the construct :: weblog

An article like this one scares me to think of the future. It makes me think along the lines of movies like The Terminator (T2 - Judgment Day,and T3 - Rise of the Machines. ) It also makes me think of The Matrix (The Matrix Reloaded,and The Matrix Revolutions, or The Ultimate Matrix Collection ) where it is the classic case of humans versus machines. It usually ends up that humans win, but is that really the case? Technology can theoretically evovle to be smarter than humans. The only good thing is that machines can only have our brains, and not our souls and what makes humans unique.

I could go on and on about how technology evolving into “thinking/feeling machines” is both good and bad… yet not today. It’s up to us, humans, how much control we are to have over the machines we create. Hopefully those machines never gain more control over us than they already have. For instance TV, Computers, Cell Phones, etc. all have control over us somehow or another. Take a look at the article and links within the article and formulate your thoughts. Post a comment if you wish. Think about the future of technology, could the world really end up like in the movies?

2005 has been a year of many things so far. Mac OSX Tiger, the High Def Revolution, and now onto console gaming. It seems like 2005 was the year for new things as technology gets better and better. For example, the three latest consoles announced all have wireless controllers. Bluetooth seems to be the technology of choice. Systems now have more than just “gaming” features. DVD players come integrated, aswell as CD players/recorders. The gaming system has now really turned into “entertainment systems.” Here is a brief writeup of what is happening in console gaming right now.

The XBOX 360 was announced last week. Wireless controllers, backwards compatibility with “certain” xbox titles.

The PS3 was announced this week. Up to 7 wireless controllers, Two HDTV outputs, an extremely complex graphics system, and backwards compatibility with all ps2 and ps1 titles.

The Nintendo Revolution was also announced this week. Also comes with wireless controllers, and plays full sized cds/dvds as well as backwards compatibility with gamecube titles. I havn’t come across much information on the Revolution, yet I’m sure there is lots out there.

Personally, I’m really excited about the PS3. Ideally in a world where I had lots of money, I would buy a nice huge HD Plasma TV, PS3, and hook up some kind of surround sound and my entertainment center would be complete. The only thing I don’t like too much about the PS3 is it’s shape. The silver is cool, yet I design wise the PS2 was more functional. At any rate, it’s an awesome looking system. I’ll be following it to some degree and be posting here.
(note: These systems may not actually be coming out to stores this year, yet they were announced this year.)

Remember when I was talking about Palm one talking about a “life drive” a while back? Well now it has officially been released and it looks awesome.

With a pretty high price tag of $499.00 you get a few cool things. For one a 4gb storage capacity along with a fast processor (Intel® 416MHz XScaleâ„¢ processor) and 16MB of memory. This looks like quite the fast little machine. One of the notable features is the built in WiFi and Bluetooth so you can always be connected. Of course it plays MP3’s and stores pretty much anything you would need on the go like docs and photos etc.

Overall it looks like a great PDA, yet I don’t think it’s anything really special. Basically you are paying for the 4gb hard drive. You can get all the same features in other PalmOne PDA’s for alot cheaper than $500.00 Well check it out for yourself…

PalmOne LifeDrive Product Page

Robots are amazing, and this post on forevergeek shows you more on how robots are amazing.

You should really watch the video

I was finally able to get one of the Yahoo 360 invites to setup an account. I really like it so far. The system combinds so many things into one portal. Yahoo is really good and jamming a whole bunch of things into one place and making it pretty easy to use. Yahoo 360 basically a super social network portal with sharing of blogs and photos and you make friends and the list goes on.

You can view “my page” over at http://360.yahoo.com/constructds

If you would like an invite, It looks like I have some to give away. Thanks Frances for the invite.

In this cnet blog post there is talk about Palm One confirming that they are going to be using a 4gb micro hard drive in one of their new handhelds. This is a freaking novel idea. I say “freaking” because I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now. I always wanted a PDA with a mini hard drive in it. Yes there is some handhelds that have a gigabyte of space, yet that is still not a mini hard drive, yet just a large flash memory module. (Correct me if I’m missing something)

Now that hard drives are getting smaller and cheaper, they are going to put into everything. Hence there being so many portable music players out there with a large amount of space in a small package. Players such as the iPod, iRiver Creative players, Virgin players, and like a whole lot more. Now you can get a hybrid PDA that is your camera, life manager, music player, and telephone all in one. (my palm zire does all that except it is not a phone)

I can’t wait to see how these work out.

While checking my gmail today, I noticed the little “RSS” button pictured here. I thought “What is that for in my email?” So I clicked it, and you know what it did? Opened up a feed for my unread emails! I was like “WHOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” The other cool thing is that if you try to load the atom feed, you must login which is much needed just for security purposes.

I don’t remember any talk of this pretty neat feature, so I thought I would post it just because I thought it was cool, and somebody might have a use for it. Technically many things can be done to use this feature, I just don’t have the time right now to do anything about it.

If you don’t this jabbering I am talking about “feeds” and such, read about news aggregators. That article also links to information about feeds.

If you want a gmail.com email account (which is now up to 2gb’s free storage) let me know by commenting or sending me an email to danisblan@gmail.com

*Update*Over at evhead there is talk of other RSS features within gmail. All the comments here and on evhead add more to the discussion.

This week has been a whole lot of talk about the good ol Google Maps Satellite Photos. For very good reason… it’s awesome, yet also a little bit erie. You can put in your address and see a statellite photo of your house. Just seems a little wierd to me. On the other hand, really cool.

Here is some more talk on the web about the new Google Maps feature:”
Memory Maps, on the Flickr Blog and Memory Maps Photo Pool
Matt Haughey: Explaining colored pools
Google Sightseeing weblog, why really go places?

Interesting read from CNET.com titled The future of bloggin I thought this little bit was quite interesting.

The growth rate of blogs is impressive. Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, tracked more than 8 million online diaries as of March 21, up from 100,000 just two years ago. A new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. That adds up to 12,000 new blogs a day, 275,000 posts a day and 10,800 updates an hour.

That’s alot of weblogs. This here blog has been around for almost a year, not counting my first couple months over at my old weblog and also not to mention my couple months that I lost when I screwed up my system. So I would say I’ve been “blogging” for way over a year now.

I would for sure say there is a future to weblogs. Celebrities have weblogs, political figures have weblogs, weblogs or rather blogs are everywhere now. Last year and 2003 was an explosion of weblogs. Do you have one? Link it in the comments…

Speaking of comments, today this weblog reached the 100th comment which I am very happy to reach. Make some more comments of your own!

Through a round about way, I was able to pick up an iRiver H320 20 gb audio player. I must say, it’s awsome. It has a color screen, which is now setup to playt movies and tv shows and music videos and look at photos and record audio, and well, oh yeah! It plays audio too!

Today is my first usage of the fine piece of equipment, and I will let you know more of the awesome things about it soon!

By the way, it’s way better than the iPod, hehe.