Rig Intelligence

I don’t see this size of iPad really being much use for myself on a daily basis, however I have to respect it since the rumor is that it was one of the final projects that Jobs worked on prior to his passing.

The iPad Mini

Peter Burrows and Adam Satariano for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. plans to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad by year-end, two people with knowledge of the plans said, to help maintain dominance of the tablet market as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. prepare competing handheld devices.

The new model will have a screen that’s 7 inches to 8 inches diagonally, less than the current 9.7-inch version, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Apple hasn’t made its plans public. The product, which Apple may announce by October, won’t have the high-definition screen featured on the iPad that was released in March, one of the people said.

There’s a lot of smoke now billowing around the “7-inch iPad”. This report is hardly the first, nor will it be the last. My only question is the timing.

Bloomberg drops “October” just as Rene Ritchie of iMore previously did a couple months ago. This would coincide with the new iPhone release, but you have to wonder if Apple wouldn’t rather space them out a bit? The iPhone launch can obviously stand alone as it is by far Apple’s biggest product. And the iPad is already at that level as well. Doing those two launches in one event (or even around the same time) may be overkill. I still wouldn’t be shocked to see Apple wait until early next year (the traditional iPad launch time) to debut an “iPad mini”.

On the other hand, by most accounts, the Nexus 7 is a very good device. Maybe that does force Apple’s hand a bit. They were obviously always going to do a smaller version of the iPad (hence, it possibly being ready to go by October), but again, the timing is the question. Perhaps if the Nexus 7 is selling like gangbusters, Apple does move to launch the iPad mini in the fall.

Then again, Apple typically doesn’t do things reactively. Instead, they seem to prefer to ship things when they’re done. Maybe they’re just done with the product. Again, Apple isn’t doing an iPad mini because of the Nexus 7 or the Kindle Fire or any other “rival” device — they’re doing it because it’s the logical evolution of the line. And because they feel like they’re going to sell a ton of them.

As for Steve Jobs implying Apple could never do a smaller tablet because users would have to whittle down their fingers to use it — welcome to Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs saying that was just as good of an indication that Apple may eventually move into the space. And now it sure looks like they’re getting ready to.

Every project is going to have different time/development requirements, and some of the smaller projects I’ve started have also evolved into products that took years to create.

When we interact with our phones we get to interact with applications that are often built in less than a year. Many times these apps are built within 6months.

That’s the gift Apple gave to the world. 

It was that long ago when VCs and entreprenuers dreaded the idea of building software for mobile phones. It was a nightmare. Your app could work on one specific Samsung phone for Verizon but not ATT. And it was if you were lucky and approved.

Today, every time we touch a software product, it’s obvious if the app took 5 years or 6 months.

The built in navigation and user interface on my car? Designed in many years ago and sucks. The app on my mobile phone that tells me where to have lunch coming home on my weekend road trip in a random place? Less than 6 months and awesome.

This afternoon we watched the Spain v Italy Eurocup final on our Verizon DVR box. I set it up last week. It took about 15 clicks through the remote to set it up properly (including selecting all the options just in case the game went long or in case the DVR wanted to delete the game to make room). 

And 20 minutes into watching the recorded game, the DVR froze. Then it locked up. I had to restart the box. When the box came back on, the TV tuned to the live game which and we all saw the scoreboard, 2-0. Fuck.

The whole point of recording the game was so we could watch it start to finish.

There is a part of me that feels bad for Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. They are relying on these god-awful designers at dinosaur companies to build them boxes and software designed years ago. And they are dreadful. They can’t be happy to put this stuff in front of their subscribers every day. 

I don’t know how you could possibly design a consumer product so many years in advance. The world moves to fast to assume you have a clue about what users want that far off into the future. The only time it works I suppose is if you are building something so audacious where you keep the quality bar obscenely high. 

The days of building proprietary apps for proprietary platforms which require broken timelines are over.

We consumers are done with that model and we are moving on. 

Regardless of how many times it happens, users are continually shocked at the pace that technology is growing (or shrinking in terms of size).  With some of the most brilliant minds in the world working 24/7 on optimizing systems, it should come as no surprise that computing systems will become increasingly integrated into our daily experience.

Not that long ago, a computer filled up an entire room. And now we tuck them casually away in our pockets.

The evolution has happened so seamlessly, that it’s easy to take it for granted. But stop and consider how efficiently our minds can work and connect to each other today. And it feels like we’re just getting  started. Soon we will all effortlessly make the shift into wearable technology. Soon, we will refuse to buy an object unless it is smart and connected. We will demand that everything we own, does something extra. That every object makes connection easier. Our glasses will need to take pictures and share them with our friends. Our tshirts will need to change color on demand and become water resistant the moment it starts raining. And of course our shoes will need to tie themselves.

We are in the pre-infant stages of wearable technology. It still strikes us as science fiction and only for the nerds of our culture. But when you stop and analyze the computing power we have in our pockets, the average people of thirty years ago would have called us all nerds too. Therefore, technology is relative. Call it the theory of nerdativity. More computing power will be embedded in what we wear than an entire room could have sorted out forty years ago. Hell, ten years ago. Welcome to the Nerd Generation. There is no magic nerd encoder ring anymore. Access has been granted to us all.

More and more technology projects are moving towards artificial intelligence, Google has always been one of the more forward thinking industry leaders for this sector.

(N.B.  IBM Research is also well along on various aspects of AI, such as Watson, and a new generation of cognitive computing chips and other frontiers of neuroscience, supercomputing and nanotechnology)  John Markoff of the New York Times reports, “Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.” He continues, “The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items. The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.”

Here are some great tips for getting the most out of your Mac.

Mag Safe: The Power Cable that is connected via Magnets for those times you trip over your Cable your computer stays safely on the Desk. 

Hover Scrolling: With multiple windows open on my Mac simple hovering over the window I want to scroll even if other windows are in the foreground. 

File Preview: Selecting a file and hitting the space bar gives a complete look without any need to open the file or default program. 

Multiple Desktops: Create as many desktops as needed to house all your running apps in a maximized window with gestures to move between them. 

Spotlight Search: A comprehensive search that quickly shows you files across your entire computer without slowing down your computer with constant indexing

Google surprised the tech world this year, whereas the company uses it’s I/O conference to showcase long term projects and technical advances, this year Larry Page and team decided to launch some a very interesting product line.

The fifth-annual Google I/O developers conference delivered on its list of much-anticipated releases, including the Nexus 7, the Nexus Q, Project Glass and a flurry of new Google+ features. Our Mashable editors and reporters were on the scene today to get all the juice on everything Google unveiled, delivering minute-by-minute updates to our liveblog. 

Google’s Android operating system, Jellybean, rolled out its latest stats and upgrades, narrowing the gap between Apple and finally adding the ability for users to purchase media straight from Google Play.

The company released new stats for Google+, which got a huge upgrade. New features include availability on Android tablets and the iPad. Hangouts have become an even more integral part of Google+ with the ability to create “Events” and share photos with participants in a streamlined way. 

The Nexus 7, Google’s new tablet device, was the expected release of the event (photos and specs were leaked online beforehand) and illustrated easy integration with Google Play and other devices that use the same platform.

The crowd was audibly swept away with the introduction of the Nexus Q, a sleek social streaming media player. It’s the first device Google has built from the ground up, and the first social media player in the world. It allows users to control the player from multiple Nexus 7 devices. Starting at $299 and equipped with HDMI, NFC, Bluetooth and micro USB, the device is expected to ship mid-July.

Most drool-worthy was the Project Glass portion of the presentation, in which presenters fitted with the spectacles jumped out of a helicopter hovering over San Francisco and floated onto the roof of Moscone Center. Then cyclists hurdled over ramps on bikes and repelled down the facade of the building. It was quite the finale. 

Overall Google I/O was… awesome. And we’re guessing it gave the folks at Apple a run for their money.

 

This should be interesting.

via gizmodo.com

It’s not all the way sophisticated like the precogs of Minority Report but the San Francisco Police Department have left their no Internet having, no email using days behind them and upgraded to a much more sophisticated system that’ll help ‘em nab more criminals.

Buzzfeed FWD took a look at the police app that SFPD will be using which allows the officers to upload images, scan license plates, dictate notes, capture interviews, pin location points and do all of it in real time. The database is constantly updated so that police officers can work together in predicting where the criminals will end up next. It’s fighting crime with data. Or as the SFPD put it, using the “bat computer”.

Some very poignant remarks about the iPhone’s impact on our culture.

The iPhone is five years old. Let that sink in.

Multi-function, hand-held computers with cellular connectivity were known as smartphones before the iPhone arrived despite having fantastically limited platforms. In other words smartphones lacked applications, or satisfying ways to use the device. The iPhone had the app store — and the rest is history.

Seems obvious right? Only if you understand the difference between a tool and an appliance. Tools, by definition, are multi-function. I can use a screwdriver to drive screws, or pop open paint cans, or commit murder. The tool can be applied in a variety of ways.

Appliances, in contrast, are single purpose. A toaster toasts bread. A hair dryer dries your hair. Both have essentially the same component parts — electric heating elements and switches — but you’d be in a world of hurt if you decided to swap how they were applied.

Not so with one of man’s oldest tools — fire. Getting close to a fire can both toast your bread and help dry your hair. Perhaps not very well and perhaps not very safely, but better than without. In other words, fire performs good enough in this application. Want better? Invent an appliance to do it better.

Man has thrived with this good enough standard for tools. Fire, stone axes, the internal combustion engine — not perfect but certainly good enough to get important jobs done. Certain features recur — ease of use, predictability, reliability, affordability, flexibility. Any doubt the iPhone is a great tool?

It performs its main function of making phone calls well enough, although not perfectly. Apps permit it complete a bewildering number of discrete tasks, although often not to highest possible standard. And — if we count devices which are iPhones in everything but name when looking at performance and use — the iPhone has become ubiquitous in modern life in just 60 months.

What this should tell us is that good enough is always man’s default standard. It might be the 21st century but the same standard applies as thousands of years ago. Any tool that does multiple jobs reasonably well will be embraced, even if better single-purpose alternatives exist. 

Five years from now where will the iPhone be? Gone. Replaced by Siri. In everything.

I was just interviewed for an article in CIO, the excerpt is below and click here for the full article.

Show off your problem-solving skills. ”I do all of the hiring for our IT/Engineering divisions for the company, and the best way for an applicant to get a job with me is by showing me how good of a problem solver they are,” says Jordan Hudgens, senior software engineer, MCW Services, a software design firm. A good way to do that? Learn what the company does, what issues they may be having (or had or could have) and give practical advice on how you would mitigate or solve the problem if you were given the job.

Some great education points for the modern era.

Children aren’t stupid.  

They are naïve.  Likewise, they are people, just littler, and they don’t know as much as big people do.  We treat them like children because they are children.  We shouldn’t treat them like children because they know less.  Being treated like a child has a bad connotation, does it not?  Should it not mean that they learn differently, so we have to adjust to their being children?  Just because children are younger, don’t assume that they don’t pick up on your signals.  They are people too… they’re just newer at being people.  They learn what we teach them.

Similarly, old people aren’t stupid.   

And I don’t just mean what you think of when someone says old person.  I mean those people whom younger people tend to think are old.  What makes these people stand out these days?  One factor: modern technology.  Just because mom or dad may not understand why, yes, online bill pay is actually pretty darned safe, or because nana or pop-pop might not understand why simply having a router doesn’t give you Internet, it doesn’t make them dumber than you.  It just means that they’re undereducated about where things are moving technologically and why they work that way.  They may even state that they’re “idiots when it comes to this stuff.”  Well, they may be now, but that doesn’t compromise them as a person, much in the same way that being young doesn’t mean you can’t learn about the world you were oblivious to.  

The previous generation will never know new technology if they don’t try it out and they will not be “stupid with the computer” if they’re excited to learn about it.  They may give up at the get-go, but let’s face it: we’re out of the brunt of the industrial revolution and into the information age.  It is the way the world goes.  You can’t make things for everyone without industry and infrastructure in the same way that you can’t keep up with culture and modern life without technology, no matter what “technology” means to your culture.  You can make change in your head or take a payment from a piece of plastic with a magnetized strip on it; we’ve all got a way of doing something, and so we’re all in this together.  If you’re willing to impart your knowledge about how a computer works to a child so that they’ll “get it” when they’re not kids anymore, why wouldn’t you do the same for the crowd that has missed the memo, but taught you from their experiences?  So now here you are.  They’re here too, and they’re coming along for the ride.  They learn what we teach them.  

So there you have it, folks.  

Technology is a part of daily life, so get used to it… together.  

Life is a series of lessons, and no matter how you learn them, learn them you must.  

Never stop teaching.  

Never stop learning.  

Michigan State University has announced that it will stop providing full-service e-mail accounts to alumni who graduated more than two years ago, a cutback that will affect 117,000 people. Some of them are complaining, but officials say it is a necessary cost-cutting measure.

David Gift, vice provost for libraries and information-technology services, said that the policy had always been to discontinue full-service accounts two years after a student’s last class, but that the university simply had not enforced it. He doesn’t know of any other university that still offers full-service alumni accounts indefinitely; most terminate full e-mail accounts within a year after graduation, or turn them into forwarding accounts. The change will take effect on August 31.

Keeping all those alumni accounts running was costing Michigan State about $600,000 a year, said Mr. Gift. They amounted to about 45 percent of all university e-mail accounts. The money saved can be used to upgrade services for current students, he said.

“Keeping full-service accounts was a nice thing to do, and we felt like we could continue doing it,” Mr. Gift said. “Then again, the number of accounts that we need to serve for current students and current faculty and staff is a relatively fixed number over time, but you’re constantly adding to the number of alums, so it’s not just a static cost but a growing cost—that makes it very challenging.”

About 400 alumni have complained about losing their accounts, he said.

Administrators made the decision after considering an upgrade to a mail client like Microsoft Exchange, which charges per account. “But we have to remember, too, that we have lots of alums who graduated never having had an MSU e-mail address, so we stay in contact with them through social media and their personal e-mails,” Mr. Gift said.

“And we know that a relatively modest proportion of alums actually use these accounts, so it’s not a panacea for staying in touch,” he said. “I don’t think any university can offer full-service accounts indefinitely to alumni. Not on their own.”

Incentives + Microdiscentives + Real-Time Feedback = Reduced Speeding!

A study from the research company Udini found that speeding was virtually eliminated among a group of drivers who were offered $25 a week not to exceed the speed limit.

The study placed a GPS tracker in eight cars and loaned to 50 different drivers for a week.

Drivers were warned when they exceeded the speed limit but additionally told they would get a $25 reward at the end of the week if they didn’t exceed the speed limit.

If they traveled between 3 - 8 miles over the speed limit, they would lose three cents, and above 8 miles over the speed limit and they’d lose six cents.

Each time the driver completed a trip, they were given a report showing any penalties they had accrued.

That shows the power of microdisincentives and real-time feedback!

There are insurance companies today who are offering discounts to drivers who voluntary install a black box that monitors their driving behavior, with drivers who fit the technology found to be involved in fewer accidents.

Perhaps someday, the driver’s window may look like a game, with real feedback built into the windshield.  Or cars will drive themselves and it’ll be a moot point!

via news.discovery.com

A camera that can see five times better than a person with 20/20 vision is here. The resolution is 50 gigapixels, or 50,000 megapixels. Cameras used by professionals reach the 40-megapixel mark, and a typical point-and-shoot might have eight or 10. The amount of information the gigapixel camera captures in a frame is nearly as much as the amount of data stored on a PC’s hard drive — all for one picture.

Riverbed Technology has announced enhancements to its software and virtual application delivery controller (ADC) product family, Stingray. These enhancements allow enterprises and cloud operators to extend the benefits of the ADC with the integration of its Aptimizer web content optimization (WCO) solution. Stingray Traffic Manager 9.0 is also released. It is the industry’s only ADC with comprehensive WCO capability. Also, new Stingray Aptimizer models are released that can be deployed with any ADC to improve performance without changes to the application server or users’ browsers.

Tim Maliyil, CEO, AlertBoot said, “Our entire business is online, so if we experience any type of downtime, it can be disastrous to our productivity, revenue, and overall user experience. We’ve used hardware load balancers for nearly 10 years, but when we moved to a fully-virtualized environment running in the public cloud, we deployed the Stingray Traffic Manager. Because it is software-based and flexible, we can jump between cloud providers as needed. In addition, we’ve seen dramatic performance results with a 55 percent reduction in page load times and 50 percent less data onto the network.”

For More Details See

www.varindia.com

Here are some great tips for saving your iPhone battery, a number of these could also be utilized by all smartphones.

If you’re not using your iPhone heavily, then here are 15 things things that you can do to help save your battery.

1. Restart your iPhone! Restarts do wonders…
2. Let the phone completely die, and then charge it all the way up. It resets the battery stats.
3. Turn off Siri’s “raise to speak” feature. Settings > General > Siri.
4. Turn of Ping. Go to Settings, General, Restrictions, (Enable Restrictions).
5. Turn off Location Services. Go to Settings, Location Services, and turn off any app you really don’t need tracking or using your location. You can also turn off system settings, and location based time.
6. Turn off Push Notifications. Settings > Notifications and turn off whatever apps you can.
7. Turn of Notification Center widgets. Weather, which is location based, sucks a lot of battery. And just get rid of that stocks widget—do you really need it?
8. Kill power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter “jiggly” mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background, especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or navigation (like TomTom).
9. Set autolock to one minute.
10. Turn off iPod EQ.
11. Turn off sounds you don’t need.
12. Use headphones instead of the speaker.
13. Use Auto-brightness.
14. Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth when not using them.
15. Set all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to “Fetch” (turn off Push).

The brain is the most extraordinary of computing machines. It carries out tasks as a matter of routine that would fry the circuits of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet: walking, talking, recognizing, analysing and so on.

And where supercomputers require enough juice to power a small town, the human brain does all its work using little more than the energy in a bowl of porridge.

So its no surprise that computer scientists would like to understand the brain and copy its ability. There’s a problem, however. The brain is built from neurons and these work in a rather different way from the silicon transistor-based circuits that lie under the bonnet of conventional chips.

Of course, computer scientists can simulate the behaviour of neurons and how they link together on conventional computers. But this is a profoundly wasteful process that is unable to exploit the partallel processing and network effects that the brain clearly makes use of and that eats power in the process.

So the race is on to develop a different kind of chip that more accurately mimics the way the brain works. So-called neuromorphic chips must be built from devices that behave like neurons—in other words they transmit and respond to information sent in spikes rather than in a continously varying voltage.