SE51 > /dev/null > 2008 > February

We are not used to think of them this way. We don’t see robots or machines as a threat, more as a tool to complete our tasks. But this my friends, is about to change. In fact, it may have already changed, the beginning of the end may have begun. Machines deliberately killing people - can that really be?

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

As technology, processing power and sophistication of software is ever increasing, it should come as no surprise that the military of the big players in the world encourage their researchers to pursue the development of new kind of technology, which might also be used in warfare.

Autonomous machines.

Robots, designed to perform a certain task, but it lies in their hands what happens next. It is up to their ‘mind’ how to proceed, even if it shall kill a human being if so required. Welcome to the Cold War 2.0, the arms race for robots in the military. Many robots are already used for espionage and all these things, even armed robots. But there’s always someone in the loop, someone who then decides whether to pull the trigger or not. This someone is about to lose his job, the machine will be doing that for him now, making the decision for him. The decision to kill a human being is up to “just lights and clockwork” (Spooner’s opinion about them in ‘I, Robot’).

According to Professor Noel Sharkey, these killer robots pose the latest and ultimate threat to all mankind, and an arms race in that direction might be on its way, if not already occuring.

But if you think that so far nothing has gone wrong and everything is under control… Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14.

Other reports have suggested a computer error might have been to blame. Defence pundit Helmoed-Römer Heitman told the Weekend Argus that if “the cause lay in computer error, the reason for the tragedy might never be found.”

And there is another incident of a machine mysteriously firing on people.

All machines are man-made. So if they really outsmart us at some stage, we brought this on ourselves. “No fate but what we make” - John Connor.

Come with me, if you want to live.

Danger, Inc. is the company who invented the Sidekick Smartphone. I have seen it, it’s pretty nifty I have to say. That’s probably what the Borg must have thought (from now on: The Borg = Microsoft) when they saw this and wanted to assimilate the technology to further “perfect” themselves. The similarities between the fictional super-enemy from Star Trek and Microsoft are indeed quite striking at this point. The Borg have announced their acquisition of the Sidekick makers.

Apparently NOT Vista capable. Wow.

So that’s another company gone off the map for competitive landscape. It seems as if the map looses more and more companies, the region of the Borg gets bigger and bigger. They are no longer far far away in the Delta-Quadrant. I can only hope that Yahoo modulates the shield frequencies to hold ‘em off, or otherwise a great company will ultimately loose its competitive standing.

Ballmerus of Borg. Maintaining a human appearence, he is linked to the central core of the Borg hive and serves as bridge between the collective and mankind. Taken inside a Borg Cube, inside which it is - as usual - 37.9 degrees celsius

With a slight delay of just a few days, Your Steveness is pretty close in keeping the promise of deliviring the Source Development Kit for the iPhone and iPod touch. It is being released on March 6 on a special event. The SDK for Apple’s handhelds is paving the way to all sorts of natively supported applications on the multitouch powered gizmos. With a fair certainty my prediction still stands that Apple is gonna put native iPhone and iPod touch apps into iTunes, into a new section, and iTunes 7.7 should be on its way.

Alongside this announcement Apple has posted the new iPod touch and iPhone firmware updates to version 1.1.4. The update is pretty big in size, so prepare to wait a while. So what’s new? There has to be something new - or not? So what’s new? Well, uhm… nothing. There is no apparent change in applications, screen, functionality, everything is the same. I can only assume with a high probability that code has been added for the upcoming SDK.

And, well, it’s more customizable, and no iTunes is required. Sounds strange from someone who otherwise likes Apple so much, yes? Don’t get me wrong, I think the Apple TV Take 2 is a great thing, but it still is tied to the fact that either iTunes and your movies, TV shows etc. is required. When it comes to on-demand TV, I like things to be a bit more… open and flexible.

MythTV provides all of this. If you know it, you know what I mean and you can skip ahead to look at my screenshots. If not, man, you are in for quite a ride. This software is pretty much one of the most powerful entertainment suites I have seen. If you have a receiver card, you have the power to rewind live TV, pause it, or schedule recordings and watch ‘em later. There’s also a plugin that hooks up to the running webserver, retrieves the TV programme information for the next two weeks and displays them in your browser. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. This tool comes with so much… unbelievable it’s free.

Well the standard themes are not bad, especially the take on Microsoft’s Media Center is very well done. But I didn’t really like it, so I took the theme Glass-Wide and simply replaced the wallpaper with this Apple TV one.

And if this is not enough, I also installed the plugin for Apple Movie Trailers and created its own menu entry for it.

I think I have got quite a cool front end for on-demand video content and other stuff such as news.

The main menu - customized for my needs

The movie selection screen. Pick one, then read all the info about the flick. The info and movie poster is brought to you by IMDB.

Beat that, Apple TV. Read headlines you like, then open the page with the article - all in MythTV.

By now you should have all heard about the thing going on out there. Here’s the short version: Microsoft makes a public announcement and says ‘Alright Yahoo, here’s 44.6 billion dollars, we wanna buy your company!’. Yahoo sees the bid (correct term: unsolicited offer) and says plainly ‘No… thanks’. Later on they add ‘We’d rather go with Google’, stabbing a knife in Microsoft’s heart.

The Borg Collective is nonetheless moving forward and is preparing an assimilation (correct term: hostile takeover) of the company. A now publicly posted email prepares workers worldwide for a merger with Yahoo, but also urges the employees to see Yahoo as competitor as long as the deal has not yet closed.

In a message to employees, Microsoft platform and services division president Kevin Johnson shared “a perspective of the process going forward.”

If Yahoo capitulates, the transaction would likely close in the second half of this year, according to Johnson.

Funny thing is, that this quote is posted on Yahoo.com. Curious.

If you wanna read the full message to the Borg hive, well, here it is.

So the second last Friday of this month is here. With February coming to a close very quickly, Apple is yet to announce the exact release date for the software package that would open up the iPhone and iPod touch to developers. It has been rumored that Apple is holding a secret, yet unannounced event for this matter. Linkin Park was rumored to play at this event. As it turned out, they did play for Apple, but for iTunes Live (expect to see this as a new iTunes Originals in the iTunes Store).

If Apple is indeed holding an event for the SDK release of the mobile devices, then they MUST send out an invitation today, as Apple always sends out invites one week in advance. If we don’t see an invite today, then there won’t be an event, but it is possible that the SDK is still getting released in a press release.

Either way, it’s gonna be cool. The only thing I can predict with a fair certainty is that the SDK will probably require Firmware 1.1.4, and new apps - free or for purchase - will appear in the iTunes Store.

Stay iTuned.

Some months back I was showing off a multimedia PC I have built, that I named BAtv. The first two letters are the initials of the street in which the house is from which I have moved away last weekend. The box had the aim to provide a richer, centralized multimedia experience that should also include standard TV. The technically the box worked, but several drawbacks did not make it worthwhile.

The banner I used when I presented the BAtv box on the earlier version of my homepage

The big and main drawback was basically the TV card which could only take in an aerial signal and had no MPEG encoder on it, which caused a 4-5 second delay in displaying the image. Subsequently it took 4-5 seconds until a switch of a channel or every other remote activity became visible, as the card fed directly from the in-house TV receiver from the provider NTL. Another drawback was the playback of some movies, which simply did not work at all sometimes or incorrectly. Although the movie database worked perfectly fine, so did the retrieval of TV programme information.

The main start screen of BAtv - a bit of AppleTV

Well, I gonna give it another shot then. Over the weekend I will re-construct the box, but firstly use more up-to-date software such as Fedora 8, and the latest MythTV release. However, as I don’t watch TV that much, I gonna leave TV out. For me I have discovered, it’s about movies, movies, and movies. So I gonna center Take 2 around movies. I gonna give it a new UI, and then make it available for download.

The new name is SEtv (System Error TV). Stay iTuned.

Yes, this is for real. This guy solves the entire Super Mario Bros. 3 game in in a little bit more than 11 minutes. Incredible.

Silently and quietly the Apple Store went down today to upgrade it. No one was really sure what this was for. Well, now it’s official: The iPod touch is now available in a staggering 32 GB size, but the other two are available as well. And yes, the 16 GB iPhone has landed as well. The new Touch is 499 Dollars, I guess 459 Euro when it comes here.

According to this article over at Engadget, the new models are available immediately, worldwide (iPhone only where the device has been released). Some people are waiting for a 32 GB iPhone with 3G, as stated in the comments of that article. In theory, this would boost the sales of the iPhone almost without limit, on average people like to have 30 GB in their players.

Other updates have not been made, the entire Macintosh line remains unaltered, in current configurations.

Expect to see a 32 GB iPhone in, say, 6 to 9 months? Hmm, I’ll take bets.

At least this would be my guess. It’s called PicLens and takes viewing pictures on the Internet to the next level. Say, you browse a Flickr gallery of a friend, but the page only displays so many pictures at once. What if, you could seem ‘em all, at once? Well PicLens allows you this, Apple TV style. Remember the ads Apple was running with this kind of wall of TV shows in the background? Well like this, only in 3D and with live imagery from the web.

Get the picture. Apple TV style.

You can click and drag, the wall moves with you in 3D. If you have looked for images on Google, the wall keeps extending itself with the search results. I’m serious. It just builds itself. And if you wanna get a better idea of an image, well, just click on it.

A preview of a selected image, in full quality

Ah yes, and if you wanna see the image in full glory, double-click it. It zooms in and gives you slideshow controls and a filmstrip on the bottom.

Boom!

iPhoto, anyone?

All of this is, amazingly, free and is supported on Mac OS X and Windows, works with Safari and Firefox. It installs itself as a plug-in and requires the browser to restart. It works with nearly every major site that hosts and displays images, such as Flickr (obviously), Google Images, DeviantArt, Picasa, Facebook, Yahoo, and many more.

In Firefox, in your toolbars you should see a new button, a blue rectangle with a white play button. Press this whenever you are at a one of those sites and you wanna see all images. Especially great on Flickr and DeviantArt!

My guess is that this or something like it comes to OS X 10.6 (and I think it’s named Cougar).