technology

Chris Knight's avatar

Whilst I await the arrival of my iPad 2 (estimated shipping 4-5 weeks, ahhh the price I paid for trying and failing to score one locally) here is something that will make one appreciate Apple’s biggest rival in a brand new light. For all the dissin’ that Microsoft gets, I have to respect them anew after watching this clip: Andrew Tait’s video “Chain of Fools”. In it, Andrew upgrades to Windows 7… but he starts with MS-DOS 5.0 running the original Microsoft Windows, and proceeds to upgrade from there to every subsequent version of Windows until he gets to the latest release!

So how successful was his endeavor? Watch and be amazed!

Anyone else nearly shed a tear when they saw Windows 3.1 again for the first time in years? šŸ˜›...

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My plans have been thrown afoul… because now I’ll have to be here next Friday afternoon to place my order for the iPad 2 on Apple’s website.

(Mash here for one of Engadget’s myriad of articles about the product’s unveiling today.)

I didn’t get an iPad last year, but I fell in love enough with the simplicity of the design that… I knew this was on my short-list of “things I never knew I needed” and ought to have. For more than a decade people have given me funny looks when I have to tell them that I’ve never had a laptop computer. I just don’t like how they’re made: too much that can get broken easily. The iPad is different. And iPad 2 has enough bells and whistles on it to have me break down to get one now.

‘Course, word on the street is that iPad 3...

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So one of the bigger stories this past week has been IBM’s supercomputer Watson beating all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during a three-game series on Jeopardy!. Watson’s final haul was $77,147, with Jennings coming in second with $24,000 and Rutter third with $21,600. During Final Jeopardy! on the last night of the contest Jennings wrote “Who is Stoker?” and in parenthesis added “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”.

I thought Watson’s performance was… impressive. But, I’m not too terrified about a droid uprising just yet.

For one thing, Watson is not much more than a glorified search engine. IBM’s engineers assured the Jeopardy! audience that Watson could not access the Internet: that “he” relied entirely on his oodles of terabytes of storage, containing (it is thought) every iota of trivia that has possibly been digitized. Clearly, an advantage was held by Watson.

And yet, even ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Things could be about to get really interesting pretty soon…

Sometimes around 4 a.m. on February 2nd – next Wednesday morning – the very last of the still-available IP addresses under the traditional IPv4 scheme will be allocated.

And then the Internet as it has existed since IPv4 was established in 1977 will, for all intents and purposes, be running on empty.

“Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?” said Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer and father of the World Web Web. At the time Cerf and his colleagues thought that it would be a ridiculously long amount of time (they may have assumed it would not be within their own lifetime) before the Internet would run out of IP numbers. They couldn’t have possibly foreseen not only Internet usage in private home but also mobile devices, streaming video and the like. In 1977, 4.3 billion possible ...

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Two months ago I discussed some reasons why I wasn’t particularly led to jump aboard the 3D television fad just yet. The most prominent among them was my understanding that we could fairly soon expect 3D teevee technology that worked without those clunky glasses (which many are now saying not only induce headaches but are just a plain ol’ nuisance to deal with).

Welcome to the future.

Toshiba is set to be the first manufacturer to roll out glasses-free 3D television, according to news site Breitbart citing a Japanese newspaper. The electronics and entertainment giant “has developed a new system that emits a number of rays of light with various angles from the screen so that viewers can see stereoscopic images without glasses”. It’s added that “People can enjoy images in three dimensions from various positions and suffer less stress.”

If true, this will be the big breakthrough that ...

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Researchers have created a new type of solar energy cell that uses the corneas of blowflies as the primary method of gathering light for conversion into electricity.

Meanwhile those brilliant eggheads at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – who previously brought us such wonders as the Internet and the Global Positioning System – have developed a new technology that turns humans into batteries for powering gadgets like cellphones (but for now is being considered primarily for use in the military). Thankfully, artificial intelligence has yet to arise that would no doubt enslave us to the Matrix.

Elsewhere in the world, the concept of the In Vitro Meat Habitat has recently been introduced. There’s really no other way to put it: this is a house made out of meat.

And while you are lounging in your living room of liverwurst, what more fitting attire than clothing grown from bacteria...

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Read about it here on YouTube’s official blog. In layman’s terms, this is more than FOUR times the resolution of 1080P high-def video.

And for some reason, YouTube made sure to note that “IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors”.

Ummmm… why is YouTube doing this? I haven’t a clue. Perhaps someone could enlighten me about this. Because I’m having a very hard time imagining why anyone would need to display video at 4096 x 2304 (do they even make monitors that big?).

Heck, I’ve seen 1080P projected onto a regular-sized movie screen, and it looked just as good as regular film. Not really sure what mainstream purpose 4K could be serving at the moment....

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People of Aberdeen, Scotland: the Horseboy is on the loose in your town!!

IT manager Russell Moffatt was using Google’s Streetview feature to locate an optician’s shop so he could get his eyeglasses repaired. But while doing the search he found something else: a person, apparently male, wearing a horse’s head mask along with a purple shirt, standing on the side of a street in Aberdeen.

This mystery individual has quickly become known as “Horseboy” and as such things go on the Intertubes, has quickly acquired a herd of fans and well-wishers.

Horseboy is just the latest in a string of odd sights found by users of Google Streetview. Among other things people dressed as Japanese warriors, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Emmett Brown have been picked out of Streetview’s data.

If I knew when a Google Streetview car would be coming past my house, I’d probably be waiting ...

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Oscar the cat lost most of his back legs in a harvester accident this past fall. But thanks to some British researchers Oscar is now enjoying a fully functional life complete with two fore paws and two faux paws!

Popular Science has more about Oscar: the world’s first bionically-enabled feline. It’s thought that the technology will soon be applicable to human patients.

And here’s some video of Oscar strutting his stuff!

He just needs some adamantium claws in his front paws and he’ll be all set šŸ˜›...

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