Thursday, March 19, 2009

there is no bluetooth.... because we broke it on purpose

from dailytech http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Reveals+It+Intentionally+Crippled+Bluetooth+in+iPod+touch+2G/article14611.htm

" Apple insisted at the time that Bluetooth was not on the iPod touch and that Nike+ didn't use Bluetooth.

Teardowns late last year, though, told a different story. The teardown revealed a Broadcom Bluetooth chipset with support for 2.1+EDR. The chipset, not listed on Apple's spec sheet, was apparently being used to implement Nike+. Some argued that there must be some hardware difference; Apple wouldn't just lock out working functionality.

Well, they were wrong -- during a Q&A session at the iPhone/iPod touch OS v3.0 press event this week, Apple let slip that Bluetooth is indeed on the iPod touch and that it intentionally crippled it.

Some are accusing Apple of intentionally crippling this key piece of iPod touch hardware as a ploy to sell its new OS. Apple is charging iPod touch customers $9.99 to upgrade and receive the complementary Bluetooth unlock.
"

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

AMD gets a little review love.

It's been a couple of months since a major review site let slip a generally positive comment about an entire lineup from AMD but on Techreport.com:

"Generally speaking, AMD's Phenom II X4 processors appear to be slightly better deals than the Intel Core 2 Quad equivalents. Not only are they great performers for the money, but the Socket AM2+ and AM3 platform has a better upgrade path than Intel's soon-to-be-retired LGA775 platform. The Phenom II X3 720 is more of a mixed bag, since it's the top performer neither in single-threaded tasks nor in heavily multithreaded ones. However, the 720 is still a good middle ground between cheap quad-cores and high-end dual-core CPUs."

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

200th post, Natural Language Engine

Don't know what a natural language engine is? Natural language means nothing more than the way we speak to one another. When you ask a person what there maiden name was. That person parses that question into its ideas: I the subject's, last name prior to name changes associated with marriage. It sounds simple but its a hard thing for computers to do.

"Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."


see: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16550 for more.