‘Technology’ Archives
When jbwan met…
Yes for the last week or so, I've been conducting my own Louis Theroux style documentary, hence the title chosen for this blog posting. They say that you should never meet your heroes; you'll always be disappointed. Well, I've been living with my Hero for the last seven days and disappointed, I am not. Last Thursday I ventured to the Meteor store in Waterford City and threw caution to the wind. Readers whom I may have lost over recent months due to a lack of posts will remember my regular criticism of mobile madness, the iPhone culture, and something that I termed the Phone-omenon that was [...]
Aero – not bubbles, it makes me boil!
Last Summer I treated myself to a new Dell laptop (Inspiron 1525). Fully loaded with a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 3GB of RAM - a reasonable beast by any grade. I'm not a gamer so I didn't beef up the graphics but it came with a decent enough setup so I was pretty sure that Eclipse, Word, Excel and my usual apps wouldn't cause too much hassle. Up until about 2 weeks ago the machine was running fine and without any real incident. However, it then started to slow down to no end. Apps took noticeably longer to load (no, not the it's an old PC now mindset problem ;) ) and typing was nearly impossible. [...]
Wordpress 2.7 – don’t you look pretty?
Recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and I have to say that the developers have done a very nice job on the admin interface. Everything looks really impressive and there are plenty of new features that I'm looking forward to investigating further. Nice work WP folk!
Knightrider fever as Mercedes team up with KIT
Well that's not entirely true and it doesn't have anything to do with Germans and "The Hoff". The KIT in this instance is the Karlshrue Institute of Technology and Mercedes has teamed up with the IT to establish a centre for research into the area of electric car development. This is a great move by Daimler (Mercedes parent company) who are already pushing the bar in electric car development by launching a model for the hi-end executive market, in the S-class range, next year. To be known as the S-400 it will be the world's first lithium-ion battery powered hybrid car. Exciting times ahead [...]
E really does equal mc^2
Finally after about 100 years scientists have confirmed Albert Einstein's famous equation of E = mc^2. Leading experts in the field of theoretical physics have utilised some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons allowing them to finally prove that energy and mass are equivalent as Einstein proposed. Looks like we won't have to rewrite the textbooks. :) source: theage.com.au
Virtually murdered him, She did
Just when you thought that you'd heard it all, you read this story. A Japanese woman who is an avid player in one of these wonderful virtual life games was recently so livid at her unexpected online, virtual divorce to her online, virtual husband that she killed off his character - virtually murdering him! Basically it boils down to illegal access of a private account and destruction of personal property in the real world. However, virtual murder or not, this Japanese lady is facing serious real world jail time for her act of virtual insanity... source: Yahoo!
PAMELA finds dark matter…
...or at least according to Wino theory. Everyone in the cosmo world is holding their breaths at the moment in anticipation of PAMELA's soon to be released findings on what they believe to be the discovery of dark matter. The team say that they have observed an unruly amount of positron production in space, the volumes that would be expected from dark matter collisions whereby particles are annihilating each other. Deadly stuff!While the world waits for the official release, we gasp at the humour that another group who attended the initial briefing from PAMELA have already released findings [...]
Shock Waves?
We all joked about wireless electricity at one stage or another, usually with non-techies, and we all had a good laugh at the idea of bolts of lightening shooting around and everybody being shocked in the streets. Anyway when the laughter died down, I'm sure that the concept stayed with us all and thinking about it, why couldn't we have wireless electricity? After all, it doesn't have to mean that you have wireless mains power, just a means of wirelessly charging a battery like solar, wind or another power generating technology. Well that's exactly what the folks in MIT have done, with [...]
Cuil – is it cool?
Reading yesterday's FT I spotted just how out of touch I was with recent events in the world of the internet. A brand new search engine, hyped as a possible competitor to Google, has emerged. Written as Cuil but pronounced "cool" it straightaway fails on the potential of having somebody say "have you cooled them yet?" without making it sound like an extract from a mafia conversation.I stopped by, briefly, to see what Cuil had to offer and immediately I am struck by the plain black page with an off-centre search box that is not only leaning on the left hand side of the page but which also [...]
Living with iPhone
So, I've been a bit negative in general about the iPhone. I've been steadfast with respect to my opinion that the product merges two products that just should not be composed, when one is an essential communications device. Last week I had an e-mail from some cousins in Australia (big hello to Beth and the gang) talking about the iPhone and wondering if I had any opinions on it; I decided that it was time that I tried it out rather than just ranting on about it. So I borrowed an iPhone that was badly hacked by some unknown person, re-installed the original 1.1.4 firmware and listened to what [...]
