Geekery

Microsoft’s new technology for schools

Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

So Microsoft, for all the flack open source dev dudes and Apple fans give them, are involved with some pretty awesome social upliftment schemes.

They have now released a product which they bill as a “simple and affordable technology for schools that allows several students to work a single computer at the same time – each with their own screen, mouse and keyboard”.

If you’re in Joburg you can see this new technology, which is currently on display at the African School Technology Innovation Centre (STIC) in Newtown, Johannesburg.

Called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, it aims to give more teachers and students access to technology at low cost.

Check out these videos for more info:
mms://msvcatalog-5.wmod.llnwd.net/a2249/e1/ft/share3/be21/0/70e11e70-326a-403a-b719-f329f803c12b.wmv

mms://msnvidweb.wmod.msecnd.net/a10026/e1/ft/share15/e1ed/0/5bbc002c-a4c7-41e6-92ac-cd15f2e0ee0d.wmv

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Beam me up, skattie! The upcoming Samsung Beam

Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

I remember when phones had one purpose and one purpose alone – to phone people. They had receivers, which were attached to the phone with a wire and dials instead of buttons. Those were the good old days, back when it only cost 3 and tuppence to go to bioscope and you still had enough money left over for an Eskimo Pie at interval. Sigh. These days if you launch a new phone it has to have 3G and Qwerty keyboards and GPS and a bleeding flux capacitor. I once had a phone with a camera and a torch. I thought it was just the coolest. Nowadays that’s just not good enough. And Samsung knows this. Which is why their upcoming smartphone has a projector. Yes, a projector, those fancy newfangled things they have at the bioscope. Now there can be one on your phone. Oh this crazy modern world.

The phone, which will run on the Google Android 2.1 OS , will be called the Samsung Beam. Aside from its built in DLP Pico projector, it will feature, um, well, everything, ever. I will list it for you. Try not to drool. It will come equipped with Samsung’s TouchWiz 3.0 user interface, a 3.7 inch WVGA Super AMOLED display, an 8 mega pixel camera, an FM radio, Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0, GPS, and, of course 11 b/g/n wifi. It also comes bundled with a 2GB card, and can take up to 32Gs.

This is the kind of phone that will herald a new era of telecommunication. On its global release, the heavens will open up, and the Lord will descend unto earth, to witness the glory of the Samsung Beam. On its release here, the South African constitution may have to be altered so that union between man/woman and phone is made legal. No, but really, it probably won’t be as cool as an iPhone. But it has a projector, and you have to admit that’s pretty neat.

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Geek God – Dries Buytaert

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

NOTE: We will be changing the Geek God section to feature local geek icons. For now, unfortunately, the post I wrote with details on this has been lost in the ether during our migration of Geekery to a new server. We will be reposting that one soon, but for now, here’s one last look at an international Geek God before we shift our focus to leading local geeks.

You can keep your rock stars and your famous sportsmen and your literary icons. While normal people are busy worshiping these characters, true geeks, particularly programmers and developers, have different heroes. A developer who has written an impressive and game changing system, platform or app will be spoken about in hushed tones and hailed as a hero. And no developer is held up on a higher platform than open source programmer Dries Buytaert, who is the original creator of the Drupal CMS.

For those not up to speed with Drupal, it is a great open source CMS. It can be used to create anything from small personal blogs to important and powerful corporate and government websites. While WordPress is the blogging CMS for the common blogger, Drupal is the developer’s choice. It has also been described as “the Linux of the internet”, and if Drupal is Linux than Word Press would be equivalent to Windows. It also boasts an extremely active and engaged community, which sets it apart from other, similar platforms.

Buytaert is from Belgium, and his claims to fame other than creating Drupal include founding Acquia, which seeks to be to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux, and launching Mollom, a state-of-the-art spam-busting service. “Mollom’s purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server.” Over 4,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service. More than 100,000 messages are being analyzed every day.”

He has a PHD in Computer Science and Engineering from Belgium’s University of Ghent and has won numerous awards, including being voted one of the Top 5 most influential people in open source by MindTouch in 2009. His allegiance to open source has gotten him called “the anti-Bill Gates”, but he himself rejected the tag, blogging that he isn’t comfortable with being branded anti-Microsoft.

For one of the most highly rated programmers in the World, he is surprisingly humble, and has a sense of humour. His website’s somewhat self-depricating bio admits that “sometimes people laugh at his hair, but he is cool with that”. The man is a true geek icon.

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The awesomeness of laser fusion

Posted on 26. Feb, 2010 by Jake.

Laser fusion is going to be awesome!!! Science lovers take note, as this clip from New Scientist shows, researchers are one step closer to triggering a self-sustained fusion reaction.

As a post on Slashdot puts it:
“The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has performed their first controlled fusion experiments using all 192 lasers. While still not ramped up to full power, the first experiments proved very fruitful. The lasers create a lot of plasma in the target container and researchers worried that the plasma would interfere with the ability of the target to absorb enough energy to ignite. These experiments show that not only does enough energy make it through, the plasma can be manipulated to increase the uniformity of compression. Ramping up of power is due to start in May.”

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No sex please, we’re Apple

Posted on 24. Feb, 2010 by Jake.

App by app, Apple has spent the last couple of days embarking on a moralistic cleansing of their iPhone App Store. Porn fiends the world over wanted answers, and now. So, thanks to an article on Gizmodo.com, let’s here what the official word from Apple executive Paul Schiller is:

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

Fair enough. What those who have come out strongly against the move have pointed out, though, is that those parents who have complained are not aware of, or simply aren’t using, the parental controls available to them that would restrict their kids from access to these apps.

Also controversial is the fact that Apple have retained two risqué, borderline soft-porn apps in the form of Sports Illustrated and FHM. Are these two allowed to remain because of the commercial clout of the companies they represent? And, if so, is Apples app purge aimed only at smaller developers, who need their products to remain in the App Store the most?

Schiller, when asked about Sports Illustrated, does not deny this: “the difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said. But, the idea that it’s fine to publish half-naked women as long as you’re famous is insulting.

And, many Apple-heads want their favourite brand to be cooler than the others. We want it to treat us like adults, and that is why the idea of the brand condoning a world in which we cannot choose which Apps we can and can’t to download is troublesome.

Are Apple in the right self-censoring their App Store at the expense of developers? Let me know below.

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