Month: June 2009

Oh my goodness! Taking everything at face-value, Apple has just dropped the equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb into the mobile phone market. The Apple iPhone is now available at a very cheap price of just $99 (RM350). This will be so disruptive on so very many fronts.

Firstly, in the traditional mobile phone market. Most new entry level phones are priced at around RM300 or so. This is true of all brands from Nokia to LG. The only phones priced below this price-point are really basic phones for the cost conscious who do not really need any functions in their phones. However, at $99, the iPhone is set to disrupt this entire market segment.

Every other phone maker would need to respond. Otherwise, they risk losing all their market-share to Apple. Normal users would now be faced with the decision of getting a well-designed, sexy and cheap iPhone or a sadly-designed decidedly-stoic looking entry level phone from any other company. Power users would be faced with the decision of shelling out $500 for a power hungry smart-phone or $99 for an Apple device. I’m sure that the other handset makers are cursing Apple for doing this.

Seriously disruptive.

Secondly, this will open up the Apple phone for more than just uses as a mobile/smart-phone. I can now imagine the iPhone as the platform of choice for legions of developers. With the kind of features that the iPhone has at $99, you can imagine building all sorts of applications around the iPhone base platform. I can certainly imagine quite a number of non-phone related uses for a $99 phone.

I’m talking about opening up new markets. If apple moves to provide documentation and development kits based off the iPhone, we can expect to see a flood of new tools that are built on the iPhone – things that we have not even begun to imagine. It will move technology away from being PC centric to really being phone centric. We’ve talked about this for ages but this is the first time that we have the hand-set to base it on.

Seriously disruptive.

Finally, the only question that I have is – the catch. Obviously there is one, or more. Unless we’ve been scammed all this time, phones this good, do cost a bit to make. According to iSuppli, the iPhone 3G costs around $173 to build. Turns out that you will only get that price for new subscriptions of specific phone plan packages in the US.

So much for being seriously disruptive.

PS: So, don’t expect Maxis to be selling you RM350 iPhones anytime soon.

The recent unfortunate Air France crash may have cost 228 lives, but the investigations into the cause for the crash are far from over. With the aircraft’s black boxes sunken to the depths of several kilometres, we may never be able to accurately ascertain the cause of the crash. However, of the many prevailing theories, one that interests me is that of fly-by-wire technology.

Most people may or may not know this, but most aircraft today are flown using fly-by-wire technology. What this means is that, the human is not in direct control of the aircraft. The pilot tells an on-board computer what to do and the computer then controls the flight surfaces to do it. There are pros and cons to this technology. In an extreme example of the F117A stealth fighter, it would be impossible to fly that craft manually due to its extremely non-aerodynamic shape. It would be like trying to fly a piece of rock.

Therefore, in most cases, everyone believes that fly-by-wire is beneficial in the long run. However, where Boeing and Airbus disagree on philosophically, is in the case of emergencies. Boeing allow the pilot to manually override the computer and fly the plane by feel, while Airbus believes that computers can react far faster and respond much better in an emergency. So, the question is which design philosophy is better.

On the surface, both companies have excellent safety records. But if I was to postulate my personal opinion, I think that Airbus is right, on one condition – that the control software must be well written and able to adapt to all sorts of emergencies.

Personally, I do not know enough about flying aircraft to know what sort of parameters need to go into controlling these things safely. However, I am guessing that there are a lot of them. On top of this, I doubt that the control software is able to adapt to unimaginable edge cases. We have just not come far enough in decision making software to accomplish this.

So, while I think that ultimately, computers should be put in charge of something as delicate as flying an aircraft, I do not believe that our software is quite there yet. We may have to lose a few more aircraft in order to successfully learn how to write proper flight control and decision making software, particularly in testing out rare edge scenarios.

Believe it or not, the Swedish Pirate Party has garnered enough votes to send at least one MP to the European Parliament. According to Ars, they’re still tallying the numbers but the party has already breached the 4% minimum needed to qualify for a single seat. They’re currently polling at 7.1%. While a single MP in a parliament of 700 may not do very much, it is quite an achieve for a political party that is less than 2 years old and formed with a very narrow set of agendas that deal with intellectual property rights.

Personally, I think that it is great that a political party is able to ride on an intellectual property platform. Obviously, the recent spec-trial of The Pirate Bay helped boost their cause. As a result, they are currently the second largest political party in Sweden and their youth wing is the largest in Sweden. While most people may argue that they are a fringe party, they are a fringe party which has accomplished a lot – more than most other older mainstream political parties.

Personally, I think that this is a great achievement. While they may not wield much power today, they’re the largest under-30 political party in the EU. This gives me hope for the future. Now, if they only opened up a branch in Malaysia.

The dude can really give a speech.

There has been a lot of buzz over the demo of new Tegra platforms recently. Most of the news seems to pit the Tegra against Intel for dominance of the Netbook market. Personally, I have to agree in the most part. Except for the purpose of running Windows applications, a Tegra Netbook would be a better choice than an Atom based system for one simple reason: performance per watt.

For those of you who do not understand the difference, suffice to say that the Tegra is built of a different architecture from the Atom systems. As a result, the Tegra provides a richer multi-media experience than the Atom system and consumes less power while doing it. The reason is very simple. The Tegra integrates graphics capabilities from NVIDIA and a low-power multi-media enhanced ARM based system.

For those of you who have never heard of ARM, they are the microprocessors that power your mobile phones, ipods and various other consumer electronic and multimedia devices.

The super exciting thing about this is that NVidia is able to fit an entire computer platform onto a board that is only slightly larger than your typical USB flash drive. Therefore, it is obvious which market segment is NVidia targeting – the ultra-mobile and integrated devices.

You may ask what kind of software it can run. The answer is that it can run almost everything except Windows software. You see, there has been an ARM port of Linux for ages. In fact, Ubuntu has been working on exactly that – an ARM port of Ubuntu for the purpose of placing it on ARM based Netbooks. Google has also moved the Android platform up from merely powering smart-phones to powering ARM based Netbooks. In fact, Adobe has recently announced that they will be releasing flash support for ARM as well.

So, you can see where this is headed.

Oh, I forgot to mention its performance numbers. The various sites claim that it can playback 1080p video and can run for several days on a single battery charge. Personally, knowing how these things work, the numbers sound right.

If you’ve never heard of it before, there is a new kind of search engine in town. Its name is Wolfram|Alpha and it is brought to you by the guys who made Mathematica. It uses the Mathematica engine and some magical algorithms to answer your search queries. Now, none of this scares me the least but. But when computers acquire a sense of humour, I am not so amused.

Try some of these queries on the engine (you can just click on it).

• What do women want?
• Are you Skynet?
• Are you self-aware?
• Can you pass the Turing test
• Answer to life, the universe, and everything
• I Love You.
• I Hate You.
• How long is a piece of string?
• What is the speed of an unladen swallow?
• How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
• If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
• Where did I put my keys?
• What is the sound of one hand clapping?
• Flux Capacitor
• 88 mph
• To be or not to be
• How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
• How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?
• All your base

Who cares about Microsoft Bing.

I am re-evaluating the possibility of using an Apple-TV for my HTPC. The advantage is that this is a device that was designed to be a HTPC from day one. It has all the right connections and is also low-powered. Furthermore, it turns out that XBMC is supported on the Apple-TV. The Apple-TV can be had for about RM1250 (GBP 216) from certain re-sellers in Malaysia (it is listed at RM1450 at the Apple store).

The only potential disadvantage is the lack of support for full-HD content. All references point to the fact that the Apple-TV is only able to decode HD-ready (720p) content but will upscale it to full-HD (1080p). This is not a serious problem at the moment for all of my available media are mainly SD content. Furthermore, I don’t see this situation changing anytime soon simply because there isn’t that much full-HD content available anyway.

Another difficulty may be with the ability to integrate the Apple-TV onto my home network. If I were to get the Apple-TV, I would be getting the 40GB one, which severely limits the amount of media it can store. So, the Apple-TV would need to stream the data off the network. It has got both wired and wireless network connections. However, it would need the correct software to be running on the network in order to work properly. Firefly doesn’t seem to support streaming videos at the moment.

This may be solved by installing XBMC on the Apple-TV. It is certainly capable of running as a standalone application.

Certainly something to consider. It would be easier to get this than some of the other options.