Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Acer Liquid A1 Price, Release Date and Full Specs

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

After the tragedy of losing mybrand new Google G1 phone in one short week, I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement to take its place. Then I read about the release of the Acer Liquid A1, and I was immediately convinced. Let’s have a look at some of the features of this new Acer Liquid phone:

  • 1GHz Snapdragon processor. This is the fastest chip on the market for a mobile phone and it will help handle complicated applications and the multimedia possibilities of this phone.
  • WVGA Screen (800 x 480 resolution) capable of displaying video at HD quality. This is the highest resolution screen available for a mobile phone. Most new smartphones have resolution of 400 x 240.
  • Google Android operating system. The Android open source platform is ideally designed for a phone with high technical capabilities, and this Acer Liquid phone gives it the first chance to truly shine.
  • 5MP autofocus camera that has ISO levels as well as the ability to tag pictures with your current location thanks to the inbuilt GPS
  • Internet browsing capabilities at HSPA speeds (High speed packet access) that allows you to surf at 7.2Mbps
  • Wifi Synching options that will allow you to share files between your computer and Acer phone with ease
  • Social Network integration inside the phone so that you can easily see and follow updates from your favorite social media sites

Acer Liquid A1 Price

Well the problem usually with great pieces of technology that have everything you want in them is the price tag. So when I first read about this phone I envisioned it to be somewhere cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise to a computer’s price. However Acer always tend to release products at affordable prices and this time around has been no different. The Acer Liquid A1 Price is 380 euros or 570 dollars before any discounts or subsidies from carriers.

Acer Liquid A1 Release Date

So all that leaves is when will this cheaply price technological product be released. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait couple of years for it to come out. In fact, its much sooner that anyone anticipated. Dell, who has talked much more about releasing an Android phone, has yet to reveal anything. But Acer have announced that their Acer Liquid phone will come out on November 28 2009. That’s right, only 1 month away, and this could be in your hands.

That wraps up a look at the phone that I plan to replace my older G1 google phone. The Acer Liquid features and price look great, and stay tuned for a full review when I get my hands on the phone.

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How to do bold and underline in Facebook chat

Monday, May 25th, 2009

I just saw on a Facebook site how to do Facebook chat bold and underline! I use chat on Facebook quite often for keeping in touch with my friends, but haven’t been able to use underline or bold on facebook chat until now.

Facebook chat bold

So how do you do underline in Facebook chat or bold? I’ll let him let you know. Emphasis in chats is really important, so I won’t try to steal his thunder (and steal his font) by telling you myself!

The big mystery now is how to do italics in Facebook chat! I don’t think italic is possible (only strong and under line).

Head over to the chat emoticons site now to find out more about Facebook chat bold.

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上海博克

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

上海博克

Shanghai Blog in Chinese characters can be written like this: 上海博克. Reason why I’m writing 上海博克 is to see whether a Shanghai Blog in English using the 上海博克 characters can show up on the google search results. Let’s see  if 博克上海 will get Chinese people to come here.

Probably not, lets see.

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Mesothelioma Law Suit

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Mesothelioma Law Suit Heading My Way

I woke up this morning and realized I got Mesothelioma. Not the real kind – which is a nasty kind of cancer which is caused by exposure to toxic chemicals but a kind that you can only pick-up in this age of fast money, internet, and crooked businesses.

You see, the kind of Mesothelioma Law Suit I have is purely psychological - but nevertheless, the symptomps are the same: shortness of breath, chestpain, amnesia, and straight out pain. As I said, its a kind of toxic chemical that I picked up that caused me to get it – the damned internet. Where else could you pick up such a evil desease while mindlessly wasting some time. 

Somehow I ended up reading about some Adsense optimizting tools that could generate me some more pocket change than the measly $3.65 I’ve picked up over the last year. I checked out the top keyword that collected the most cash for a single click – and guess what, it was Mesothelioma law suitfor a whopping $69! One click, and someone out there pockets 69 freaking bucks….CLICK,CLICK, CLICK, CLICK – oh wait, I can now buy myself a brand new laptop, thank you very much! And the worst of it, is that the unfortunate people with this kind of cancer are the ones who have the cover the cost of this advertising.

Mesothelioma Law Suit for everybody: Google, the Internet, and Advertising – I SHAME YOU ALL!

At first I wasn’t sure how to feel, but in fact, this is a feeling that every unsuccesful blogger feels at one point in his/her life. It’s the Mesothelioma  lawsuit syndrome. That feeling you get when you know that there’s some huge thing out there waiting to be got, something that is attainable by someone somewhere, but that someone will never be you..and it makes you sick to your stomach – out of either ethical reasons or just plain jealousy.

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Internet Piracy – Hope for humanity

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

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It’s kinda funny isn’t it – the internet has turned millions of otherwise innocent people into true criminals. In fact, I’d be surprised to find any experienced internet user who hasn’t infringed some copyright law in one way or the other. Even the most moral of mothers and fathers must have watched an ‘illegal’ Youtube video or downloaded some random mp3 track. And yet, even tough the world is now full of ‘thieves’, no one really seems to really care besides the music labels and perhaps movie/tv studios. Even the little FBI warnings at the beginning of movies threatening prosecution or the reported lawsuits filed by the RIAA on individuals for lifesavings don’t seem to bother the average citizen.

 What is the reason for this recent phenomenon – is it that people think music/video should be free, is it that its just so damn easy to steal stuff on the internet, or is there perhaps a deeper layer to this ‘crime of our times’?

One of the most important, and certainly most shocking things I learned at school (besides  stuff in sex ed class of course), was that Communism, in principle, was actually a great ideology. All through my upbringing I was led to believe that it was the most evil thing on this planet – but as my history teacher explained, in a perfect world we would be governed by Communism. If people weren’t so selfish and greedy, then it would be the way towards the most harmonious society imaginable.

What does this all have to do with internet piracy you wonder, well in fact it has everything to do with it. You see, the main reason why people ‘steal’ on the internet isn’t because it is a much more conveniant way to obtain music (altough it sure is more conveniant), and it certainly isn’t because they don’t believe it is a crime – it is actually because of the communist/collectivist mentality rooted deeply inside every human’s brain. Music label execs, multi-million dollar artists aren’t regarded with much compassion in the eyes of the average citizen just working to get by. In their mind, they shouldn’t have to forego a large chunk of their earnings just so the rich get even richer. It is this type of psychological communism that gives moral citizens like you and me the moral freedom to commit crimes.

While it makes perfect sense that a Chinese person making 100$ per month gets the Britney Spears album for free rather than foregoing their sons’ school money to purchase it – it doesn’t make it legal in the eyes of the law. But what is the law at the end of the day… simply a set of rules to help society function better. Will society function better if this person starves and helps Britney make another 5$ or will it be better if he stays alive and Britney Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercises 0.000000001% of her revenue. You could argue that the Chinese person shouldn’t buy this album in the first place, but then again will this really help Britney’s cause or will it just take away from the one of the only available methods of entertainment for this poor bloke in China.

Laws are laws, but sometimes they shouldn’t just be broken they MUST be broken. Will I wait at a red light on an empty street if I’m driving my dieing grandmother to the hospital? Absolutely not, #@*!& the law! At the end of the day, beyond the laws, rules, guidelines, policies governing us all, people are looking after themself. Ironically it is a form of extreme selfishness that leads to this communist mindset. No one will ever feel like making sacrifices to their personal living for people much more fortunate than themselves unless they have to. 

At the same time, people wouldn’t commit these ‘crimes’ against those less fortunate than themselves. Charity fits into the opposite side of the spectrum of internet piracy - people give money to those less fortunate than them because they want a more balanced society. Of course, the amount of people ready to give away their money to randomers is a much smaller proportion than people ready to commit internet piracy. The psychological explanation behind this might be tied to a proffesor’s study that people are 2.5 times more motivated to perform an action if it prevents them from losing something, compared to gaining that exact thing. So people are more motivated to do something to make sure they dont Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise their equality status than doing things to make sure others are on the same equality. Or you could just say that people are selfish and care more about themselves than others if you wana be boring about it.

What’s the lesson to take away from this all? Capitalism is wrong? No, thats not it – that debate was settled half a century ago. What we must take into account is that an extreme form of capitalism should not see government support. I’m in full support of our current economic and political systems where succesful people get more than those who aren’t. Without this system, society would cease to progress. However, when these companies and societies start getting greedy to the point where they use the law to ruin the lives of those not so fortunate, thats when I have a problem. It shouldn’t have to be extremes – where either we are a cutthroat society where everyones ready to backstab each other for a dollar or two, or no matter what you do you will still be equal with everyone else. The balance that must be achieved is that succesful people should continue to reap the benefits of what they sow, and those less fortunate should try the best they can to contribute back to society and give back when and IF they can. The government doesn’t start sueing homeless people who don’t pay tax for using the street lights on the streets do they? So these music/TV/movie industries shouldn’t get mad at poor people who download their goods – they don’t actually Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise anything, because the poor wouldn’t have bought the good in the first place.

Of course, there are thousand complications that stem from this sort of outlook – how poor do you have to be to deserve exemption from having to pay for non-exclusive non-exhaustive goods? This is a tough matter to agree on, and in our society there will of course never be these sort of exemptions for poor people. The law doesn’t discriminate, and I don’t see an ‘entertainment welfare’ support seeing the light of day anytime soon. It is indeed a Darwinist state we have become, and the rich will continue to get rich whilst the poor will continue to be poor.

But as the internet has showed us, there is yet hope for those less fortunate! Hundreds of years ago it was the scum and nobodies of society that commited piracy in the seas in hopes of a better life. Today it is again the poor, young, and less fortunate who have a chance to get even with society on the virtual domains of cyberspace. Only difference is, this time no one’s really getting hurt and I have to say – this time around…. I’m siding with the pirates.

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A Message to Time Travelers: Stay Away!

Monday, March 10th, 2008

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Everyone in this world, more or less, knows how their life is going to play out. You might pursue this career over that, you might marry a brunette instead of a blonde, you might die of cancer instead of old age…but at the end of the day, life is so damn predictable. You don’t wake up everyday and wonder whether frogs are going to fall from the sky, or if aliens are going to land and share this amazing technology with us. Instead, some days we get excited about little things such as some weird creature we hadn’t seen before , or if we’re lucky once in a blue moon there is good progress towards some exciting future developments. However, at the end of the day none of these developments are LIFE CHANGING.

Until now…News in recent months have hinted at a very exciting possibility: time travel. Now, THAT is what I’m talking about when I say “Life Changing”. Yes, the odds are that its not going to happen in our life time or our grandson’s grandsons lifetime, if ever. However, just the possibility of it happenening is something truely exciting. It’s difficult to understand what this would exactly mean for us, because wild science-fiction movies are usually the only instances where such possibilities are played out for our entertainment, but even these science-fiction novels and movies never really analyze the implications to every-day lives that these discoveries will create. Given that scientifically there is a chance of this actually happening, I think it would be wise to get prepared of how different life could be. It never hurts to “Be Prepared” as the Boy Scout motto goes, and to prepare you for when that time comes, here is how life would be if indeed time travel occured.

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The way the current technology works, is that there is a chance of a ‘time door’ opening, allowing visitors from the future (assuming they have sufficiently advanced technology) to visit our planet. As this would be the first ‘door’ to open in the history of mankind, it would mark the furthest point back in time people of any time could visit. So, unless mankind becomes extinct at some point, or some terrible disaster wipes all documentation of such a ‘door’ opening in 2008 or future research suggests time travel would lead to terrible catastrophes, then essentially people from the year 390124 could and should visit us. You would have to think that thousands and who knows even millions of years later, mankind could develop some truely mindboggling inventions and why shouldn’t a time machine be one of them. So all that requires from us is that this ‘door’ we open in 2008, is enough of a opening for future smart people from the year 1958309753 to work with to establish contact with us.

 Now lets get down to what this will mean. A person visiting from essentially the latest point in time could bring with him infinite news/developments/technology. We can in this way, jump thousands of years in progress. Imagine for a second if we were to go back to caveman days and showed them cars, televisions, airplanes etc. That is similar to the impact people from the future visiting us would have. So one day your checking the news and reading about the Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition talks, and then as you surf abit more in the tech section you read about some breaking news that has just transpired. Headline reads: “People from the future have arrived, they have offered the cure to all illnesses, little pills that givc us immortality and removes the necessity to eat or drink anything.” In a few minutes, the whole world that took thousands of years of steady progress and calculated achievements to develop – will have completely been uphauled.

 The question then becomes: if the future does solve all our problems, then what will be left for us to do? We will have everything we want, nothing to worry about – life will be…perfect? At the beginning this is what it will seem like. Sick and poor people will no longer be sick and poor, the concept of poverty will cease to exist, and people will no longer have to ‘work’. This last point could create major issues. Fine, we won’t need any more companies producing anything because it is assumed that millions of years from now, there will be cheap machines that can create whatever you want with some simple inputs. But even with infinite resources, our world still needs some hard labour. Even if that problem is solved with robots, there will still need to be some ‘people’ that work (right?)- world leaders, police forces, scientists that produce this future technology, everyone in the entertainment industry, shops and stores of some sorts, babysitters etc – how would you motivate these people to work, remember people don’t need money anymore with high-tech advancements solving all problems (is this perhaps why the supreme being created our world with limited resources?).

There certainly will still be crime and terrorism, because poverty is not always the reason for such things. Of course, more and more technology can be brought from the future to combat all these problems.. Like drugs that remove the anger from psychopaths, and police intelligence so smart it prevents bad things from ever happening ala “Minority Report”. But perhaps you can see a dark pattern developping here, and it is similar to those science fiction movies where ultimately technology fails us. Utopia simply can’t happen when everything in the world is unnatural. 

Furthermore, even if the implementation of future technology solves all our problems – what reason would we have to live? We have infinity to live, but yet there is nothing that hasn’t been done or needs to be done. Life perhaps would be sweet for the first 5 or 10 years where everyone in the world is on holiday and enjoying everything and anything with no worry in the world. But then that all too familiar feeling would start to kick in. You know the feeling you got towards the end of the summer holidays in school where you are getting bored of having nothing but free time.. There would be no progress because all progress has been made, there would be no change because all change has been implemented. So what would be the purpose of anything? There would be a million of entertainment sources, and things to do but at the end of day when you’re going to bed and cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise your eyes…there will be that realization that it all kinda feels empty without the mystery, without the wondering of the unknown, about all the imagination and possibilities in your head about the future. It would be like watching the most amazing movie/sports match ever possible..but you already know how its going to end. That kind of realization would ultimately crush the human spirit. Alot of what drives us in this world is that in some small, perhaps almost insignificant way we are changing the world and responsible for its progress. Like imagine the guy who invented the paper clip, he might not be the most famous or important person in the world, but I’m sure that his life was great knowing that he had just singlehandedly set a legacy and changed the world.

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All in all, while there would be amazing short term benefits, in the long run time travel would be a terrible thing for humankind. Just like it is incredibly stupid to take a drug that gives you short term pleasure at the cost of life long repercussions – time travel should similarly be kept away from.  The way towards a utopia is through sustained development: education, smart economic systems, and politics that is communist in ideal but capitalist in approach (commitalism?). 

Hopefully, people thousands of years from now read this, and never enter that portal that would land them in our untouched and perfectly legit world. Then truely, I would will have saved mankind! 

PS: Large Hadron Collider time travel readers are also banned.

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The 1ππ0\/@Ŧ10π Crisis

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

innovation.jpg 

Innovation is a word that is used today in every imaginable way possible (no pun intended). It’s been a while since our world spent all of its resources and manpower on building up its militaries, engaging in war, and trying to suppress its colonies and own citizens. Yes, for the last several decades our brains have had a chance to focus on other areas such as entertainment, business, science, and technology. But as we have all too hastily discovered, innovation is fast running dry.

In no ration?

Let’s look today at the various fields that humans have taken a strong interest in.

Entertainment: Every passing year, you can see an increased number of film fans complaining about the lack of creativity. New sequels of old classics, adaptations of comic books, recycling of the same movie concepts (Ben Stiller as the innocent awkward geek put into funny situation, the same old romantic comedy which you can guess how it will end before the opening credits roll out, and a host of other formulas that people have seen time and again). While some of these end up being pretty decent such as Die Hard 4 and Sin City, you can’t help but notice that movie studios are fast running out of ideas.  

Business: If you have looked at any job postings recently, you will be hard pressed to find a position NOT requiring its candidate to be innovative. Not that I think these companies know what they exactly mean, but innovation is the hot word of the 21th century and they want a piece of that pie (several studies have indicated that 45-75% of all economic growth is directly attributed to innovation). From what I have witnessed in my short time in the business world is that companies aren’t so open to innovation as they think themselves to be. Change in any organization means costs and lots of costs ranging from; restructuring of organizations to new training methods to infrastructural costs to bring the change into place. Unless its broke, they wont fix it. So instead of huge changes such as the eradication of classical working hours, we have little TQM tools here and there that superficially gives corporations a feeling that they are in fact innovative.

Science: Still no cure for cancer, AIDS or most other serious illnesses. We did land on the moon some several decades ago but progress has been practically non-existent if you consider the grander scale of the universe. Einstein still stands as the most important scientific figure of all time, and perhaps one of the only know figures to the average public. Aside from the slow progress, grants and support for the scientific community is not nearly enough to expect any spectacular results in the near future.

Technology: Boy, will the people that have been stuck in a comma for the past several decades be disappointed when they wake up. If science-fiction movies are anything to go by, humans have long been expecting flying cars, time travel, and colonization of other planets.  Instead, the best thing we got right now is a phone with some extra features and TVs that can display 1080 lines of pixels instead of 480. Hardly groundbreaking stuff.

As we can see, almost all areas of interest to human beings are turning into saturated markets that no longer seem to be able to generate new ideas and products. This is in fact why innovation has become such an important word in the 21st century, constant innovation has become a requirement for entities wishing to stay ‘ahead of the curve’ – whether its a company, individual, or nation state. So what does the future look like then in this world where innovation is becoming not only more demanded, but also harder to supply. Is the situation really so bad?

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Innovation Restriction 

First of all, I should state that I truly believe that innovation is limitless and infinite, therefore any scarcity of this so in-demand ‘resource’ is our fault and our fault only. I’ve heard it mentioned that creativity and innovation is not something you can teach, you are either born with it or not. I completely disagree to this analysis, and I believe that it is these types of predispositions that lead to our lack of innovation. However, the biggest clog towards innovation in our world is the infrastructure and the long ago built systems in place that secretly govern us. In past times this could have been governments and their autocratic leaders, but today it is increasingly becoming greedy corporations that prevent us from evolving at a faster and more socially desired way than naturally possible. Yes, those companies that seem to be leading the movement towards innovation are the exacts one restricting it – kind of like a Trojan horse full of carpenter ants .

-Energy: Oil is a scarce, over-relied on, and non eco-friendly chemical that is slowly leading to the destruction of our world. Solar-power, electricity, wind-power, and heaps of other innovations are there ready to be applied on to our polluted world. These are technologies that are in place and even becoming more economic solutions, but it will be some time before major oil companies, and their ‘friends’ in the government will let this happen.

-Software: While every praise should be given out to Bill Gates and Microsoft for their innovations that have deeply impacted this earth, they should in the same manner be criticized for unfairly ridding themselves of competition and keeping their technologies so much under wraps. You can’t really blame Bill, as his endeavours have led him to become one of the richest man on the earth, but it all becomes quite meaningless when you consider that he will be giving out 95% of his wealth to ‘help the world’. If he and other technological companies of those times embraced the idea of Open Source earlier, ‘the world’ might be a much better place already. Hopefully entities such as Google, Linux, Wikipedia can prove to be exemplary models that show sharing knowledge can benefit us all and ultimately lead to progress.

-Medicine:  It is a sad truth that it is profits that rule this world and not advancements that help humanity. How else do you explain companies not willing to help create this cheap cure for cancer? The foremost and easiest reaction is to think of these pharmaceutical companies as evil and conscious-less. However as true as that might be, there is naturally a thicker layer to this tragedy. 1)Providing research grants to this cause will lead them to Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise money. 2)Losing large amounts of money with no matching revenues will lead to unacceptable financial results. 3) The company will Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise money and employees will be cut to steer clear of bankruptcy. 4) Shareholders and the board will fire whoever was responsible for the mess and even more staff will be lost. So it is capitalism that should be blamed, if anything.

-Entertainment: Demand and supply are concepts that apply to the entertainment industry too, so you can’t blame entities for supplying that recycled garbage if there is an actual demand for it. So it is us as citizens that need to stop purchasing and hence supporting these unoriginal knock-offs. Yet is this really the only way movie studios will stop making these risk-free cash-cows? In our world yes. The music industry is facing such a serious situation today, yet they still aren’t wising up to the fact that they need to make some sort of changes to their current business model…suing its customers, giving them an inferior product in the form of DRM restricted tracks, and continuing to price products way over their costs is definitely not the way to go. As this article about the Pirate’s Dilemma points out, piracy in the end is forcing these industries to become more innovative and reinventing capitalism altogether. Let’s hope that piracy can, very ironically, prove to be the force that leads to more innovation.

-Technology: With Warner Bros. recently announcing its adoption of the Blu-Ray format, it has all but won the latest technology war over its nemesis HD-DVD. But anyone who has done research into the topic will realize that HD-DVD is the best format for the people: machines are cheaper, discs are cheaper, backwards compatible with DVDs, and more features that the Blu-Ray. However in our current capitalist system it is Sony’s Blu-Ray that won with rumoured buy-offs of around a half billion dollars for Warners Bros alone. Similarly, other movie studios sided with Blu-Ray because it was the better format protecting their‘intellectual property’. So in the end, a couple of large corporations decided a format war over the mass consumer base’s wishes and discouraged once again any innovators wishing to take on bigger and larger organizations.

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Yes it is an undeniable truth that these very same companies that appear to be leading the drive towards innovation are in fact the ones hindering it. With the industry and market firmly in their grasp, they can continue to deliver less than ideal products at the expense of consumers, and restrict those who wish to compete against them. Ironic, tragic, greedy, evil – all words that in someway describe this dark force that controls our future. But is our world really entrapped in this far less than ideal model with no way out? Was this the system we fought countless Wars of global magnitude to achieve? In this age where the largest companies have more power than most nations, where globalization and free trade are only increasing there economic and political clout – is there anything we can do to fight against this seemingly impenetrable stronghold? Innovation, in other words the progress of humankind and life in general, hangs in the very balance.

(to be continued in part 2…) 

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