Panasonic has launched its 3-D home video camera. Boy what a massive piece of metal to cart around to your next preschool bash. Take a look at this thing! It looks like Wallie the robot movie hero.
Imagine pulling your new Panasonic out and turning sharply to thwack it into the face of the Sports’ Master? It will cause more injuries than Bakkies Botha.
The JSE had its problems today. The bourse has experienced technical issues, which normally means massive system failure, or network outage. In common English, just thing gremlins.
But we’re not supposed to be experiencing gremlins. We’re supposed to be part of the new world order of harmony with binary. Well we’re palpably not.
We’re perhaps more hamstrung than our uncles and old fuddy duddy aunts and granpaps and moms who would turn around and turn on a zippo. At least when they fired up their daily diaries, they didn’t have to wait for some flippant dandy to waltz out of his technology office and deign to communicate the problem to the masses by rebooting the Blackberry server. Or what what.
At times the communication model we use is hamstrung by half truths. When we embrace a word its application forms the picture which settles in our joint memories and helps reduce confusion. That’s if we all employ the same word similarly. Of course we don’t.
While words are intellectual stimulants, smells are evocative and empathetic. They follow us like our unwanted shadows. Apologetic almost and distinct. Always discerning. On the other side is words which are disheveled, they’re amorphous.
Words form images that are not always duplicated by the recipient.
Some excellent Bday Source code from the webpage
In an unusual twist, code writing is pretty much mathematical, yet poetic too. At the same time, the rules are a semantic reproduction of the thing to which we refer. If you want something to be achieved it has to be produced by strict rules governed by a mathematical beauty intrinsic to the rule.
Publishing anything has the same set of rules. There are phrases used like “lead” or “oped” which are tightly governed by the same exactness. This nomenclature sometimes clashes.
Microsoft announces its to work more closely with ARM chip manufacturers in the UK. That’s of interest when you consider that Microsofts’ dallying in the hardware space has not exactly gone according to plan.
First the X-Box. Wonderful graphics. When it works. And the Windows Smartphone? Actually, not very smart. And its close friend the HTC Phone of South Africa ? Well good luck if you can find someone at MTN who actually can fix it. A work colleague has spent months trying to find the original marketing company called LEAF which originally sold these with many bells and alien whistles. For those who remember the ad campaign.
Microsoft buys into ARM which is a gaming chip manufacturer - why? Read below...
At first glance, this Kindle e-Books thing appears to be unilinear. One way towards reading. Someone asked me a good question today. Why get a Kindle when you can buy i-Store rights to books, and audio books, and so on, and merely download into my MAC? Or my iPhone? Or any device that allows reading of e-Books.
So why not? Mainly because the devices are not set up for reading in the sun, and as we Africans know, its a bit issue with devices designed in the northern Hemisphere. They just don’t glow brightly enough for our blue skies and sunny outlook. That means we’re left squinting like hogs in the sun as we walk to get our lunches and try and SMS or read the WAP page or whatever. Kindle and other readers are designed to be legible in blazing sunshine on the beach. Anywhere.
Easy to read SMS - not easy to read eBook
I love maps – but sometimes the digital device allows you to act like a complete cretin and get away with it.
Whether a Garmin or TomTom in a car, the Garmin 500 in an aeroplane, the Samsung’s google maps on my phone, or just my pure and simple map book, maps are cool. I use large maps for flying and they’re some of the most accurate in South Africa.
The Garmin 500 - a cool R 7500 or so
The developers have thousands of years of map making to get to where you and I can make sense of the world based on a handful of signals and codes on a piece of paper, or a piece of digital paper. The interesting thing is that even 3D maps (which give you a sense of perspective) are actually 2D.
And even stranger, 3D mapping was in black and white during the Second World War, developed to help mappers read the mountains and hills and valleys, which in turn helped plan attacks based on real ground issues.
Now coloured codes and visual representations allow for you to slip into perspective mode and view the world as if you were cruising along in 3D. The old map readers would use double eyed microscope-type glasses to view the black and white maps, peering over them like mad scientists.
But I still await the world of 3D mapping. Sometimes its easier to plan your route by hauling out a real piece of paper. Spread it over the bonnet, place four stones on all four corners and then – it all gets clearer. One problem with digital mapping is that your brain finds it more difficult to figure out in time and space what and where things are. That’s because a paper map can be as big as your bonnet, giving you an insight into distance and direction. But when converting onto the digital, its a tiny little thing.
Ipad launches. People purchase their iPhone4, Motorola. Nokia smartphone, windows mobile, google android, Samsung, Rim Blackberry, waycom tablet, stylus, Kindle, e-Page, online-subs …. SCREEEETCH!!
Geez. That’s an aweful barrel-full of monkeys for the middle Class.
Maybe we should all get one device. A brain. That’s still way up front in processing power. As bizarre as it sounds, your noggin has some grunt. Got me thinking about those para-military urbanites, all clinging to their coffees as they rush about the morning. That there’s an arrogant belief that people in rural areas can’t do digital or they’re backward.
Bad mistake.
There are machines out there written by teenagers that pull content directly from sites and feed them into mobile phone headline services.
So what, says the free marketeer, its out there and we have the right to access information. And there’s the rub. Who pays the person who goes out to retrieve the information in the first place? Normally some me dia corporation that is collecting IP. However, that tells only part of the story. We all believe in the right to access information.. right?
I promise not to do this more often. Use a blog to market something, but in this case, it’s the right thing to do. BusinessDay is re-launching its website to conform to world standard and the switchover takes place at 17h00 tonight – Friday the 16th July.
The following outlines changes to our site which have been carefully planned and researched:
Ooh, how pretty exclaim the Digital Fundi's of the world..
So, Gollum is to appear in public (or one of his minions) to tell us today all about the iPhone 4’s problems.
The real news is why did Apple launch their iPhone 4 without first checking that it worked? For ever we have got used to this brand making sure about these sorts of things. So what pushed the blokes to rush this whole idea?
He's Back !! Gollum may be Glummen later today ...
Fear of Google’s Android? Can’t be Smartphones, as the Microsoft junk is a contradiction in terms. Not so much Smart as Bart phone.
But latest is that Apple may give away $29 worth of accessories in lieu of its messup. But Stocktwits tells me that that’s not stopping the market from selling short in AAPL. That’s Apple.