computers

Chris Knight's avatar

Jerry Jalava of Finland is a motorcycle enthusiast and computer hacker. He lost a finger in a riding accident last spring and when the doctor working on rebuilding his hand heard about Jerry’s love of technology, he suggested a USB “finger” drive to replace the lost digit. So now Jerry Jalava’s right near-pinky finger is also a 2 gigabyte USB drive that carries a Linux distribution and the movie Freddy Got Fingered.

You can check out plenty more pics of his bionic finger on his Flickr photostream....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

This has gotta be one of the most innovative and clever uses for the iPod touch that I’ve ever seen…

The BulletFlight application software, available through the iTunes store, turns the iPod touch into a full-blown ballistics computer that helps hunters in the field plot their firing solution. Users can tap in the ammunition type, wind speed and conditions, and distance to target. Profiles for three weapons come loaded with BulletFlight, although more can also be added.

Maybe Apple should look into this concept further. I mean, wouldn’t it be nifty if we could own an iGun? 😛...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Slashdot has a humorous story about high school students in Maryland who have targeted those “speed cameras” there for clever abuse. The kids are finding people they don’t like – such as their most-hated teachers – and using laser printers and glossy paper to create high-quality copies of their prey’s license plates. Then they scram past the cameras at excess speed with the bogus plates on their cars and make the teachers or whoever get slapped with a $40 fine a few days later! From all appearances there is no oversight or investigation: the fines get sent out automatically.

We should start doing this with the cars of a lot of busybody politicians and bureaucrats. What say ye?...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

A few weeks ago Apple hired Mark Papermaster to be its new head of development over the iPod and iPhone lines. All well and good… except that Papermaster was also previously the vice-president of the microprocessor and chip technology at IBM, and there was a “no-compete” clause in his contract with his former employer. Papermaster has countered that he’s going to be involved in entertainment devices: something that IBM has never pursued and thus, the clause is invalid in his case. It’s now wound up in the courts, where IBM is suing to keep Papermaster from working at Apple.

Now we know why IBM is really interested in locking Papermaster out of the Jobs Mob…

IBM has been developing something called “racetrack” memory and it’s afraid that the technology it developed will wind up in the iPod and iPhone. And it’s easy to see why Apple could conceivably be interested ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Fifty years ago today Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, demonstrated what is today known as the first microchip. It wasn’t much to look at (click on the picture on the left): some circuitry etched in a germanium medium, sandwiched between glass. But Kilby’s little gimmick not only worked beautifully, it ended up revolutionizing the world. Everything from the computer on your desk to the television in your living room to the iPod in your pocket has a heart of silicon that is a lineal descendant of this odd blob of materials.

Click here for Custom PC’s story commemorating the occasion of the integrated circuit’s birth....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

It was ten years ago today, on September 7th, 1998, that Sergey Brin and Larry Page took some investment capital and a database algorithm and from it spawned Google: the search engine that more than anything else transformed the Internet from a technological novelty into an indispensable application.

I used Google on the first day it was announced, in one of the computer labs at Elon. Even then I thought this was the most superior search engine of the lot that I’d been using up ’til then. In a few months Google supplanted those. And there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by whenever I’ve had to use the Internet (which is most) that I haven’t employed Google.

Back then it ran on four computers. Today Google has a vast campus in California and data centers all over the place. The company has developed its own operating system, is ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

You might have heard about Cuil: a new search engine, the founders of which have stated is going to be a “Google killer”. It went online a couple days ago and I’ve tried it a number of times since then, growing more frustrated with each attempt to determine how exactly Cuil is supposed to be useful. It claims to have indexed more pages than Google. And maybe it has, and all those pages really are sitting in a database somewhere in Cuil’s corporate headquarters. But if so, the algorithms needed to access ’em are shot to Hell. Doing a search for myself in regard to the Viacom mess last year turned up photographs of a robot and an NBA basketball player. And the results don’t even seem consistent from one search to the next, either…

This thing cost upwards of $33 million to start up. Kinda makes ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Would you trust Microsoft Windows to run a building’s elevator system (via a web browser)? Or to operate an Amtrak train? How about the computers regulating radiation therapy at a major hospital? No, I’m not totally dissing Windows but ya know: stuff like that really should have their own dedicated operating systems. Richard Stiennon at NetworkWorld.com has what he considers to be the top ten very worst uses of Windows. Chilling stuff… in a funny kind of way....

Read more