C-Objectively

I guess Samsung has decided to join the raft of players trying to come out with an “iPhone killer”. Or maybe we should just start calling them iPhone hangers-on? Check out a picture of it:

I’m sure if I actually used this phone I could come up with a whole host of reasons why this thing won’t come close to an iPhone. But just by looking at this image let’s go with:

Why have they taken up a giant chunk of the space on the home screen to inform me that I am looking at “My Shortcuts”? You know, it is probably a pretty intuitive guess these are my shortcuts since you know, it’s my phone and, well, these are the shortcuts on it. Seems to me like that screen space could have been used a lot more efficiently by showing an additional row of shortcuts or increasing the size of the same ones.

I’m sure Apple is trembling in their boots.

Yeah so I went to LA for a wedding a few weeks ago and I somehow managed to catch a cold when it was a ridiculous 95+ degrees there. It took me a little while to recover from that. Then it was July 4th and there was lots of driving and fireworks.

Speaking of driving, I always knew that tires on cars, and of course especially race cars, experienced a lot of stress and pulling forces under acceleration, braking, and cornering. But this, I could not have imagined this.

Somebody used a high-speed camera capable of capturing 1000 frames per second (how the heck did they get it to do that???) to film drag race cars at the starting line. If you watch the video you get to see tires being twisted up like a wet towel you were trying to wring out. Plus you can catch each individual cyldiner firing in the dragster’s engine.

Oh and just for reference’s sake, movies are shot at 24 frames per second and your typical home video camera records at 30 fps.

And if you like that, here is a collection of other interesting super-slow-motion video clips.

This is one of the funniest, most ironic, and stupidest ideas I have heard recently. Microsoft, the company who’s name is splashed all over the computer screens of 98% of the world’s computing population (Mac users use Office remember?), is spending $120 million annually to fight its image as “a huge American company”. Riiiiiight.

Insert obligatory jokes about the company’s name versus size here.

Wired News has posted up a funny article, title as seen above. Some choice quotes include:

“I know what I don’t know, and to this day I don’t know technology and I don’t know accounting and finance.”

– Bernie Ebbers, ex-CEO of WorldCom

“Screw the nano.”

– Motorola CEO Ed Zander

Some of them you won’t find funny if you don’t follow tech news too much but President Bush is on the list too.

Wired News: 2005 Foot-in-Mouth Awards

I bet you never thought to look in the microscopic etchings of circuits on computer chips to find where Waldo’s been hiding. See here. Apparently microchip designers have been etching in art and words into their circuits for decades. These things are ridiculously small, only seen with a microscope, and smaller than the width of a human hair.

The link above has samples of this stuff including Waldo, Marvin the Martian, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, and my favorite, a message in Russian to would-be reverse-engineers in Russia during the Cold War taunting them “If you’re gonna steal, steal the best.”

Of course, its not all fun and games. The aluminum flakes that made up the spots on the image of a cheetah on one of HP’s chips ended up coming off and caused the chip to fail. Who bets someone got fired for that?

I just want to share with you all an unbelievably stupid situation I’m in right now. I am, or used to be, an AT&T Wireless customer for cell phone service. When I signed up with them I got this phone. Now, I am moving up to Seattle where my phone doesn’t have any coverage without paying roaming charges. To alleviate this problem I am told by Cingular, the current lord of my cell phone service contract, that I will need a new 2 year contract and I will also need a new phone.

Now you say, sure, different network, different phone needed, right? Wrong. The Sony Ericsson T616 was sold to both AT&T and Cingular wireless customers in identical form. Identical with one exception that is; each company “locked” the phones they sold so that they could only be used with their service. Now that Cingular has bought AT&T Wireless and they’re supposedly one comapny though, they are telling me that I can’t use my T616, which is already roaming on Cingular’s networks all the time because of this whole merger dealie, if I change my plan from an old “AT&T” plan to a new “Cingular” plan. (more…)

A new computer mouse called Horse

The current and commonly accepted design of the computer mouse is a lot of things, but comfortable and healthy is really not one of them. You or someone you know may be suffering from pain, Carpal Tunnel, or other Repetitive Stress Injuries from using a mouse for hours on end.

Finally some people with actual knowledge of the human body have taken the time to come up with a mouse design that is orders of magnitude better for you in terms of preventing hand, arm, shoulder, and neck pain from mouse use. The article above outlines the research that’s gone into the design but for those of you who don’t care and are curious as to what it looks like, well here is a picture of it.

I realized some time ago that using a mouse was causing me a lot of pain. Since the horse mouse didn’t exist then (and still doesn’t for most of us) the next best solution I could find was the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. Review here.

Well hopefully you all find a device to use that is not causing you pain or injury. I know my solution has been great, much better than continuing to use a mouse, but its not perfect either. I’ll continue to look for something better. Maybe a horse trackball.

Oh and using the MS Trackball Explorer has one added benefit. Anybody who walks up to my computer is too confused by it, can’t use it, and gives up trying to use my computer.

There is a pretty interesting interview of Bill Gates by Peter Jennings done by ABC recently. They cover all kinds of technology things as well as some of his personal life, his kids, and his work through his charitable foundation.

Here is a link to the transcript.

I found a page that has maps of the major subway systems of the world to scale. Its pretty cool to see. I was actually surprised to see the size of the Los Angeles system. Although we all know how (not) useful it is; what with things so spread out in the area and lack of other public transportation as a support system.

If you have a relatively powerful PC and video card, check out this crazy development. Some guys have coded a First Person Shooter (FPS) game that looks pretty incredible but is only 96 KB in size. Right, that’s not a typo. Ninety-six kilobytes. Approx. download time on a dialup connection? Two seconds. Mad props are due. Check out the .kkrieger beta.