April 2004 Archives
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April 30, 2004
Lots of templates
Lots of free templates found here. Mostly image and theme based, but they are well done.
April 29, 2004
Self Cooling Beer
Lots of action in cooling technology this week. This being quite portable. It reminds me of those nifty hand warmers you use when skiing -- except in reverse.
A 17C drop is nearly enough to not have to prechill the beer at all.
April 28, 2004
Universal Limits on Computation
This is an excellent article, in my opinion, about the future of computation and about the universe itelf.
The abstract is:
The math in the article is fairly simple, relatively speaking, and they describe what they mean in words, too. Their conclusion that Moore's Law can only work for about 600 years, regardless of physical manifestation, is astounding. An article I read a while back stated that within 30-40 years, computing power will meet that of the computing power of the human brain. Given Moore's Law has been going for a while now, that still leaves on the order of 500 years of it for information processing to exceed that of the human brain (as it is now). That's good news, in my opinion.
In my previous ramblings about the size and age of the universe, I had not considered the whole horizon aspect of it. Basically, in a universe that is expanding at an accelerated rate, the observable universe gets smaller. Actually, the article puts it that objects that get beyond the horizon cease to be in causal contact with the observer. That means that the state of an object beyond the causal horizon has absuletely no impact on the observer in any way. Curiously enough, it can't actually have an impact on any other observable object, either, because by the time the causal effect gets to the observable object (as of now) it will no longer be observable. (This, of course, assumes no effect can traverse the distance faster than the speed of light.
Put in another way, if you have two objects, A and B being observed and A is closer than B, then the following works. Currently, B causes A to look red. If B changes such that it now makes A look blue that change in B would still be while it was within the horizon. If B exits the horizon and goes through a change that now would make A look green, by the time that change can effect A, A will have left the horizon. Clearly, once any object leaves the horizon the observer can never learn anything new about it, even by studying changes within the horizon.
This also means that the observable universe gets smaller while the total universe expands. It's this reduction in size, and thus energy, that places a limit on overall infomration processing that can be done. The assumption is that the results of the information processing have to be obvservable. A tree that falls in a forest without being observed still fell because you can later observe that it was fallen. A tree that falls in a forest outside the horizon is irrelevant because no such forest can be observed... ever. Put another way, it didn't fall because it doesn't exist in the universe. Of course, this implies the universe as the observable stuff around the observer.
Curiously, in this accelerating, expanding universe the end of time comes when no fundementally lowest level thing has an causal effect on any other lowest level thing because the rest have gone beyond its horizon. This would be perfect entropy as there is neither observable nor mutable state.
Strangely, this would seem to imply that the accelerating, expanding universe is be driven by some force so strong that it rips everyhing apart to its lowest level fundamental building blocks that can then no longer have a cause on each other. There are many flaws here. First, this force pulling (or pushing) everything apart at an accelerated rate has to, itself, be made up of lowest level fundamental building blocks. Secondly, if there are only two fundamental building blocks and they are in causal range, they still can't act on each other. Why? Because there is nothing else available to pass between them. Also curious, this can be expanded to any number of lowest level building blocks.
And if I keep rambling I'm going to randomly reverse my ramblings. So I'll stop there. For now.
Aspartame Bad link
PHXnews.com | Breaking News from the Phoenix area, Tucson & Flagstaff, Arizona
Just a link cache -- who knows what is true about it.
Cool Toaster
As far as toasters go, this one wins. I'm always burning toast. No more with this one that has sensors to detect when a piece of bread is "perfectly" toasted.
Nice Tiny PC
Tiny Stealth PC Adds Integrated WiFi
This little PC is just the ticket. It doesn't skimp on things like the processor, although it may be skimping on the graphics card, depending on how good the Intel "Extreme" Graphics 2 is. With all the standards ports and WiFi already included, it's ready to be plugged in anywhere as a little server.
Sadly, though, the prices start at over $1k USD. THat's a bit pricey for a base model with only a Celery 2GHz and 256megs ram.
Oh well... a cheap laptop with a faster processor may actually be more economical and portable and practical.
April 27, 2004
How a wedding dress gets thousands of hits a minute...
Good grief: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4146756343
Certainly, it's funny enough. Right now, 15:04, it's at 752,268 hits. When my friend first showed me, it was at 726k hits. And that was only a few minutes ago.
And this is the sort of thing that mostly goes through IM, too. IM seems to be the new method of choice for passing jokes and other things around. And it's much faster than email, in general. Not because of the technology. But because of the way people use it. I'm sure this has made plenty of other blogs, too.
After typing that paragraph, it's 15:06. And it has 758,914 hits. That's an average of 55 hits a second. At this rate, each day will produce 4,752,000 hits. The whole page size, including graphics, is 370kilobytes. That gives 1.6374886 terabytes of transfer per day. In bandwidth terms, this listing is using 19.8730469 MBps of bandwidth.
And now, at 15:15 (hey, I work too) it's got 777937 hits. In the last 9 minutes, the rate has changed to only 12.71875 MBps of bandwidth.
I'm lucky to have ebay items that get over 100 hits. The PowerMac I recently sold only got 104 hits.
Certainly, it's all the story -- and the responses. But is any of it real? Who knows. It certainly has helped make the price go up. ;)
And yes, the hits are unique... the counter will not count me twice.
And I sign out with it at 792,249 hits. Up 39,981 hits since I started this. Amazing.
[Update: it's 09:52 on the next day the hit counter on this is up to 3,568,643. It's been rolling at an average of 43.4 per second, or 15.68MBps. Amazing. What's more amazing, though: it's currently bid up to $15,100. For a $1,200 new dress? And at 10:08, it's at 3,657,941 for a 16 minute pass of 93 per second or 33.6 MBps, more than twice the average and significantly higher than yesterday. That's a rate of 8million per day.]
[Update2: Alright, the guy is now getting media coverage on TV and other sources. He's officially being called The eBay Wedding Dress Guy. The hits appear to be rolling even faster. At 11:17, I saw 4,073,693. That's up over 500k from the earlier update. 4,092,881 two minutes later, rolling at a rate of 57.8 MBps. And yes, all of these bandwidth rates are in mega_bytes_ per second. Certainly, eBay servers are very distributed to be able to handle such loads.]
w.bloggar
Alright, w.bloggar is nice in that it supports every blog under the sun. Unfortunately, that means it supports the only those features that are common among all.
It doesn't know about the text formatting filters, such as line breaks. And it doesn't know about the whole draft thing. I think I have to go back and search around for another one that is more movable type specific.
*sigh*
SPAM
Spam is so bloody obnoxious. Sadly, it's like the real thing. They keep selling it because people keep eating it. In this case, people click through and sometimes even buy things from spam.
Most spam, though, is easy to spot. You can make your what 10 feet long? And keep it that way for 100 years? And while you're at it, you can make a trillion dollars by entering this lotto for free 10 million times. And you won't mind keeping a 20 million bucks by just hold 500 million in your account for a few days. But first, you just need to send the transaction fees of 89 thousand up front. You will get your money.
These are all easy.
But for the last few months I've been getting ones that are a bit harder to spot. And, in fact, they are ones that I actually have to open. I use hotmail, with the exclusive filter on. That means I only get mail from people in my contacts. I don't have the junk mail deleted. Instead, I scan through it. I also sell things on eBay. This means I may actually get some important email about something I'm selling. The latest looked like this:
Visit eBay, The World's Online Marketplace TM at
http://www.ebay.com
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SitezBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site deskign software
-- some blocked image --
Hi, please add another $14 for shipping to Alaska.
lfpodopn-ohjs@lycos.com wrote:
Hello, what is the shipping cost to Virginia?
--------------------
Question from: heemuest
Title of item: Sharp Stereo Home Theater System DVD CD NIB
Seller: aqesuec
Starts: Apr-19-04 17:35:06 PDT
Ends: Apr-25-04 17:35:06 PDT
Price: Starts at $120.47
To view the item, go to: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=618540822
I don't know what the blocked image is -- and I don't want to know. But the link at the bottom is actually just a label for the real link. I won't click on it; I don't need more of these. Looking closely, there are inconsistancies. In addition, the item doesn't even exist. The first time I got one of these was while I was selling about 15 things. At first, I merely though eBay had screwed up -- which, being an autiomated system, has too many issues with it to even start thinking about. But then I realized the link didn't actually go to eBay.
My problem with this is that it doesn't have anything to do with what is being sold. Perhaps it goes to some site that looks like ebay and they're trying to steel passwords. More likely it's trying to fool people into clicking in to a site that'll pop up a million windows thus giving them lots of ad impressions, etc.
I just wish they'd stop because I actually have to look at them while I'm selling something and decide if it's a real one or not.
*grumble*
Yet another PMP
Mind Controlled Personal Video Player?
And in this case, Gizmodo is calling it a PVP. Oh well.
This looks to play as many formats, or maybe even more, than an Archos. But it has a smaller screen and with a 2.2Ah that only gives 3 hours, it's battery use is just pathetic.
But hey, I guess that's the price you pay for a device that will control your mind. Or you control it with your mind. Or it just plays waves crashing on a beach.
Odd.
April 26, 2004
Synthetic Life
Scientific American: Synthetic Life [ BIOTECHNOLOGY ]
Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines
A very cool 5 page article on the topic of synthetic life. Well, really, it talks about building machines using DNA, and proteins, and whatnot.
One of the items that interested me was the part about mututation. Through generations, the DNA machines mutate. This is normal biologic behavior. On one side, this has been used to actually improve the performance of a machine by letting it happen and only selecting those machines that had the correct behvior. On the other hand, in the open, the system quickly degrades to not working at all.
What is really interesting is the virus, by definition, have solved this problem. They tend to be able to replicate without losing their primary goal. Why is that?
I think answering that question will be enlightening for both organic machine engineering and virus fighting. Imagine having to keep up with your antivirus software definitions so you don't get sick. Of course, if the distribution method was in water, it could just be a matter of making sure you drink enough water...
The other part that was interesting was one of the example uses. This was building plants that would glow when around TNT. I think it's amusing that they can build stuff so apparently easily that just glows. Where are the designer glowing plants now? Wouldn't a glowing spider plant, for instance, be cool? ;)
Frog Logger
Alright, as far as sensors go, this one is cool. It gives your PC thermometer, barometer, and hygrometer data. It works via the serial port, which is nice for simple applications in hardware, too.
This could be good use on conjunction with APRS, too. Who knows if it supports any of the standards that could be used -- I certainly haven't been paying much attention to such things lately.
It could be fun to add to blog posts, too, much like people add the music they're listening too.
Nice PMP from Samsung
Samsung's Slimline Media Player Coming to America in July
That's Personal Movie Player, or Personal Media Player, or Portable -- well, you get the idea. It could also be a PVP (that's video) but that'd just get all the PvP fans confused.
Anyway, this looks like a cool video gadget that can do TV, as well. That's analog wireless video; no IP TV over BT or WiFi found here... (which would be really nice on a small device -- I had hoped my Zaurus could do that). What it doesn't seem to be able to do is either record off the TV part or record off another input. That's one place where the Archos devices always seem to remain ahead...
April 25, 2004
The Latest in Dell Support
The latest from Dell Support wasn't as bad as I would have expected. However, it wasn't perfect, either.
The first three times I called, the line went dead. The third was't totally dead but the guy on the other end (presumably in India) couldn't hear me; it was dead enough.
The process was different this time, though. Instead of being on a 3-way conference call with Airborne Express to get a pick-up time, they had Airborne express just send a box out. So that took an extra day. And instead of having the laptop ready and just dropping it in the box when they come, the box was dropped off; it was an empty box just addressed to me. The Airborne Express person didn't know what I was talking about when I explained how it had always been done. This is the fourth time I've gone through it.
The box did get out the same day, though, because the empty box came in the morning. What irks me is that when the laptop is returned, it usually comes in a well used box. But Airborne Express always says they don't reuse the boxes. I've got 4 absolutely used ones to prove otherwise. Sure enough, though, when they ship new boxes they come as brand new kits. The boxes are very cool, though, and we're finding good uses for them, so I'm not complaining too much.
The laptop went out Tuesday for screen repair and came back Friday good as new. As usual they said it would take 1-2 weeks and it was much faster. I can't complain too much.
April 23, 2004
BlueTags -- for people?
::: Welcome to BlueTags A/S :::
So, I had this nice write up on how their patent is silly in the light of things like APRS tracking, cell phones and whatnot. I mean, I have an app that I can SMS and get the location of my phone. Other have certainly talked about it. In any case, I'm pissed at IE again for losing my form field. So, I'm not going to rewrite everything.
The patent is here.
BlueTags certainly seems to want it to block all others from doing similar things. They don't even mention that others could license it. They just say it prevents anyone else from doing it. Blah. Give me a break.
More of this, Please
dottocomu: TV-to-cellphone SD card video recorder
This is exactly the sort of functionality I was hoping to get out of my Archos. Of course, it comes close already and it's now 3-4 generations old.
The ability to record video right onto a device and then the ability to move that video to an external card for play on any other device the supports the format is huge.
My goal with the Archos was to be able to record a handful of DVDs onto it an beable to play them on the road without having to bring the DVD player. Of course, little did I know that the record capability wouldn't be as good as the playback -- which has been "fixed" in the newer models -- but I can't justify the cost just yet.
Another goal was to copy those recorded files onto an SD or CF card and play them on my Zaurus C700. As it turns out, though, SD isn't fast enough nor are most of my CF cards. My 2.2gb microdrive actually is fast enough, but I don't have the player that's optimized for the C700 yet. And the C860 would be able to do the job much better.
In order to bring the experience up to something really reasonable I'd need to get the new C860 and the newest Archos (either a 340 or 540). The cost of both of those is on the order of $800, or $1600 for both. That's just far too expensive.
Of course, the handset we were working on did video really well from 3gpp sources. So this little pyramid would have been perfect had it been able to play video from the miniSD slot. However, it couldn't. In fact, all it could use the slot for was MP3s. A sad, but true, restriction of the carrier. Well, the handset isn't shipping anyway so maybe the next one won't be as restrictive. I'd love to be able to pop in a gig SD card with a whole bunch of Futurama episodes and watch them whenever. ;)
eBay Sale
eBay item 4125549382 (Ends Apr-23-04 20:04:48 PDT) - Apple PowerMac G3 350 MHz 64MB/6GB/CD
It would appear that I'm selling a PowerMac G3 on eBay. It's not that we don't like Macs. In fact, I kind of like Macs. It's more that we don't have a use for them. Everything we do can be done on a PC and we already have enough of those around the house. So, out goes the Mac taking up too much room.
The problem with selling stuff like this on ebay, though, is shipping. The estimated ground shipping is somewhere on the order of $40 bucks right now. That's nearly 40% of the current price and it's money the buyer loses and I don't get. However, it also eats into the buyers budget which means when someone buys it they're thinking "Is it worth $145 to me?" Of course, there's no way around this short of not offering shipping and having it for sale in the local area. But that means not being able to leverage as many buyers to increase the sale price. The same is true, of course, for allow international shipments. The shipping and overhead costs more but the number of people willing to buy just may increase.
Equally difficult to sell on eBay are really cheap items. eBay recently made this easier by lowering the cost of really cheap things. Of course, you have to question whether or not something worth 50 cents is really worth selling rather than just donating. For someone who needs the cash, it's a clear choice.
Easy and cheap to ship things that are also fairly in expensive are some of the best things to sell. For instance, we've sold a lot of comic books through eBay. They are fairly easy and quick to list, package, and ship. But that's all relative. It still took quite a while for the whole process to play it's course. And eBay is working on that, too. The ability to list by ISBN, like half.com did, is super powerful. Listings can automatically be created, complete with pictures. And buyers will know precisely which model or version they are bidding on.
In any cae, the mac will be sold tonight. Bidding is binding, so I'll be shipping it soon -- maybe even this weekend if the person pays quickly. I'm doing PayPal only for the first time -- so I expect them to. I was worried, but comparison searches showed the last bunch of PowerMac G3s were all sold with PayPal only, too.
In the end, the whole thing is fun though. And that's the big draw of eBay.
Big Laptop Drive...
Toshiba Makes First 100GB Laptop Drive
But at only 4200rpm, what's the point? Heck, even my 2.2gigabyte microdrive runs at 4200 rpm.
What laptop drives could really use is a variable speed option. Why run one at 4200 rpm when plugged in? Why run at 7200 rpm when on battery? Sure, the faster the drives spins the hotter it is, too. But if you had a drive that cruised along at, say, 3600 rpm until heavy demand came in when it sped up to 7200 rpm -- or heck, why not 10k rpm? -- and then dropped back down when on battery I would guess there would be an overall power savings (spinning up uses more energy than keeping the spin going). This is much how the dynamic processor speeds of the latest mobile processor work.
At the least, there could be multiple modes with fixed speeds.
Oh well, at least it's a 100 gigs -- and that could fit into, say, an Archos. ;)
Hard to wind down from being busy
The hardware for the project we were doing software on got cancelled. Our software didn't, though. What this means is that we went from being under a tight schedule with a lot of urgency to all of a sudden not having much of any pressure. Now, we do have some because not only do we still have to finish the current software we're going to be doing even more software for the next handset. We're just not under any schedules right now.
This also means that a number of problems I've been experiencing are going to go completely unsolvable. This is very frustrating as it makes it very difficult to finish my pieces to my satisfaction.
This also now gives me some time to catch up reading the various web sites I normally like to frequent. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to also blog all of the stuff I read that I find interesting -- so I'm not going to. I'm basically just going to start up on current stuff rather than feeling like I need to play catch-up.
I do, however, need to do a back post for last Saturday and finish up a back post from the two weeks before (which I'd completely written and when the post wasn't accepted IE lost the contents). Come to think of it, that would be a nice feature of those automatic form fillers (like the Google toolbar has). Keep the contents of a page for use when going back so if the contents are gone they can be refilled. This does have some security issues, but for non-HTTPS pages it could be a time saver.
My company keeps growing, too. We now have 18 people. Of course, it seems every time we add a new person things just get busier. Why is it that adding people doesn't actually seem to ever reduce work load? Maybe that's what happens with a growing company that is also doign well. Or maybe it just means there aren't enough people. Or it could also mean that the amount of time spent on hiring someone, and bringing them up to speed, and finding tasks often takes more time than the person adds. In a field like ours where we can't reasonably expect people to know what we do, this could easily be the case -- especially in the first few weeks or so. We had a big round of interviews and so far we've only hired one person from that. With 6 people spending, on average, about 1 hour per person across 20 people (reading resume's, discussing results, phone screens, interviews itself, etc.) we have 120 hours spent already. And can anyone get 120 hours of productivity done in their first 3 weeks without using the time of anyone else? Not only unlikely, but not wise, either. Even if they could, the first 3 weeks would just return things to the way they were. But in all, that means it could take months to bring things to the point where more has gotten done. Of course, the goal was to hire 4 people from the round of interviewing, which reduces the overall overhead.
In any case, I now feel I have time to ramble again... beware. ;)
April 15, 2004
Xport 2.0 -- embedded microprocessor fun
Charmed Labs via Gizmodo
So, we have here a little device the plugs into the Game Boy (Advance and Advance SP) and provides IO, FPGA, and more RAM to turn your Game Boy into a complete embedded development tool.
It uses a standard Xilinx FPGA, which is cool because I still clearly remember using one of those during late nights in college. Also cool is that it uses an ARM7 (is that what the GPA runs on? appears to be) which is what most BREW phones use (ARM7TDMI) with the exception of the new ones we're working with now (ARM9).
Additionally, the system comes with eCos, an open-source real-time operating system with a footprint of less than 32k. Through RedBoot, this allows for bootstrapping the OS into a remote debugging mode with GDB.
If I had time to mess around with something like this, it could be quite fun. It's too bad it doesn't have ethernet available out of the box. That could allow for some fun networking applications in a fairly small and inexpensive package.
And the cool part is that it just plugs into the Game Boy. When done, unplug Game Boy and continue to play games! ;)
April 14, 2004
New N-Gage
The QD is definitely quite a bit smaller than the original N-Gage. However, the new one is 143g while the old one is 137g. By size, though, the old one is 133.7x69.7x20.2mm or 139cc in volume. In comparison, the new one is 118x68x22mm at 123cc. That means it's thicker and smaller and heavier.
The N-Gage Arena Launcher sounds a lot like the X-Box's Live area, but it adds hints and cheats right there. That's pretty cool.
The images on this page seem to show decent relative size. THe orientation of the phone is a bit differnt, too, with the long part being on the top now rather than bottom when playing games.
Of course, there's no more "sidetalkin'" but who cares since you can use a bluetooth headset. ;)
A big thing missing here seems to be the camera. So much potential is available for cameras and games. The other big drawback, in my opinion, is the 4k color screen. That's just not a lot of colors. The Moto T720 also had a 4k color screen and it just never looked as good as the 64k color screens which are lacking in comparison to the 18bit color screens. Oh well.
April 13, 2004
Links of the Day
That I don't have time to ramble about...
Rant about online editing
This is absolutely insane. Twice today I've lost the entire contents of a post because either the page changed or there was an error on the post and going back (either through the buttons or IE back) loses the text entry contents. That's just insane.
So now I'm trying a desktop client that will hopefully make this better. It's called w.bloggar and it appears to support just about every blog under the sun. This means that some things, like draft and publish, aren't just things that can be changed. In fact, I can't figure out if there's any way to tell the difference. It has spell checking, though, so that's nice. I'll be trying it out for a while to see if I like it. Of course, it doesn't do the whole bookmarklet thing. I'll just have to remember to switch over.
It also doesn't give me feedback on what sites have been pinged or if there were ping errors. In fact, due to the time it takes to ping it often fails with a timeout.
So we'll see if I can live with it. I used semagic all the time with LiveJournal and it worked out well.
I'll be testing with it's file abilities, too. It looks like it might make adding images almost trivial. We'll see. ;)
No Silly ideas here
picturephoning.com: Moblogs: A Silly Idea Whose Time Has Come
Alright, I think picturephoning may have missed the interesting part about the MobilePipeline article.
The author appears to have similar ideas to what I have. Make the camera quality better. Do this by either sticking better cameras into the phone. Or, better yet, give a tight link between your shiny new ultramegapixel camera and your phone.
If you Canon Digital Rebel had bluetooth, for instance, we could slowly send 6MP images up to a site. Even resized to a more web-like 640x480 they'd look much better than any camera phones (and even some other digital cameras, because it takes such wonderful pictures ;) ).
Of course, 6MP over Bluetooth would be slow. Our Casio EX-Z4 actually has two features that could work well with some phones. One of them is that it uses SD cards. Just pop out the card from the camera and into the phone and send away. Now we're talking about sending 4MP images over a wireless network that's still fairly slow for VGA images. Enter the second feature of the Casio: it can resize images right on the camera. This is a very cool feature for exactly this use!
Of course, the main problem is that so many of the new camera phones don't use SD cards. They use some other silly format. So will I ever get to do this? No idea.
WiFi on the camera itself allows dumps at hotspots without a computer or cell phone. This is a nice feature on cameras where you can create photo albums out of HTML. Just have the camera FTP the entire album up to your website. Edit it later, if you like, but it's complete HTML. (OK, so you should also email some to your blog because blogging is all hip. ;) )
And finally, why should your cell phone be both a bluetooth and WiFi access point? And maybe if it's in range of another access point, instead of using the cellular network it can just become a repeater. Or maybe it can be bluetooth to WiFi, as well? In other words, connect to it via whatever you want (IR, bluetooth, WiFi) and let it pick the best route out to the net. What's that have to do with cameras and quality? Or even moblogs? I dunno, maybe it's just a silly idea...
Find out where you are with a picture!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Article at New Scientist, brief at SmartMobs and TechDirt
According to the article, this technology will use a picture from your shiny new camera phone (or any camera, for that matter) that you send in (and pay a fee) and it will tell you where you are. It will do this with an accuracy of 1 meter. This is quite impressive. The article claims GPS has an accuracy of 10 meters. The differential GPS and aGPS on the handsets this can get much better. Assisted GPS solves the problem TechDirt talks about with urban areas and not enough satellites in view. It doesn't solve the problem in a dense jungle (or even just redwoods) but then, neither does this.
However, a standard car navi system doesn't use aGPS. Now, if you take the Sony's new 3D navi and my idea of using a real video feed rather than rendered 3D and finally combine it with this technology not only will the accuracy be at excellent but you won't need to worry about losing the GPS signal.
This would be a pretty cool system.
Now add it to a HUD on eyeglasses using a phone and small video camera and add face recognition and not only will you know where you are but you'll know who you're talking to. And this could, potentially, even be used inside.
Imagine meeting someone and later going back over the days video and entering in information you learned about this person (or reviewing the information your computer gathered) and the next time you see them up pops the information?
Alright, that may be a bit farther in the future. But many of the technologies are being worked on, clearly. Many people are working on facial recognition -- a very difficult problem. We have people working on location recognition. Speech recognition works pretty well at this point. Language understanding (say, to fill in a contact card) is also being worked on, although it may very well be the most difficult piece. We already have HUDs for glasses. Fairly powerful computers are already available in portable sizes -- and if you want exercise you could have massive computational power taking a few of the fastest laptops and linking them in a backpack. What's left? Add the ability to be conversational and you have a fairly decent robot. And a lot of this is already being integrated into Sony's little walking and dancing robot.
Exciting times ahead. ;)
