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50 Images Of Things You Had No Idea Existed

 A Brick Path Laying Machine

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Future Tech is already here.

Here are 17 amazing ways technology is changing our world:

The Ratheon XOS 2 is a second generation exoskeleton design for US army use. It allows the wearer to enhance his strength to carry heavy equipment much easier and for much longer.

The world's first virtual shopping center opened in Korea . All the products are just LCD screens that allow you to order the items by touching the screen. When you get to the counter, your items are already bagged and ready to go.

A cell phone you can bend as much as you like and it will still do everything a smart phone does.

Your personal computer ring can play music, check your email, give you alerts and even allows you to browse or chat with others.

This man is demonstrating the ability of his prosthetic eye, which has a camera installed in it.

No longer using the camping stove just for cooking, a new line of camping stoves use the heat energy to power up lights and charge your phones or anything else you can charge by USB cable.

This trash can follows you around and calculates where to stand to catch your thrown garbage!

This motion tracking table morphs its surface to mimic your movements, allowing you to control objects from the other side of the planet if you so choose.

This windowed door turns opaque whenever you lock it.

This incredible app translates signs from video and in real time!

The new 'Google Fiber' has started deploying, and will offer users an internet connection that is about 100 times faster than what they are currently using.

When did car panels start looking like this advanced?

A stop sign using water to project the image

An example of the new E-Ink in action. An ink that stays flat on the page and can be printed but still moves on the printer page.

All of the functions these items that we used 20 years ago...

Are now done by a single smartphone.


New casts can be printed with a 3D printer, are lighter, more comfortable and just as strong.

Bionic hands are now so advanced they can perform even delicate and complex movements.

  And it just keeps coming!

  

The Web's About To Get Faster

You may not have heard of Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 2, but it is going to make your internet experience a whole lot faster.

HTTP is the protocol used to power the World Wide Web by defining how hypertext (the code in webpages) is to be formatted and transmitted and how Web servers and browsers should respond to those commands. A URL typed into a browser, for example, becomes an HTTP command to the server telling it to retrieve the given Web page.

Currently, the most common version of HTTP in use is HTTP/1.1.  The HTTP/2 standard is expected to speed up loading of Web pages by transporting data between browser and server. 

The new protocol is backward-compatible with the older protocol, so existing webpages will work just fine.  HTTP/2 speeds up web browsing by carrying more data in a single pass with each request to load the requested Web site.  This is especially important for smart phone access, which now accounts for about 33 percent of all Web access, up from 25 percent a year ago, according to statistics from StatCounter.

Once the new standards are published, sites and hosting companies can choose to start implementing them.

Google, which was a driving force behind the new standard, will begin implementing it in the Chrome web browser next year.  Google developed the network protocol known as SPDY ("speedy") for transporting content over the Web with reduced latency.  SPDY serves as the basis of HTTP/2.
  

For Valentine's Day: How does a geek say 'I love you'?

It may just be everything that Windows 8 should have been

Windows 8 was a bold re-imagining of Microsoft's operating system, but the Start screen proved contentious.  The colorful Live Tiles offer useful notifications and information, but they were designed with touchscreen devices in mind: much of the work we do in Windows involves keyboards, mice, and large displays chock-full of windows and apps. 

Windows 8's Modern apps demand a full screen's attention, oblivious of our need to multitask.  The new Windows 10 Start Menu gives us the best of both worlds.

Boot up a PC running the Windows 10, and you'll be dropped off at the oh-so-familiar desktop.  The taskbar and its icons sits on the bottom, and the recycle bin sits in the upper-left corner.  It looks, at first blush, like Windows 8 all over again. 

But press the Start button, and you'll be greeted by the return of the Start menu. It's a proper Start menu too, with your most frequently used apps are stacked in a column.  Press the "All Apps" button and you'll find the endless column of nested folders we've all been scrolling since Windows 95, though they're now grouped alphabetically.  Sitting alongside that column are Windows 8's animated Live Tiles, endlessly serving up news-bites and social network updates.

[Read it all.]
  

The Dangers of Vertical Video Syndrome

Even if you know how to shoot video on your mobile device, you need to watch this.  Plus, it's funny.

Windows PCs See Steepest Decline Ever

Readers of this blog will remember that I have been issuing negative predictions about Windows 8 ever since I first saw it.  PC Magazine Columnist John C. Dvorak now seems positively prescient with his June 2011 column, "Will Windows 8 Kill Microsoft?"  There is growing evidence the negative predictions were right:  

The market for Windows-based PCs has declined faster than anticipated. According to two independent reports, PCs fell off 11.2 percent to 13.9 percent in the first quarter of 2013 — the steepest decline in the history of the PC.

A 'Worrisome' Decline

According to market research firm IDC, worldwide PC shipments fell of 13.9 percent in the first quarter (versus 1Q 2012) to 76.3 million units worldwide, significantly greater than IDC's previous forecast of a decline of 7.7 percent.

IDC pointed to the launch of Windows 8 as a contributing factor to the hefty decline.

"At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market," said Bob O'Donnell, IDC program vice president, clients and displays, in a prepared statement.  "While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices.  Microsoft will have to make some very tough decisions moving forward if it wants to help reinvigorate the PC market."

Microsoft keeps blowing it with desktop operating systems.  Remember Windows Vista?  It was supposed to drive new PC sales just as Windows 8 is supposed to now.  Only instead of driving PC sales with a new operating system that people wanted to upgrade to, Microsoft tried to force new PC sales by selling an operating system that couldn't run on the PC's that anyone currently owned.  People rebelled, and the result was a relatively quick roll out of Windows 7. 

Microsoft continues to labor under the impression that instead of listening to what customers actually want, or even what computer experts think computers should actually look like, they can make design decisions based on what business and marketing experts tell them they should be selling.

Let me add a note to all PC manufacturers:  PC users don't want to touch their screens!  It is one thing to wipe the fingerprints off my tablet once every couple of days.  I would really hate to have to clean my laptop or desktop PC that often.  And the best way to interact with data on a screen is with a mouse or trackpad.

So let's hope that Microsoft comes out with a replacement for Windows 8 as quickly as they replaced Vista with Windows 7.  And, while Microsoft is rethinking its mistakes with Windows 8, it might want to rethink that "ribbon interface" in Office as well.

I have been saying for a decade that I could run Microsoft better than Steve Ballmer.  So if anyone in Redmond is reading this, I'm available.  Call me.

Stationery's New Followers

From The Wall Street Journal:

Twitter executive Elizabeth Bailey Weil makes stationery on a letterpress in her garage.  Judy Clement Wall has 1,665 Twitter followers, but when she really wants to connect with one of them, she takes out a piece of stationery and picks up her pen.

She wasn't much of a letter writer before she began to spend time on blogs and social networks like Twitter.  But as some of her virtual friends became real ones, a letter, she says, "solidifies the friendship.  It makes the person real and 3D in a way that they can't be online."

Social-media fans are embracing paper.  While United States Postal Service sees a decline in mailed letters overall, tech-savvy paper-lovers—in frequent contact via blogs, Facebook and Twitter—are giving rise to a host of small stationery makers.

Read it all.

Spearphishing: The dirty email trick favored by the nastiest hackers

If you consider yourself a proficient internet user, you probably know to watch out for phishing attempts — massive email efforts to get you to hand over personal financial information like a credit card number or to click on a website link that could allow malware to steal information from your computer.  They usually come in e-mail messages riddled with spelling errors and terrible formatting.

Now comes a new, more subtle and more dangerous threat: spearphishing.  Spearphishing is often aimed at tricking specific individuals into opening a malicious file.  It could be, for instance, a boobytrapped PDF file or Word document which, when opened, secretly and silently installs spyware onto your computer.

Spearphishing is increasingly being used by totalitarian governments seeking to spy on individuals and to infiltrate computers belonging to government agencies in other countries.  Sophisticated criminal organizations have also started using the technique to obtain valuable financial information.   

Once installed, the malicious spyware code opens a backdoor, giving hackers remote access to all the files on your computer, as well as the ability to capture every keystroke, to steal passwords, and to read everything on your screen.

But why would an anyone be fooled into opening such an email?  The information in the email is crafted to look and sound just right enough so that it can dupe someone into clicking on a link or opening an attachment in an email and for their computer to become compromised. 

For instance, imagine you were a reporter covering human rights abuses in China.  I simply send you an email (with a boobytrapped attachment), forge my 'from' address so you believe that the email has come from a human rights group, and in the body of the email tell you that attached you'll find shocking details of human rights abuses in China.  If you click on the link or the attachment, I can then read all the information on your computer, including the identities of dissidents who may be supplying you with information.

Similarly, if you were a military supplier, I might make my email appear as though it came from a sister company or another supplier and use the access to your computer to gain vital military intelligence.

Some experts say that company employees and individuals who use cloud-based, shared document apps like Google Docs can be sitting ducks for spearphishing attempts.  In the first place, Google Docs is a very convenient way to fool end users into divulging passwords, because it is such a trusted source.  Also, Google Docs connections are HTTPS encrypted, and cannot be filtered by Web-filtering gateways to scan for malicious content.

While spearphishing may currently be used by governments and sophisticated criminal organizations against specific targets, we can expect large-scale hackers to begin using this technique to harvest financial data and other sensitive information from members of the general public.  The best precaution is to examine messages--especially those carrying attachments or containing links--very closely, to make sure you are viewing the entire file name of an attachment before clicking on it, to make certain that messages from people you know are genuine, and to be especially careful of messages from people you do not know. 

Apple, Inc. akin to religion? Studies suggest yes

From here:

For years, observers have noted the similarities between Apple, Inc. and religious cults.  Origin myth?  Check.  Faithful masses?  Just walk by an Apple store when the iPad Mini goes on sale later this week.

“A stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting,” anthropologist Kirsten Bell, told Tech News Daily this past week.  Bell reviewed several Apple product launch videos for Tech News prior to the iPad Mini launch event last week.

[...]

A BBC documentary series that aired last year cited a scientific study that seems to confirm this link.  In the study, neuroscientists analyzed the brain activity of an Apple devotee and discovered that Apple stimulates “the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.”

Read it all.

Poll Finds Lackluster Demand for Windows 8

PC Magazine is reporting a poll that shows people aren't exactly rushing to jump on the Windows 8 bandwagon: 

In a new poll of 1,200 U.S. adults conducted by the Associated Press and GfK, about 52 percent of people had not heard of Windows 8.  Of those who had heard about the OS, 61 percent were not interested in buying a new laptop or desktop with Windows 8.  Only 35 percent said they thought Windows 8 was an improvement over Windows 7.

This is as I have predicted in several previous posts.   The problem is that, having run out of original ideas, all of Microsoft's "innovations" for the past ten years has been increasingly bent on simply making things look different.  Take the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office.  It isn't an improvement.  In fact, a lot of people think it is confusing and, overall, a worse user interface.  But it is different!  And that is supposed to justify Microsoft's huge customer base laying out hundreds of dollars per PC to get the new thing!

Now, for fear no one would buy a new version of Windows unless it had a substantially different look and feel, Microsoft has taken the most used operating system on the planet and given it an interface like a Las Vegas slot machine or an airport kiosk.  Did they really bother to test this interface among the computer literate public?

Microsoft says they want to have the same user interface across all their devices, including the Windows 8 phone.  There are two problems with that:  (1) In a world already dominated by the iPhone and Android (with which people are perfectly happy), the Windows 8 phone will never (I repeat, never) gain a significant enough user base for most people to experience the same interface on their phone and their PC.  (2) People really don't care if their phone has the same interface as their PC.  What they want is for their phone to have the interface that works best for doing what a phone does and their PC to have the interface that works best for doing what a PC does.  

While there may be an overlap, in that phones, tablets, and PC's can do a number of the same things, people use them differently.  People will get e-mail, browse the web, and (occasionally) open Office documents on their phones.  But no one does serious word processing or creates spreadsheets on their phones, not to mention graphic design or publishing.

Every time my antivirus software does a scan, I watch as it runs through over 600,000 files.  That is not surprising--my whole digital life is on my PC.  I need a powerful file system that will allow me to find and manage those files and an operating system that will allow me to do this as efficiently and quickly as possible.

All those 600,000 files will never be on my phone, and I don't want them to be.  All I need on my phone is an interface that allows me to quickly find the relatively few photos, or songs, or e-mails, or documents I choose to carry with me. 

Having the same user interface on my phone, tablet, and PC does not help.  In fact, it makes the experience worse on each device, since compromises and trade-offs inevitably have to be made for the same OS and user interface to span all three types of devices.

And, finally, I DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH THE SCREEN ON MY DESKTOP OR LAPTOP!  The idiots at Microsoft and various PC manufacturers need to get this through their heads.  I may be content to wipe my tablet off with a clean cloth every other day, but I do not want to have to take a bottle of Windex to my desktop or laptop that often--in fact, not ever.

Microsoft just isn't getting it.  They have run out of original ideas, and under the pressure to come up with something new, they are turning out products that are actually making things worse for their customers.  Given the size of their company and their user base, the results will take time to show up.  But this isn't going to end well for Microsoft.  In five years, I expect to look back at this column and say (sadly), I told you so.

The Serious Flaw with Windows 8 and Metro

John C. Dvorak comments that "The fault is so simple that you didn't even recognize it" by which he means that the new "tiles" interface in Windows 8 actually makes it difficult to recognize what you are looking for on the screen.

Let me pose a simple question:  When you look at  your desktop screen, how do you find the program you are looking for?  You look for distinctive icons using your human ability to recognize  patterns.  It’s what we do best.  You ignore the words beneath the icon.   For example, you scan your desktop for a red flat cat, locate it, and  click, knowing the program is Irfanview.  We are so good at this that we  can identify an upside down icon.

How is it a step forward to create a tile inscribed with the name of  the program?  An old alphabetized DOS listing is easier to navigate than a  wall of tiles, on which nothing is immediately familiar.  Our innate  pattern recognition is short-circuited by similar tiles.  You have to  read text rather than react to an iconic image.  And while colored tiles  help a little, it's still problematic.

In another column entitled, "Microsoft Screws Up Windows 8," Dvorak continues the theme, with which I agree wholeheartedly, that Microsoft has screwed up royally with the design of Windows 8.  He compares Microsoft Zune to Apple's iTunes, which he also sees as flawed, by delivering one of the best descriptions of Microsoft's predicament that I have ever read:  "If Apple jumped off a cliff, Microsoft would jump shortly thereafter, only with less elegance."

My advice:  Buy Apple stock.  If Microsoft keeps plugging this kind of klunky, poorly designed user interface, people will gladly pay twice the price to move to a Mac.

The Pirate Bay Offers Downloads of Physical Objects

I have blogged about 3-D printing before, the ability to "print" actual physical objects using a special type of printer.  For science fiction fans, think of the "replicators" on the Star Trek series—that's actually where this kind of invention is heading.

Now, you can download "physibles," or data files that deliver real, physical objects to anyone with a 3D printer from, of all places, The Pirate Bay.  Yes, The Pirate Bay—the torrent site known to most people as the bane of the recording and motion picture industries for the vast amounts of illegally shared material that some users make available via that medium.  The site currently has a dozen physibles available for download, including a 3-dimensional model of a 1970 Chevelle Hot Rod, a whistle, and a "tabletop wargaming robot model." 


As this Pirate Bay blog post makes clear, "We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

Of course sites like The Pirate Bay continue to face legal problems, including legislation in the US and Europe aimed at making file sharing illegal and blocking access to file sharing sites.  But the potential for the digital exchange of ideas, intellectual property, and, now, even physical objects is a compelling reason why sites such as The Pirate Bay should be protected and not hounded out of existence.  My recommendation is that you check the Electronic Frontier Foundation website frequently for ways in which all of us can help protect the freedom of the internet.

Why Verizon Doesn't Want You to Buy an iPhone

A pretty hot story is going around, stoked by CNNMoney, that Verizon Wireless sales reps are steering customers away from Apple's iPhones in favor of 4G LTE-enabled Android devices. I absolutely believe this, Verizon's official denials notwithstanding.

 [...]

Here's the problem: Verizon has spent millions of dollars rolling out its massive LTE network to cover 200 million people so far. You could call it billions, if you include the $5 billion spent on the C Block 700-Mhz spectrum licenses. But according to its first-quarter earnings presentation it's only been able to convert 9.1 percent of its 93 million users to LTE.

[...]

There's only one problem. The iPhone isn't a 4G phone. And according to Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, the carrier sold more iPhones over the last quarter (3.2 million) than it did LTE devices (2.9 million). That means more than half of Verizon's smartphone buyers are crowding onto the already busy 3G network, while the 4G network has plenty of space.

 Read it all.

So, Dad, how do you like the new iPad we got you?

This may be in German, but it needs no translation:


 

Now this caught my Pinterest

Remember the Bruce Springsteen song, "57 Channels (and nothing on)"? Sometimes the internet seems like that--a billion websites and none of them worth visiting. However, Pinterest, a visually-oriented, web-based pinboard, has caught my interest.

The relatively new website takes on the challenge of providing a new and creative way to explore and discover online content based on your interests. More specifically, Pinterest focuses on the visual images and videos rather than articles, blogs, music, or podcasts.

The premise of Pinterest is you create "pinboards," which are simply categories, to which you can then "pin" images that you find online or via other Pinterest users. Your virtual pasteboards become collections of images, with notes and links back to the original source of the images. Pinterest also serves as a site for social networking, since you can follow and interact with other users and the pinboards they create.

Pinterest, which also has a Pinterest iPhone app, differs from other sites for finding online content because it's so visually focused. The iPad app Flipboard, which bills itself as "your pocket sized social magazine," is visual, too, and makes use of the iPad's supported gestures very well. Flipboard concentrates on magazine-like content from the Web, folding text into its layout liberally. StumbleUpon is quite similar to Pinterest, giving you a "roulette wheel" Stumble button, designed to take you in new and unexpected directions whenever you feel internet boredom setting in. But Pinterest excels at the amount of information, choices, and connections it can put in front of you at one time.

Springpad, is a service that lets you organize things by being your "memory" on the internet. Springpad lets you save images and Web clips to a virtual pasteboard, which is pretty close to Pinterest in theory, but Pinterest is actually fun to use and pretty to look at, and Springpad isn't.

Pinterest is better and more gripping than Google+ because it is more modern. Pinterest is essentially non-linear and presents the user with a smorgasbord that employs the innate human ability recognize patterns and make choices from hundreds of items, while Google+ is linear and boring.

Looking at Pinterest, you will quickly see that, while it has 10 million users, subscribers up 'til now have been mostly female. That means you are more likely to find recipes than football scores or car reviews. This will change as Pinterest's user base grows, though it will be interesting to see how masculine and feminine interests co-exist on the same site. I predict that the ability of each user to pin items of individual interest will not only allow male and female users to coexist, but the site to thrive as a truly interactive and highly customizable forum for social interaction.

Right now, you'll need an invitation if you want to join Pinterest quickly. There is an open sign up that puts you on a waiting list for an invitation. But you can use the site and browse what is there even before you subscribe and create your own pinboards.

Once you are subscribed, Pinterest will help you install a bookmark button that you can use to "pin" interesting things you see online.

Next, you can choose your areas of interests from a reasonably diverse list that includes architecture, design, education, gardening, history, clothing, pets, and more. The interests that you select will determine what kind of content you'll see when you first hit the homepage.

Third, you can create boards where you'll pin things you find as you browse the web or look at things other users have pinned.

Everything you pin becomes searchable, which means you can search items others have pinned, leading to an inexhaustible web of links to ever-greater worlds of content.

So, give it a whirl. I am sure Pinterest will catch your interest, too.
 

Audi LED headlights--be careful where you use them

 

Analyst: Windows 8 Tablets Dead on Arrival?

PC Magazine has raised the question whether tablets based on Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 may arrive to find there is no market for them:

Microsoft may be touting its Windows 8 operating system as an ideal engine for a tablet, but one analyst report claims that it will be too late to the party.

In a blog post published Tuesday, analyst JP Gownder predicted that Microsoft-powered Windows tablets would be a "fifth-mover" behind tablets from Apple, Google's Android partners, HP's WebOS, and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

As I have commented previously, any missteps with Windows 8 could spell disaster for Microsoft. And this reality seems to be taking shape: If Microsoft stakes its fortune on an operating system designed primarily to be run on tablets and its planned device for the tablet market is a dud, then the folks in Redmond will be left with a giant mess.

My own prejudice is clear: There is no place for a touchscreen interface on a desktop or laptop computer. Period. Steve Jobs said it best: the trackpad is the most natural way to interact with a laptop or desktop. No one wants to keep their arms elevated to touch a desktop screen while editing photos in Photoshop. Plus a finger is not precise enough for that kind of task. (And no one ever seems to mention how often—or even how—you are supposed to clean all those fingerprints off your monitor.)

Microsoft is showing its stupidity (once again) in trying to make the same operating system and user interface work across all kinds of devices. No one cares if their tablet and their laptop and desktop are identical. In fact, Windows users who use iPads and iPhones (and there are millions of them) don't seem to care if those devices are even remotely similar.

Apple is not entirely immune to this kind of fuzzy thinking either. I am convinced that Steve Jobs, in his final days, was more concerned with new products in the pipeline than with the user interface on OS X Lion. The faux leather trim on the iCal interface (and even the little ragged edge of a torn page at the top of the screen), along with a whole laundry list of interface oddities in Lion, are inconsistent with Jobs' aesthetics. The user interface on the Mac OS needs to use design metaphors that are consistent with the device, rather than trying to import the look and feel from iOS to the desktop.

Now if the folks behind those corporate walls in Redmond and Cupertino will get a clue...
 

One More Thing: Steve Jobs' Final Moments Described by Sister

From here.

Steve Jobs final words? Really, just a final phrase, repeated in triplicate: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

That's but the capstone of a gripping eulogy [a must read] delivered by Steve Jobs's biological sister, author Mona Simpson, at Jobs's October 16 memorial service at Stanford University. The New York Times printed a transcript of Simpson's thoughts today, and it reveals a great deal of the unique relationship that Jobs shared with his sister–who he met for the first time when she was 25–as well as the more intimate moments of Jobs's life and final days.

Read it all.