Oh The Future, you’re getting ever so close.

I hate corruption, don’t you?

I’m still laughing

Here they go again with their special magic boxes of computer technology. Check out the GUI on the computer screen half way through, thing looks intimidating.

Man this so uses that idea I had when I was twelve that I called the “Theory of Infinite Possibilities”. I really need to write a full post on that someday…but I’m sure it’s already been a fully developed theory by some other mad scientist genius at this point.

Update: Go here if you feel like trying this out (Java required)

Official Site Here

From ReadWriteWeb’s writeup:

…Regardless of the attendance, one thing is for sure: with nearly ubiquitous access to cameras and video equipment, this will be the most well-documented inauguration, ever. Now, the Microsoft Photosynth team has announced that they will be making the event even more memorable – by creating a three-dimensional “synth” of the inauguration from your photos.

Sounds pretty cool, right?  So how does one participate?

1. Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath. If you have a digital camera with a zoom lens, take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)

2. E-mail each photo as soon as possible to themoment@cnn.com (one photo per message, 10MB size limit). Don’t forget to include your name in the message if you’d like to appear in the list of the contributors. Please only send in photos you took yourself.

3. Go to cnn.com/themoment to see all of the photos in our photosynth

The good news? Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Photosynth project, all of the photos will also be shared via iReport. Then, there’s the bad news. If you want to see the finished work in all its glory, you have to have access to a Windows machine. Photosynth is only fully supported support Vista and XP currently. But they do offer an experimental Silverlight-based Photosynth player for other platforms. (I used the experimental viewer and it worked very well.)

Brian you should so get in on that.

Pretty damning piece from the NYTimes:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

Just makes alternatives like this all that more desirable.

Table saw that can detect a finger and stop the blade in 1/1000th of a second.

Aren’t actually holograms at all.

The CNN anchors were not really speaking to three-dimensional projected images, but rather empty space, Kreuzer said. The images were simply added to what viewers saw on their screens at home, in much the same way computer-generated special effects are added to movies.

Kreuzer said the images were tomograms, which are images that are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen.

Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space.

CNN officials could not be reached for comment.

Windows Vista Fixed Edition Windows 7 was revealed today by Microsoft at the Professional Developers (Developers Developers!) Conference in LA.  

Best feature that I’ve NEVER (</sarcasm>) seen before in any OS: Being able to choose what wireless network you want from the Taskbar!

If Only Macs had the same feature…*snicker*

All joking aside, it actually does look like a legitamite update to Vista.  Major UI and usability improvements, and I dig the idea of allocating zero video memory to non-focused windows (which should improve snappiness of the OS UI).

More info @ Gizmodo

As some of you may know, I’m an avid fan of TED talks. One of my favorites to this day is Ray Kurzweil’s talk about technology and how it will transform us all. Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to actually attend a lecture by Kurzweil at RIT. The talk, just like his TED talk, was about technological singularity and how it is rapidly approaching.

Below is a slightly abridged version of what we saw at RIT this month, and if you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend watching.

Technology has changed us so quickly in such a short period of time it’s absolutely astounding, and the change is growing exponentially. Some of the predictions Kurzweil is making for the next 40 years are downright mind blowing. We’re the last generation to know what life was like prior to the internet. We lived the transition from no internet to ubiquitous use. We’re ARE the crest of this new era and we’re riding it right into the future. Juice.

For quite some time Google has or has been rumored to be dabbling in the energy business. People have whispered in corners, wondering whether Google would pop out with some as-yet-unknown magic solution to all our energy problems. The truth, it seems, may not be so grand, but I think it may still seem pretty far-fetched to most.

As Times Online is reporting (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4753389.ece), along with quite a few other stories touching on the subject, Google is at least investigating the option of installing data centers off shore. That means there would be a floating platform bobbing on the waves serving you search results and cached web pages.

Is it the freedom from any one country’s laws and regulations? The fact that it might be possible to make the system entirely self-sustainable by using the motion of the waves to generate electricity? For whatever their reasons, Google faces very unique challenges and is demonstrating a lot of creativity in their solutions.

Quoted from this article covering the winning entries from a contest hosted by Google to develop the best mobile apps for their new mobile platform, Android.

Locale
Ever get embarrassed at a company meeting when your cell phone unexpectedly goes off? With Locale, you can make sure your device knows to switch to vibrate mode the minute you step into your office. With Android’s GPS capabilities, Locale adjusts your phone’s settings to wherever you’re located. Thus, your phone will forward calls to different numbers based on whether you’re at work or home, or will send out a status message on Twitter letting people know where you’re located. This application was developed by Carter Jernigan, Clare Bayley, Jasper Lin and Christina Wright, with additional contributions from Jennifer Shu.

This Locale application reminds me of a frequent conversation that I would have with Brian Lindanau back in the spring. Brian was proposing a “wild idea” for iPhones at around the time that iPhone applications were springing into life. He had suggested applications that take advantage of the GPS information included in the new generation of mobile devices. His example was taking a system like Jott and Sandy, a set of web applications that allow you to send yourself reminders and emails from your phone, and integrating them into the GPS functionality of the iPhone. Using this example, he proposed being able to, for example, maintain a grocery list that would pop up on your iPhone when you walk into a grocery store.

With Android creeping up on release, maybe its a good time to appreciate the growth that we have seen in the mobile market in the last few years. The iPhone has done an excellent job of setting a new standard for the mobile environment, a standard that Android will surely push to new levels on its release. Cellphones are everywhere. The mobile internet is growing mainstream. Computing is become more and more ubiquitous by the day. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the things we start experiencing in the next year or so is a spread in location-sensitive applications that come to convenience and smoothly integrate into our lifestyles. Brian usually seems to be right about most things …