New tech gadgets

Here is something to think about of what has come out on the tech market.

MooBella sounds like some large woman who likes ice cream. This is indeed a first to have ice cream dispensed. Utter than other ways. I thought of another joke about this, but you can think of your own!

Bones in Motion sounds like a cool gadget. No this has nothing to do with insertion like everyone may think. It is a mobile tracker when you do activities. Why don’t they not only use this for runners,etc. How about keeping those drivers who talk and drive and next. Opps, sorry, I was too busy talking on the phone when I killed the other person in the car!! Sounds like phonesnotinmotion would make a good name. I wonder how much the stats have gone up with accidents and cell phone use? This was what Live Science had to say. Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year. How about when you can’t get the cell phone replaced due to water damage, where is the warranty. Where is the warranty on this hazard on the road??

Robot Marriages?

I found this article to be a very interesting and funny. I don’t know how I find these articles like the other amusing one that I wrote about.

Next Page of same article

“Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen
Robots soon will become more human-like in appearance, researcher says”
If the robot does the dishes and cleans the house and doesn’t argue that might be a good thing. Ha, how about no mother in laws to call and try to manipulate them. Then imagine all the females buying the tickle me Elmo robot! I wonder if that would look different than the original one.
I don’t know how robot sex would go? It might be good for a polygamist where you might have a human wife and a robot one. Heck they might even have gender parts to change like on second life for on the robot where you can give it to the wife to use if you ran out of viagra one day.
I know this might be amusing but people do strange and different things out of the norm. Maybe they can have little robots so the pedphiles can do them instead of the real children? How about going to the robot brothel house of ill repute? How would life for people change if robots came about?

Roland Piquepaille wrote this article

By David Levy

A hot robot?

I think this guy has more time on his hands than he knows. Along with something else. I’ll save my 20 dollars and not buy the book. Even if it ever made it to the best seller list one day. Even though being single I would rather have a real female to act like a robot. I can see a robot to clean house, but to marry one? This guy made me laugh out loud when I read this article.

OK a more serious article that was written on other blogs.

Amazon has just started up an e-reader. On their new “Kindle Store”they have more than
90,000 titles. They have 101 of 112 New York Times best sellers. This reader is as thin as a pencil sideways. The features are a 6-inch display based on the technology from E Ink. There is a 600×800-pixel resolution with a four-level gray scale. Most books or articles can be purchased for $9.99 or other prices.

So the question people ask is if this will be a seller?
Kindle article

This is tough to say as of this moment when they will sell this at $399. Most of all they don’t have to be connected to a PC to download a book.

Satellites and GPS

I hope that everybody had a nice Thanksgiving. I got lost once again going to Maryland from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and ended up in downtown Baltimore. Rather than to get lost again I finally got a Magellan GPS at Sears on Black Friday and got a good deal on the 3100 model. It is better than having mapquest in the car. It can calculate the shortest path. You can re route if you think there is too much traffic on a road should you decide not to drive in that direction. It talks to you while you drive so you don’t have to ever look at a map.

I just got this but think that I can download new maps to the device.

Even telescopes have GPS with SkyAlign.
This new technology finds what you want to see in the sky at night. There is no more guessing what star you are looking at in the heavens anymore.Here is a GPS movie. I wonder how many satellites will be added one day to the 27 in operation one day with all this technology using it all the time.

Google plans to bid $4.6 billion and possibly partner in auction of wireless airwaves.

A bid for wireless is soon. Google plans on bidding $4.6 billion only if certain conditions are met. They want the Government to alter rules. The partner whom they choose is to help them build a network. They have several companies of potential partners. It would be a big challenge designing, building and operating a mobile network. Experts think that it is too heavy for Google to do this alone. The airwaves when auctioned off will be for $14 billion altogether.

They can alter the technology standard to have a WiFi TV and it goes to a controller box. Not ready yet for prime time is the WiFi TV on the internet. Article on WiFi-Tv. You can hook up wireless with TV’s in your home . They have Dish Network and are wireless and are less expensive than the cable company. I just hope Google don’t charge high prices like the cable company does!

Manhunt Released and banned in U.K.

I’m not into gaming as most people are. I usually like a good military type of game if I would play one. I guess that would be from being a Marine at one point in my life. There was something on CNN about the release of Manhunt 2. The release data for this game was October 31 or a few days sooner. Of the clips shown it is a very violent game and parents are urged not to buy it for their children.

Another article from USA Today give some more detail of this game.Please use your discretion when going to the following links; it may be offensive and violent to some. This game is made by Rockstar Games and here is the Manhunt site.
All this attention although negative seemed like a marketing ploy to make this game sell.
Rockstar games has made several other games that deal with adult themes also. These games are Grand Theft Auto and Midnight Club: Los Angeles.
However they lost buyers in the global market in the U.K. and it is banned.

Here is a list that I found of banned video games. I don’t know how accurate or how worthy it is being that it comes from wikipedia. Here is more about video game controversy. This is an old article from May 2005 about legislation of putting labels on video games. Here is a top 10 list

In our society I’m glad there is some sort of censorship with all that goes on in the world. Parents should be responsible for what they buy for their children and also watch on a TV screen. Everyone is somewhat a critic just like some people like Halloween and then some people don’t. These labels safeguard society somewhat. Here is an article about an attorney with a modest game proposal- Attorney Proposes Violent Game.

I don’t think this game Manhunt was created with him in mind to write a $10,000 check. The plot seems different. Now comes another thought. Does video games create people to do violence? There may be many arguments to this if video games can or cannot create violence.

Here is another article You Grew Up Playing Shoot’em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids? I don’t want to bring up the Virginia Tech shooting but found two articles. One article read that he like violent video games. Va. Tech Killer A Violent Video Game Fan This one contradicts the other one. Search warrant reveals VA Tech killer had no video games
Police found no evidence in Seung-Hi’s room that he played video games. Here is a study that was done and wonder if PSU ever did one about video game violence? VG Researcher More studies Education Games Research. This article tells more and states “Just as we know for a fact that guns don’t kill people, neither should we believe that video games do either.”

Technical Thoughts

I came up with very much for a topic when surfing the net this week.
I could not decide on one to just list, so I went with a couple of them that deals with virtual worlds, DTV, Dvorak on AJAX, radio show about computers, and believe it or not TWit.tv.

Virtual World Anyone??
Second Life is to offer a passport to go to Active Worlds. Better save those Linden Dollars to get one! Active Worlds hosting is rather expensive. This World Servers Pricing List goes up to 4,000,000 sq. meters. I don’t know how much space that takes up on their server but with all the 3D capabilities it must be a lot! That is a big jump from Second Life land pricing.

I must have been the only one try Second Life in the computer lab because I went to get an upgrade and I’m not the administrator, so I spoke to Jim and Kevin?? I just wondered what it was like to have a 3D enviroment with an avatar. No, I could not get the name of Ed Balls on Second Life either darn it! That last name was not listed!

I don’t see how this is can be possible? Entropia Universe will create 10,000 jobs in China?
Here is the article. The Guardian. I know the US trades a lot with China, but I am skeptical about 10,000 jobs?

CRD is (Beijing Cyber Recreation District).This article tells more about China Plans Virtual World for Commerce Maybe Gary can find more information on this since he is in China, and if this is a job creator like they say it is for a virtual world?

We have a new tech standard coming up with Digital TV.

I don’t know if anybody knows this but soon your caveman analog TV will be
no good for rabbit ears. The FCC has forced everyone to go to DTV by Feb. 17 2009.

Anyone who doesn’t want to go from the old TV sets like myself will have to go to get a converter box. That is nice they give a $40 coupon for two boxes. In reality the cable or dish provider will furnish this. They better for the price they charge anymore. So much for the days of the rabbit ears, which reception never came in really good and someone had to stand with the foil paper on the antenna and not move!

Then I viewed another article about DTV from John Dvorak.

John Dvorak always tells it like it is!! If many of you have never heard of him he is a very good writer!

Then he had another article about AJAX and since we had learned about it in IST420, thought it should be posted.

He thinks AJAX is terrible.

He points out 6 things in this article as his laundry list:

1. Too often the drop-down menus are off-kilter. You click on something to find a drop-down menu appearing to the left or the right of where you’d expect it. When you move the cursor to the menu, you take it off the trigger button and the menu goes away before you can get to it.

2. Mismanagement of highlights. This is a common problem with Javascript and mapping the screen for highlighting. You run the pointer over one thing and another thing—the wrong thing—lights up.

3. Screens do not scale. Most AJAX implementations will not scale when you change the font size from smaller to larger. A worse situation is when some fonts scale and others do not, making a mess on the screen.

4. The forward and backward functions of the browser are often rendered useless by changes on a page that never actually change the page, making it hard to find something you were just looking at unless you remember the exact menu sequence.

5. Menu overload. Some AJAX sites have far too many confusing drop-down and pop-up menus scattered all over the screen, making it a nightmare to find what you are looking for. Site maps, which normally cut to the chase on many Web sites, can be useless on AJAX sites.

6. Commercial viability for site monetization is difficult. I don’t want to get too much into this, but let’s just say that the concept of page views does not work with AJAX since the person on the site rarely leaves the one master control page.

So why does anyone use AJAX? If you have some weird concept that requires a user to absolutely, positively remain on one master control page, for whatever reason, then AJAX is great—though I can see Flash working as well. But AJAX is terrible for general-purpose Web site design—worse than Flash ever was. Then again, my complaints may only stem from the fact that most implementations are done by people who simply cannot do it right. It also appears that the number who can do it right is minuscule.

Funny while writing this I got to listen for the first time to Kim Komando on 104.7.

I never knew they had an analog radio show about computers??

That made me think of TechTV which was somewhat like this radio show. So I looked it up on Google. I had always liked to watch G4 before with Leo Laporte when they had a different name as “Tech TV” and called “The Screen Savers”.
Leo is now called the “chief TWit” being on TWit.tv which is a podcast.
I find that a rather amusing name and title. LOL
But he always had a good sense of humor on Tech TV!

Can Election Machine Software be fixed?

I remember when I started to vote and they had the older voting machines. You would walk into the place to vote, sign your name on a paper and somebody gave you a ticket that you had voted. Then you would wait in line and somebody would escort you in front of the voting machine and pull a curtain around you. You had to pull a lever under a candidate to cast your vote. The vote was not really not registered until you pressed a red button and the curtain swung away setting you free like you had become the wizard of oz.

Ok bad joke about the wizard of oz, but what was really funny is that the government being non-uniformity. By this I am talking about punch ballots in Florida. I thought the voting in this country had the same large metal voting machines .

Voting machine closeup that many people voted on and not a punch card. What is wrong with just placing a piece of paper with an “X” and put it in a ballot box?

So now instead of using the old voting machines or placing an “X” on a piece of paper we have the New Electronic Voting Machines since the 2000 election got very messed up.

Has anyone ever thought the punch card system should have been replaced with the old metal voting machines in the first place?

So now in order to turn to a new electronic machine that will cost states and tax payer’s
3.8 billion! Here is a document from NY DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) or Optical Scan Costs. First NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) had to come up with guidelines. NIST guidelines paper

So here are places that did a study of the new voting machines and they say they are vulnerable to attacks.

Princeton Study

Here is the article of 24 pages that tells of it is not full proof.
Princton paper for review

This document comes from a study from the John Hopkins University.
An article about this article.

This paper was on the NIST website and tells how they are set up prior to elections and are paperless. I find it strange that our government has audits for large businesses and like to see a paper trail or audit trail for them, but no paper chase for elections.

They had a movie in which comedian Robin Williams played a presidential candidate in “Man of the Year”. There was a mistake in this parody about election machines. Could this really happen in real life?

Discover magazine has an article as well that tells about that it can be tampered with.

Now we have a government document that talks about an audit or paper trail on the one they use in that state.

This PBS article tells about errors that have occurred on what the government deems as a fit machine.

This article Officials assure voters electronic results are reliable
This is another article almost the same but from AOL

With anything in society there are good things and bad things that can be associated with them. Here is what can be considered the top ten list.

So what are your thoughts and opinions about this? Do you think these these machines are safe, or do you think there is possibility it could have been implemented to soon with possible bugs?

Fight cyber bullies, schools told

This was an interesting article from the BBC.
Cyber bullies
It said that “More than a third of 12 to 15-year-olds have faced some kind of cyberbullying, according to a BBC government study.” “Schools have been told they can confiscate mobile phones and how to get hurtful material pulled from websites.” There is something called ‘Happy slapping’ I am certainly glad my name is not the name of the person in the article. “Schools Secretary Ed Balls said cyber bullying was “insidious” and had grown with technology and changes in society.” “Schools needed to get to grips with newer forms of bullying, he said. “
Mr. Balls said this to a BBC writer maybe he needs to get a better grip on things also. The writer made this article funny by the persons name not me, I just found how it was written was amusing from the name context. I hope that no one was offended by this material and keep a sense of humor of the naming convention

How many plug-ins can there be?

I started to write Assignment 1 and came across this interesting website or should I call it a plugin repository. I hope none are spyware, because you never really know what happens when you download one of these browser components.
This site don’t like Linux because it has a R.I.P. Linux in an graphic. It seems to be rather old and this site was last updated February 25, 2005. The other site BartPE seems to be that they gave up on both of them.
Plug-ins It’s interesting of how many plugins there really are. This site covers many of them also. But most of the links seem to be broken. More Plug-ins
This is for the Mozilla Firefox browser. There is a link to search for plugins also.
Even More Plug-ins The Mycroft development project provides a collection of Sherlock & OpenSearch Search Engine Plugins at 12774. Mycroft This site tells how to get started to develop a plug in. Click Me

Did you lose or miss place that CD with the driver on it for a hardware device??
Here is where you will hopefully will find it by searching for it. Drivers
I always lose the hard drive diagnostic disk when it is in need, it never fails!
I’m lucky that Western Digital or Maxtor have downloads on their sites, and many more manufacturers. If you ever purchase a hard drive from newegg they don’t send the disk with the hard drive and never do. Unlike when you purchase a hard drive from Best buy in the box. I would guess most people know how to format their drives, etc. who get them for their system who order from new egg. XP-Drivers Driver zone has a driver update scanner, they say it is safe and contains no malware or spyware? Driverzone
Mr. Driver
Driverguide

DISCLAIMER:

Most of all beware of what you download from unauthenicated manufacturer sites. There may be malware, spyware or anything
else. You do so at your own risk like anything else in this world.

Does size really matter??

I know the title of this has some laughing, but I was more of thinking of the size of the PC hard drives. Size does matter if you want more storage space. How many remember the small 300MB Hard Drives? I can remember when Windows 3.1 had that size hard drive!
I was thinking of getting a new hard drive and remember when they used to be 300MB and how much times have changed. We have software or files that keep taking up more space on the hard drive. Maybe it is the files we store, and never get rid of? I get into saving wave files and creating music. I don’t know how many people are into collecting royalty free loops, but they add up. I have an old version of Acid Pro 4.0 and a Pro Tools module with software also that have editing features on them to mix tracks with.
Just look at the prices for a 500GB for over a hundred dollars.

Newegg Hard Drives

So for a terabyte which was over a couple of thousand dollars at some time is $200-400 dollars which is more affordable. Soon within the next couple years it looks like a terabyte
might be the size of the common hard drive? I would envision the future of hard drives to be more of a flash drive for the pc in the future. It seems smaller and electronically can fit more digital on them.

The Flash Readers has at no point yet got to a terabyte and wonder if it ever will?
I would guess if the market demand was there one day perhaps it would have more size.
What about the other part of this, small hard drive for operating system and everything else on the net? I don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future, but what if all we needed was a operating system or a login and have the web as a giant mainframe and a hard drive would exist more to be online? We already can play games online? But there would be no privacy then if everything went to online storage. At one point some part of the technology market will change with something being more smaller. It seems at the moment they are trying to sell more mini desktops on newegg or they are trying to get rid of stock because they don’t sell? The cell phone as small as it is has an operating system in it, but it is the software components inside that make it interact with the integrated circuits.