Headworx

Software has become the soul of our civilization. Hardware is its heart, but indeed, what is a piece of hardware worth without software? The days of hard wired logic gates are long gone. The only piece of "working hardware" among my collectibles from the past is a Pong game based on the AY-3-8500 chip. Everything else after the Pong needs some kind of software to run. Software has also become a nightmare of our civilization. Every child knows software has bugs. And we are so used to "turning off and turning on again" when things do not work, that nobody even thinks this is crazy. It is just the world works, period. Some people think it is absolutely unprofessional an even unethical to ship software with bugs (but hey, everybody does that...). But software bugs are just a part of our life, as software itself is and we are simply learning to live with them. The same way we learn to live with harsh winters and cold rainy summers (who likes them, after all?). The worl...

I have been playing with Google Language Tools recently. Yeah, I know they have been sitting there for a while but as they are burried deep down the Google Labs area, they never attracted my attention. Google Translator is probably the most interesting technology. Yes, I know there are many web page translation services on the Internet, but the Google one seems to be well ahead of the crowd (surprise, surprise!). English is not my native language and I know just a little German and Spanish, so it is rather hard for me to judge the output. But when I tried to translate several German or French or Spanish pages to English the output was surprisingly good. When reading such translation, you can still feel it is rather machine than human behind, but the overall quality seems to be far better than, say, the Babelfish . Anyway, I decided to bring my blog to eight new languages. Now it is up to the readers to judge the quality. I would be very interested in your feedback. Rolling on my Goog...

When I was building my first home in the 1990's, I wanted it to be fully wired. Music and telephones in every room, centralized control center and media distribution. I used several miles of various cables, shielded for analog signals, thick, copper, unshielded for loudspeakers, and (luckily) Cat5 UTP (unshielded twisted pair with RJ-45 jacks) for control equipment. And today most of the cables in the walls are not in use anymore. Cat5 and power is what I plug into and it looks like every month I use less and less RJ-45 sockets to connect. Electricity becomes the only wired thing. Almost everything else runs WiFi. Here on the left is a sketch of the devices currently in use. The flow starts from the telco line ADSL modem, currently running at 4Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream. It used to be 1Mbps service, but after bringing home the Internet Radio, I found out it has to be upgraded. Fortunately, due to the falling prices, the upgrade took the monthly bill down and the speed u...

Well ... may be not exactly like the title says, but the announcement about Qualcomm and Microsoft joining forces to port Windows Mobile to MSM chipsets is huge. It may be not that huge for Qualcomm, who enjoys 3G mobile phones dominance similar to what Microsoft has with Windows on desktop PCs, but for Microsoft it is a really strong move towards gaining market share in mobile phones. Especially against Symbian , that clearly crystallizes around the last two phone manufacturers not using Qualcomm MSM 3G chipsets (Nokia and SonyEricsson). Since Palm went with Windows last year, the mobile phone operating system battlefield has been clearly divided between Symbian and Windows Mobile. There is a number of other proprietary OSes for phones, but as phones become more and more smartphones, more resembling computing powerhouses than dial - and talk devices, there is a growing need for a full blown operating system to manage the environment and applications. So it will be very likely the w...