory — what everyone else has to work with — is about to become a thing of the past. In the newly published book “Total Recall,” Bell and his Microsoft Research colleague Jim Gemmell outline a vision of a not-too-distant future where people can digitally record and preserve their entire lives. This ability to remember everything — “the e-memory revolution,” Bell and Gemmell call it — corrects a problem we’ve had for the past 10,000 or so years. “Lots of people say, ‘Isn’t it healthy to forget?’” Gemmell says. “It’s really a bug in human memory, not a feature.”

A memory upgrade might be just around the corner because improvements to digital storage, digital recording and digital search are converging in just the right way. In this century, people will be awash in a sea of information. Already portions of our lives are digitally captured every day. From the constant stream of e-mail to the GPS-stamped pictures we take on our Smartphones, pieces of ourselves are being stored on Facebook or YouTube or massive portable hard drives.

Bell and Gemmell have been exploring ways to record and easily access this trail of data people leave behind. Bell’s archiving adventure began in 1998, when he decided to go paperless and eliminate clutter (“You have a much freer life when everything goes into cyberspace,” he says). With help from evolving hardware — an automatic camera, an arm strap that logged biometrics, a voice recorder, a pedometer, a desktop scanner — he archived as much of his daily life as possible.

Around 2001, Bell surfaced for air and discovered he had amassed hundreds of thousands of files. The shrinking cost of storage had made the archiving easy, but that was only half the battle. “Gordon discovered he had created this big mess for himself that he couldn’t do much with,” Gemmell says. “I realized this had become a very interesting software problem.” The experiment turned into a Microsoft Research project called MyLifeBits, which Gemmell created in 2003.

Since then, the two have worked on ways to mine the data mountain of Bell’s past in ways beyond a quick search. The key to unlocking e-memory’s transformative power lies in harnessing this data to, say, create a picture of one’s overall health. For example Bell, who has a heart condition, tracks his weight daily and monitors the data pumped out by his pacemaker to get a changing snapshot of his well-being.

 Click here for the full article

Sort of... if you consider a house of bricks without mortar. Still impressive :)

I need a pair of these!



Click here for the full Wired.com report

Just in case you wanted to go back a decade or so in technology.

Some may say that this an abomination or heresy to run Windows on the iPhone :)

Sorry about the annoying background music....

Taking it to the next level against Microsoft, and I dare say Apple ("It should just work."). Should be fun to watch :)

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.


Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

- Click here for the full post

Thanks Obama! How would these lost jobs calculate in your "saving or creating 3 million jobs"?

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.

U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.

Microsoft reported an overall effective tax rate of 26 percent for 2008 in its last annual report. “Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates,” the report said.

Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, said many software companies such as Microsoft have exploited tax and trade rules in the U.S. and other countries to achieve a low overall tax rate.

Ireland Subsidiary

Typically, he said, a company like Microsoft develops a product like Windows in the United States and deducts those costs against U.S. income. It then transfers the technology to a subsidiary in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower, without charging licensing fees. The company then assigns its foreign sales to the Irish subsidiary so it doesn’t have to claim the income in the United States.

“What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate,” Bosworth said. “Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”

Ballmer is one of 10 U.S. software company executives pushing back against the tax proposals in meetings today with White House officials including Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, and the heads of congressional committees such as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat.

Expense Deductions

Among other things, Obama proposed limiting expense deductions such as those for employee compensation when companies defer U.S. tax on foreign profits.

In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

Ballmer said that, while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country.

Worldwide Employees

Microsoft employed 95,029 people worldwide as of April 21, of whom 56,552 were based in the United States, according to the company’s Web site. The company announced it was firing up to 5,000 people in January while hiring some new workers; the company has shed about 1,000 jobs since then, spokesman Lou Gellos said.

Ballmer estimated that higher taxes under the proposal would reduce profits for companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average by between 10 and 15 percentage points.

“It’s just a question of how much will the Dow come down,” Ballmer said. “It’s not about companies anyway; we’re talking about shareholders.”

In addition to limiting current deductions for companies that defer U.S. tax on their foreign profits, Obama proposed altering a set of rules known as “check the box” that allow companies to shelter foreign profits in offshore subsidiaries that can be disregarded for U.S. tax purposes.

- Click here for the rest of the article.

"AquaPenguins - technology-bearers as autonomous underwater vehicles
Like its natural archetype, the AquaPenguin from Festo has a hydrodynamic body contour. Its elegant wing propulsion and its head and tail sections, which can be moved in all directions, allow the robotic penguins to manoeuvre in cramped spatial conditions, to turn on the spot when necessary and – unlike their biological counterparts – even to swim backwards.

The bionic Penguins are designed as autonomous underwater vehicles that independently orient themselves and navigate through the water basin. They are supported by a 3D sonar system which, as with dolphins, allows communication with their surroundings and with other robotic penguins – for example to avoid collisions.

An entirely new feature in robotics is the torso that can move in any direction. The bionic Fin Ray® structure, derived from the tail fin of a fish, has thus been extended into three-dimensional space for the first time. The pengins' torso design can be used in automation in a flexible tripod configuration, thereby opening up new fields of application in mechanical handling technology."

- click here for more info