Archive for February 2010
Will Natal Change the Game? 23 Feb 2010
The ever-excitable Jason Bradbury has posted a written and video review of his experience playing with an early prototype of Microsoft’s much anticipated Project Natal gaming interface (check out the videos on the Natal YouTube channel here). I’m not much of a gamer, though Natal does hold some interest in the same way the Wii [...]
Snooping at School 18 Feb 2010
I thought this sort of thing was limited to storylines in books by overly paranoid others, but where you hear about how a school used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home you have to worry.
The Rise of the SIM 17 Feb 2010
The end of the video in an article from the Mobile World Conference (about mobile tech) by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones brings up an interesting point I was thinking about recently. Let’s say we all embrace cloud computing, it means we have to be connected all the time to have access to our documents and [...]
Mobile DTV Brings TV to Mobile Devices 15 Feb 2010
I remember the days of the portable TVs, with their little 1- or 2-inch CRT screens and how bad they were, so it’ll be interesting to see how this new generation of mobile TV devices get on and whether there is actually demand out there.
Will E-Books Mean Cheaper Textbooks? 11 Feb 2010
So I’m reading an article over at CNN where ten tech luminaries (their words) are commenting on the future of reading and I stumble across this from author Jeannette Walls: I think electronic readers and tablets are going to have a huge impact on the textbook business. Some textbooks cost more than $100. What student [...]
Einstein’s 1905 chronology 10 Feb 2010
Talk about a busy man, I have trouble achieving anything let alone breaking new ground in a scientific field that often.
Alan Turing and the Ace computer 8 Feb 2010
Yet more interesting reading on Britain’s contribution to early computing. [Ace] ran for the first time on 10 May 1950. By modern standards it was sluggish but in its day was the fastest in the world. And, whilst investigating how it could be used, the team uncovered another problem that looked set to dog greater [...]
Kicking Off the Computer Age 4 Feb 2010
The BBC has a couple of interesting articles about the start of the computer age in the UK. The first is on the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM, more commonly known as Baby), developed at Manchester University and the world’s first programmable computer. The second covers the Edsac computer developed in Cambridge with funding from [...]
A fight over freedom at Apple’s core 4 Feb 2010
I argued in comments in a post on another site recently that by allowing websites that use Flash to only work as Apps via their store we’re removing one proprietary format and replacing it with not only a proprietary format, but an unscrupulous gatekeeper as well.