Into Tech

Having bought my fair share of laptops over the years, I’ve noticed that the packaging has gotten smaller. I remember years ago buying a laptop and receiving a huge box with the actual laptop suspended in a styrofoam suspension system. More recently, I’ve seen laptops coming in much smaller boxes. However, Wal-Mart and HP have apparently decided to try ditching most of the packaging altogether, and letting you walk out with your new laptop in a messenger bag, rather than a box. Yes, there are still boxes from when the machines are shipped from HP to Wal-Mart, but the company can now fit 3 laptops to a box, significantly reducing packaging and making life easier on customers in the long run.

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For all the trouble surrounding e-voting, some folks believe that optical scan technologies that simply count the paper ballot votes are a decent solution. Of course, those optical scan technologies are often made by the same companies that make the e-voting equipment, and have been shown to have numerous problems going back many years. And, as per usual with these e-voting companies, they’ve been highly resistant to independent inspection of the systems. Perhaps that’s because the machines can’t do the one thing they’re supposed to do properly: count the votes.

Down in Palm Beach County, Florida (yes, the home of the infamous 2000 election year “butterfly ballot” with its hanging chads), officials are admitting that they’ve somehow lost about 3,400 ballots. But they don’t seem to be saying they physically lost the ballots — they’re saying that the optical scan machines, provided by Sequoia Voting Systems (no stranger to e-voting counting problems) count the ballots differently when the same ballots are run through different machines. In trying to explain how come a “recount” showed 3,400 fewer ballots than the original count, a county official explained:

The seven high-speed tabulating machines used in the recount are much more “unforgiving” than those that process votes on election day

Does that not seem highly problematic to people? Isn’t part of the point of these optical scan machines that they’ll count the ballots consistently? If everyone seems to admit that there’s an element of near total randomness (chalked up to how “unforgiving” the machines are) in these machines, isn’t that reason enough to question their usage at all? As for the election in question, it appears that officials have decided to throw up their hands at the controversy and certify the election, despite the fact that this “unforgiving” recount changed the results of the election.

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Whether it is virtual reality, urban planning, restoration of ancient arts, communication on a global basis, defense strategies, watching programs or carrying on with daily business, the computer has become an indispensable part of our daily life.
However, when our computer suffers from technical problems, whether it is viral or any other hardware or software issues, [...]

Last week, Major League Baseball introduced instant replay for the first time (oddly, MLB rushed the introduction mid-season, with no real testing), which has many wondering if the rather “human” element of umpires making bad calls will be a lost element of the game. While it can suck when such wrong calls go against your team, the umpires’ ability to screw up has always been a part of the appeal to many fans of the game. However, Farhad Manjoo over at Slate is wondering about the inevitable next step: moving to completely automated umpires and referees in various sports. He compares the Hawk Eye system that is used in tennis to determine whether a ball is in or out to the efforts in MLB, but points out that computerized systems are far from perfect. In fact, they can lead to some highly questionable results, such as a situation in which every single human observer believed a ball was out, and even television replays showed the ball appeared out — but Hawk Eye claimed it was in, and that the problem was that human eyes weren’t good enough to see if the ball was really in or out. At that point, it makes you wonder whether or not such a machine ruling really makes sense.

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Since late 2004, rumors have circulated about a new type of phone directory aptly named ‘mobile 411′. These rumors included tails of names, numbers, and addresses being made available to telemarketers and publicly accessible to all. However, like premature fruit from the grape vine, these rumors were a little tart.
The Truth About Mobile 411
Contrary to [...]

While I tend to think that Wikipedia is a good thing overall, that’s because I know it’s not a source that should be relied on by itself for important decisions — such as whether or not to grant political asylum to an individual. It can be useful as a starting point, if that information can be corroborated elsewhere. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security felt otherwise in
using Wikipedia to deny a request for asylum for a woman. An Appeals Court has now overturned that decision, noting the problems with using Wikipedia as a sole source of info, but the whole scenario should make you wonder. Did DHS really not have the ability to check the legitimacy of the woman’s documents without resorting to Wikipedia? What sort of resources are provided to immigration officials that they’re making judgments based on a Wikipedia page?

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Shopping for your first table saw can be very confusing due to the huge selection available. Table Saws come in a wide range of shapes, sizes and are designed for a wide range of applications. Buying your first table saw shouldn’t be an ordeal, with a few tips, anyone can choose a table saw that [...]

Passengers on London Underground could be using their mobile phones to get through the ticket barriers and even pay for their lunch within the next two years, after a successful trial of technology in the capital by O2 and Transport for London.

The mobile phone company integrated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard Visa card into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers who spent six months using the phone as a mobile wallet.

They made more than 50,000 tube journeys, either by putting their existing travel card on the device or topping up their pre-pay wallet at machines in underground stations, and bought items from shops such as Eat, Yo Sushi and Krispy Kreme. The phones also gave users access to the VIP section at the O2 arena and the Wireless festival in Hyde Park.

Claire Maslen from O2 said the trial was so successful that the company was trying to put together a consortium to launch a full service within two years, well in time for the London Olympics in 2012.

“The Olympics are an obvious target to aim for, but I think that is a very conservative timeframe for a commercial service,” she said. “We would hope to have something up and running much sooner than that.”

While it may seem ridiculous to turn a mobile phone into a bank card, research has shown that people realise they have lost their phone much sooner than their wallet.

The O2 trial used near field communications (NFC) technology. The Oyster card is an obvious example, but bundling travel cards with a mobile e-wallet, which users can top up from their bank account and use to pay for items under £10, have been mooted for several years.

In Japan, such phones have been in use for more than four years. The Japanese railway network has been using the technology since 2001 and millions of cards have been issued. But the technology used in Japan is based on Sony’s FeliCa chip technology, which is different from that used in the O2 trial and by Transport for London for the Oyster card.

Philip Makinson, at industry experts Greenwich Consulting, said mobile wallets had fallen down in the past because of the number of people needed to make any system viable.

“It requires cooperation, not just between handset manufacturers and network operators but third parties such as Visa or Mastercard and banks and retailers. To reach critical mass you really need to have at least three of the big operators to be involved or there is not enough in it for the likes of Transport for London or Nokia,” said Makinson.

Several of the UK’s five mobile phone networks are understood to be interested in mobile wallets.

“There does seem to be consumer demand for it, people are saying they want to carry less stuff around with them,” said Makinson.

The results of the O2 trial show that people like using a mobile phone to do more than send texts and talk.

Nine out of 10 of O2’s testers were happy using NFC technology, with convenience, ease of use and the status of having such an innovative device cited as benefits of the service.

Top of the testers’ wish list was using their mobile phone as an Oyster card, with 89% saying they would use it. The trial showed that having Oyster on a mobile phone led users to make more journeys on public transport.

More than one in five who used pay-as-you-go Oyster on their mobile phone reported that they made more journeys on public transport during the trial. More than two-thirds of users said they found it more convenient to use their phone than a standard Oyster card.

More than two-thirds of testers also said they would be interested in having the Barclaycard Visa payWave feature on their mobile.

Crucially for Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker and one of the companies involved in the trial, 87% of the testers said the ability to use Oyster on a mobile phone was likely to influence their choice of phone.

Samsung thinks Apple shouldn’t get all the limelight when it comes to skinny laptops and it’s planning to win the Size 0 contest next month with its beautiful looking x360.

Despite sounding like a certain games console, Samsung has managed to bring its X360 in at 1.27Kg, a little under the Apple MacBook Air offering, while managing to equal or better what’s under the hood.

It sports a 13.3in LED display capable of 1280 x 800 pixel resolution and is powered by an Ultra Low Voltage Centrino 2 processor with up to 4GB of Ram.