What is the Internet?

What is the Internet?

Sorry for not posting in a while but my Internet died and Internet people are lazy and cant come for another week so I am using my phone for the time being and this got me thinking, what is the Internet? To start I will simply say this is difficult to explain, very difficult. The easiest way to describe the Internet is basically to think of it as map. IP is the complicated address of the place you want to go. URL’s are simplified versions of IP like instead of “111.222.33.44” it’s more like “www.google.com.au”.  

Although… technically speaking it is more like computers + cables + servers=Internet, let me explain. People have computers, which are connected by cables or Wi-Fi to servers, which are connected to each other, which means everybody’s server is connected creating one quite expansive network of servers with cables leading to computers. People can upload and put whatever they want on the Internet and it will be almost permanently stored there forever! Somewhere…

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Siri, is it all that?

Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) is a brand new feature on the iPhone 4s and is now an integral part of iOS5. It is supposed to be an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator but is it really all that?

There are quite a few problems with Siri, It only really works effectively in the USA. For example in countries outside the US the function to ask for local businesses or to assist in navigation doesn’t work which cancels out a big part of what Siri is supposed to do. There is also the fact that Siri only responds to English, which slims down the audience of people who can actually use it. These problems are being addressed and the language variety widened but it is a shame that these things were not thought about before its release. I do have to admit that Siri does work really well in what it’s supposed to do, it can understand and pick up voices very easily.

One thing I do enjoy about Siri is that it does sometimes answer with some humorous comments. There is a lot of work that needs to be put into to Siri to make it great and ahead of the pack but for the moment it lies somewhere in the middle. Like my FB page for all the blogs straight to your news feed at http://www.facebook.com/azqsxwdcefvrgbthnyjmukilop13243546576879809

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Over 100 views! (Liquid fueled rockets!)

My blog has now reached the milestone of over 100 views and I thought I would check out an “on this day type thing” to celebrate the event. Turns out technology wise that today on march 12 in 1926 the first liquid fueled rocket was launched. 

It traveled for 2.5 seconds at the speed of 96 km/h (60 mph) and reached a height of 12 meters (41 feet) and landed over 56 meters away (184 feet). This was a big stepping-stone in history and led the way for new rockets to be developed like the ones used today. Thanks for the support! Stay tuned for more.

Floating touch

Floating touch, is it something worthwhile? Or just a gimmick meant to attract customers?

Most touch screens use a mutual capacitance sensor that can pick up physical contact events with the screen but on devices that use “floating touch” such as Sony’s new Xperia Sola, along with the mutual capacitance sensor to pick up touch it also has a self-capacitance sensor that can pick up signals from over 2 cm’s away.

Now this has some pretty cool uses like, don’t you hate it when you’re eating and then you track oils and other things across the screen? Well 
now you don’t have too and same with when your hands a wet, you wont need to risk damaging your screen with water. But technically speaking that is just potential. Right now the “floating touch” has little uses such as browser usage and taskbars and such. To me I think its kind of pointless at the moment because you will have to pay more money for something that you may not even use that often because of its limits but I do think people should try it out and see if there is actually something worth while in there. I would love to give it a try and see how it feels for my self and hopefully I will able to.  For more cool blogs please click the follow button in the top left corner. Stay tuned for more. 

Ipad 3, so much potential!

With the Brand new iPad 3 (Technically the “iPad”, no seriously its just called the iPad) being released earlier this March and it being one of the newest pieces of technology on the market I only see it fitting to write about it. 

I wonder how TT looks on the iPad 

For those of you who live in a hole, the iPad (or the iPad 3 as it should be known as) is the newest piece of technology developed by apple. It features a brand new Retina display, a 9.7 inch (diagonal) LED- backlit glossy screen widescreen Multi-touch display with IPS technology (IPS= In plane switching is basically the way the screen is built to enable the person to view the screen with a high level of quality from much wider angles) and a incredible resolution of a whopping 2048 by 1536 but this is just the display. There is also the brand new Dual-core Apple A5X chip with quad-core graphics, over 10 hours battery life and a 5-megapixel camera which records in HD (1080p) all compacted into a device 1 cm thick and weighing just over half a kilo.

Now after reading that last paragraph you might get the impression that I love the iPad but you would be wrong. To me it is just a slightly better version of the iPad 2 with a faster processor, improved display and an improved camera. To me it is just not worth the money, for that amount of money you could by a laptop that does all those things and more. One last thing is that why put a camera on such a large and awkward to hold device it’s just kind of stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love an iPad and I would probably put a lot of time into it if I had one but to me it is just not worth the money, so yes if I got one for free, sure I would love but I would never buy one. It is sad to see a device with such potential let down by its uncreative designers, it is leading the way for future technologies and has so many things to offer but is just not there yet. Stay tuned for more.

Pixels

Whilst setting up my new blog template it came up with the option to choose how many pixels wide I would like my page to be and this got me thinking, what are pixels?

Well Webopedia.com describes pixels, as “A pixel is a single point in a graphic image.” The word pixel was a word coined in 1969 to describe the photographic elements of television image, pix (picture) and el (element). Now what actually are pixels? Pixels are thousands of tiny little squares that are divided across your screen but are so tiny and so close together that they look connected.

The number of bits a pixel has its ability to display a certain amount of colors. For example, 8-bit means the monitor uses 8 bits for every pixel making it possible to display up to 256 colors (shades of gray). The quality of your display mostly depends on its resolution (how many pixels it can display and how many bits are used to represent each pixel). To give an example VGA, VGA systems display at 640 by 480, or about 300,000 pixels. Although now a days most displays are run on 24bit systems allowing them to display over 16 million different colors.

So that’s about it for pixels. To learn what pixels can be used for stay tuned for a blog on the Ipad 3 and its incredible resolution. Stay tuned for more.

Also if anyone can name 16 million colors of the top of your head I would be glad to see it in the comments below!