I have been using twitter for about a month now and I am still trying to learn how to use all its features. I haven’t done much yet with my account besides following other peeple’s tweets. I follow the news, different bloggers and a couple of celebrities.
What I like about twitter is that I get the lastest news and blog post headlines all in one place and in one short little tweet with a link to the full article. To me this resembles RSS feeds, but what makes it different is that I don’t have to click on each feed link to see what the contents are.
I would share my twitter account, but up till now I don’t really post any interesting tweets. If you have anyone interesting to follow, which could also be yourself, just let me know.
When I first saw the article on BusinessWeek entitled “Poor HP Earnings Dim Hopes for Tech” I wasn’t suprised and immediatly thought of my own HP Laptop.
Simply put, I would not recommend getting an HP laptop. Having the video card burn after about a year and a half of use and then having to fix it for 200$ does not count as a good solid laptop to me. A friend of mine also has the same laptop and after a year or so both of our DVD players stopped working. They both only run CDs (who needs a DVD player? anyone?). And the battery?….
According to the article, HP profits from the computer division declined 19%. They make good printers and I thought the same would go for thier computers. But after experiencing them I know I won’t buy any HP laptops again.
Did you know that Google and Microsoft are both in a very tight race? I am sure you do. This race seems to be going on and on and will go on for quite some time, so no finish line here. Today, I read an article called 10 Ways Google is Trying to Kill Microsoft. Although I wouldn’t call it “kill”, instead I would call it ”10 ways Google and Microsoft are trying to show off”. Both of them are already huge companies with millions of users and I doubt either one of them can kill the other.
But thats not why I am posting this. The article is actually a presentation that compares both companies in terms of their operating systems, internet browsers, search engines, apps, ect.. Very informative and interesting to know that both are actually providing almost the same services, its only a matter of popularity and which one came up with the service first.
Just last week I posted an blog post about the new Nokia phone that will charge itself wirelessly. Today, I read an article on the BBC called Wireless Power System Shown Off that talks about a new system that will deliver power to any electronic device, wirelessly. So it seems that generating electricity wirlessly is the next big thing.
Now imagine not having to keep your TV set next to the closest plug outlet, or not having to worry about where to plug that laptop charger “at all”. This new system will power up all those devices wirelessly. It uses two coils (imagine two antennas), one that is connected to an electricity outlet and the other is connected to the device. Each coil is set to have the same frequency and then a magnetic field is produced which allows energy from the main coil to flow to the device, build up voltage and hence the device is charged. Since the energy is transferred through magnetic fields, safety is not considered a concern.
I can’t wait until this comes to the consumer market. I can get rid of all the table lamp wires, laptop chargers, cell phone chargers, TV wires, etc. As it states in the begining of the article:
” Electric tech could make plugs obsolete”
Google anounced its new Chrome OS for netbook PCs just recently and the hype surrounding it is all over the blogsphere. One of the blog titles I read was titled “Will Chrome be the Windows Killer?”. Why kill something when something new comes out? That I don’t get.
Anyway, one article that I really like is Google Chrome OS and Microsoft IE OS on Doublebackslash. It talks about the new OS and whats the hype all about. Worth the read.
What do phones do during standby mode besides communicating with the nearest base station to update your location and draining your battery? Not much, but what if during standby mode you can also recharge your cellphone battery and wirelessly?
Nokia has a plan to develop cell phones that uses ambient radiowaves coming from the weak signals of other electronic devices such as TVs, radios… ect, to recharge cellphones. The power invested will be small and won’t be enough to hold an active phone call but will be enough to keep your cellphone on. The article by the Gaurdian explains more.
So far they have been able to invest 5 milliwatts of power. The goal is to reach 20 milliwatts. The phone is expected to hit the markets from 3 to 5 years.
No not Chandler Bing from Friends (I love that show), but Bing from Microsoft, the new search engine. I’d have to admit I love the homepage and the images they put there everyday. Its basically a search engine and one of its additional features is that it helps make shopping decisions using ciao which compares prices and adds consumer reviews on products (you can get there by clicking on shopping from the bing homepage). One thing I didn’t understand yet is that one of its special features is “Better UK Results”. Why the UK? Why not somewhere else? (yea I know even Google has that).
People are already comparing it to Google, so I thought let me test it too and compare. I wrote in both serach boxes the word amazon and got the following:
- Bing gave me 198,000,000 results while Google gave me 853,000,000 results, which clearly means they are using different search algorithms.
- Google displayed on the first result page news results about amazon with the date of publication. Whereas, Bing did not.
- Bing dislplays on the left side related searches to the term amazon. Google has that on the bottom.
- Bing gave me amazon.com.uk as the first result (even though I have “show all” clicked, I didn’t ask for the UK results only, could be checking which location is closer to me as I am closer to the UK than the US), while Google gave me amazon.com.
I changed the search to pizza and noticed the following
- Bing gave me 57,800,000 results while Google gave me 154,000,000 results.
- Google makes the result pages more interesting by adding photos of what you are searching of (delicious pizzas), while Bing does not unless you choose to search images.
Other differences:
- Google displays how many seconds it took to get the results, Bing does not.
- If I misspelled a word in the search box, Google does one of two things: 1. asks me if I meant this and adds the correct spelled word while displaying results using the correct and incorrect spelled word. 2. or it directly fixes it and displays results accordingly. Bing fixes it and displays the results with the correct spelled word and also gives the option to see results with your misspelled word.
- I am a huge fan of the define: feature in Google I use it all the time and I have already added it as an accelerator in IE8. I didn’t see anything similar to that in Bing.
- I typed in my other blog name “The Wireless Corner”, Google displayed it as the first result on first page, Bing on its 3rd result page gave a link, not to the homepage, but to one of my articles posted on the blog.
Well those are some of the differences I noticed between the two search engines, if you have more that you would like to share then just leave me a comment.
Bing is looking good, its very user friendly and has some features that are different from Google. It is still a beta version, perhaps they will add more features to it when its full version is released. But Bing has a long way to gain the popularity that Google has. In the meantime, I will keep googling using my favorite search engine. (Will people start using the bing term in sentences like, I was binging all day. Or I binged the word? Let’s see..)
If you’ve studyed computer science, engineering, any IT related fields or even mathematics then you must have taken a course or two in C and/or C++. Have you wondered why you were taught C when they could have taught you C# or any of those new languages that are not taught at many colleges and that are in demand by many IT companies nowadays? I have been asked that question many times and a lot of students say that after they graduated they have never used it. Even during college, students seem to have the idea that C is a language that is not used by companies and they won’t be able to find jobs based on their C programming skills. Well they (and perhaps you) are wrong.
TIOBE is a website that ranks programmng languages on a monthly and yearly basis. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The June of 2009 report states that the second most popular language is C Programming, coming right after Java. And also from the report, C was “Language of the Year” in 2008. So what makes this language which was found in the 1960’s still popular?
C is the programming language that is used in embedded software, operating systems, drivers, compilers, DLLs, etc. Software that is close to the hardware. It gives access to system memory and its fast since its compiled and not interpreted. Also, if you are new to programming, then C would be the best language to start with, its simple, clear and does not have all the complications and details of the object oriented languages. Once you learn C, learning all the other languages becomes alot easier since the basic concepts are the same among all languages.
C still has its place in the programming world and I doubt it will lose it anytime soon. So if you know C programming then don’t worry, its not out-dated.
Today while reading some of the questions and answers on LinkedIn, I came accross a question that said: “Is Engineering an Art or a Science?”. Being a Computer Engineer, I agreed with the answers that said it is a combination of both. This got me thinking, the same could be said for programming.
Why do we write software programs? Its usually because we have a problem in hand (an inventory system for a startup company, a banking application, a program to measure the average amount of rainfall, ect) and we want to write a program to solve and implement it. If we had 50 programmers and gave them all the same problem, we would end up with 50 different programs that all lead to the same result. I always say that when it comes to programming you need to learn the rules and then use your imagination to connect them together. The rules would be the Science and the imagination would be the Art.
Now this is something. Speaking about information in my previous post, this shows what exactly I meant by how our lives changed with the vast amount of information available and how easy it is to access it. This will just ease it even more.
It’s call the Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine. It uses the information that you enter in its search box and finds computational results. For example when you enter your birthdate, it will give you the day you were born, how many days passed since you were born, any special events that happened on that date, the phase of the moon and more. Try entering a unit, a mathematical equation, a medical term and see the results.
Its like a huge calculator that calculates everything. I can’t imagine the amount of data they have stored in their databases and the algorithms used to extract the right information and display it the way they do to the user. Watch their demonstration video to get the full picture, its amazing..
