...more recent posts
Boeing will introduce in flight wifi internet access on Monday on a non stop flight from Munich to L.A.. Cost will be $30 for the entire flight, or $10 for 30 minutes. Boeing hopes to have this service, called Connexion, on 300 planes by 2006. Singapore Airlines has plans to also deploy the system, but other major U.S. carriers are still dragging their feet.
Very informative article on the near future of camera phones:
Component and handset makers are gearing up to ship mass volumes of camera phones worldwide in hopes of sparking new markets in mobile imaging. They say they can resolve looming design hurdles for 2-megapixel and higher-resolution images as well as real-time video...Moving fast.
...Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., for one, wants "to push quickly toward the 5-megapixel camera phone and push digital still cameras to become something only for professionals. That's our ideal"...
...Next-generation lenses are also incorporating better autofocus, digital zoom and higher-resolution video capabilities. The enhancements already have doubled the bill of materials for a CMOS sensor module, from $5.50 at the VGA level to $10.10 for a megapixel unit, because of more expensive lenses and manufacturing costs. Samsung hopes to produce a 2-Mpixel CMOS module with MPEG-4 video for less than $20 by year's end....
"At Epson, we are working on 5-Mpixel graphics engines for 2005.... We believe that when the 2- to 5-Mpixel camera phones become mainstream, they will replace a huge percentage of digital still cameras," Lyons said. "In 2005 to 2006, we're looking at 2-Mpixel phones going mainstream"....
"We will support videoconferencing over circuit-switched and IP networks, but our long-term strategy is video-over-IP," he [Nokia senior VP Juha Putkiranta] said. "And carriers agree, because they see the efficiency benefits."
The article also expresses some worry about the networks being robust enough for lots of 2+ MP image file transfers. I still think the solution is to have the phone save two copies of every picture, one at full resolution and one at some fraction. The full resolution shots stay on the phone and then sync to a paired computer over bluetooth whenever in range. The reduced versions can be sent right from the phone over the network. This is better all around. 2 megs is too big. Even if I could I wouldn't want to fill someone's mail box up with 2 meg images. Just seems rude. (But, again, I want those full res shots in case I get one I want to keep.) My guess is this would be trivial to implement, since a DSP that can manipulate jpegs is already in the phone!
Interesting. Looks like redacted information can be (often) recovered by counting pixels:
The technology employed is, at first sight, nothing revolutionary. The two researchers measured the inclination of the text, deformed at the time of its digital reproduction - the inclination was an angle of 0.52°.
They then used a character recognition software to determine the width of the Arial-font text which provides the number of letters per unit of length. Simple recourse to an English dictionary then helped establish a list of possible words.
Incredibly long technical post on the history (and possible futures) of software development on the Mac. Short version: "The value is in the frameworks, not Obj-C."
Blogger undergoes a significant update. Notes on the very nice looking new designs are here.
From IBM's chief technology officer's speech at the International Electronics Forum:
"Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice." He added, "Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."We are always seeing stories about "the end of Moore's law" and for years these stories have consistently turned out to be untrue. But this seems a little more specific and a lot more believable.
In a possibly related story, Intel has recently announced a complete change in their future processor roadmap, dropping their massive, and monolithic, P4 flagship in favor of a more energy efficient dual core design.
So perhaps CPUs have hit the wall in some sense. But does it really matter? My amateur understanding is that we will still continue to see total system performance increase, but more and more those increases will come from other links in the chain (from mass storage speed increases, from bus speed increases, etc...) as well as from redesigning toward parallelism.
In other words, while we might not see 6 ghz processors, we will for sure see dual core 3 ghz processors (very soon,) and for most applications this will amount to the same thing. So expect more breathless "Moore's law is invalidated!" stories (even though it's not really a law and can't be invalidated,) but don't get too worked up. There is plenty of room still for innovation.
Puff piece, but sort of interesting nonetheless, on wearable displays:
Starner expects that the advent of mass-market floating displays will similarly expand what we do with mobile computers. He and his peers predict that someday we'll all be operating in "augmented reality" with the help of our wearable computers. All that really means is we'll eventually have the ability to bring the Web--or some form of it--with us wherever we go.Clearly the display is the biggest problem going forward (with data entry the second.) But will it go this way, or will flexible roll up displays be the answer? Imagine a cell phone / mobile computer in the form factor of a fat pen. Out of the side of the pen you can pull a flexible screen, like rolling down a window shade. This way you can get an arbitrarily big display in a pocket sized device. Both technologies are here, and close (2 years?) from the retail market.
"Why: Why not?"
Indeed.
Floppy disk drive RAID.
I'm not saying they are there yet, but Apple seems to have gotten something right with the latest iTunes (as well as breaking some stuff and going further down the DRM blackhole.) I think the iMix thing could be potentially huge. See this post for more:
Gyford writes, "It's kind of a social networking tool without really trying. With music as the social lubricant, you have something by which to gauge other people. Never mind those dumb lists of 'My Favourite Music' that Friendster et al suggest you populate. You can see which bands someone actually listens to. After browsing to, say, mechajesus's page, I'm almost interested in getting in touch simply because we share lots of tastes and he also listens to things I've never heard of. For anyone who's all High Fidelity-esque about judging people by their musical tastes (and, let's face it, you can't take anyone seriously who isn't), this is like the proverbial crack cocaine. Well, maybe if you could just download an MP3 with a click ... then I'd have problems leaving my computer to take care of essential bodily functions."
Interesting beta app for the Treo 600 (download link in first post) which gives you lots more control over the camera (can increase the factor set quality level from 65 to 99) plus it sort of deals with the low light blue dot problem. With a small amount of testing I can say that the pictures do look a little better.