Headworx

Two weeks ago I posted my thoughts on Quality versus ROI, wondering why as wealthy as we are, we accept piss poor products and services in the name of becoming even more wealthy. This is a paradox, because having more money we get worse quality of life, and applies very often to the greediest and wealthiest among us. Today a short stop contemplating on another related phenomena. We often agree to pay premium for things that look great, but do not perform as great as they could. Or how sacrificing looks a little the functionality would jump to a higher level. And the crown example of form over function is... surprise, surprise... Apple! Two weeks ago, after a couple of days of careful shopping, I bought the Apple 27" LCD monitor. I have always loved big monitors and a lot of screen real estate. For a number of months I have been on intensive self training program to become an expert Linux admin and programmer. I play with code and commands in one window and my best friend Google si

Snapdragons have made a long way since their inception. It has been a number of years and several devices on the way. But the real story begins now with the introduction of the first 1,5GHz, MSM8660 - based phone, the Pantech Vega Racer. With the introduction of the MSM8660 mobile devices, the performance gap between laptops and phones is closing rapidly. Look. My current Nokia Booklet 3G laptop has a single core Z530 Atop CPU running at 1,6GHz, no GPU and 1GB of RAM. The Vega Racer phone has two asynchronously clocked 1,5GHz cores, fast Adreno 220 GPU and the same 1GB of RAM. The Adreno 220 GPU is worth a separate mention here. It is blazing fast, especially for a mobile, battery powered GPU. Probably the fastest mobile GPU on the market today. Six times faster than the iPhone4, twice as fast as the Nvidia Tegra 2. With Having the Adreno 220 on board, with FullHD HDMI output, any MSM8660 phone can easily be a gaming console, or a HD content player. With a HDMI monitor and Bluetooth ke

So I am in the software business. Again. This time putting the software in the light bulbs. And all kinds of devices that have not been "connected". And they are now. Well, everything requires software these days. Almost everything. Apart from the embedded and server parts we do in house, I also needed a front end application for iOS and Android. It has been very precisely defined. Basically a three - screen client based on five REST Web services. A great candidate to be outsourced. And probably the last one I will be outsourcing. Ever. The entire idea of outsourcing the process of building applications "to the specs" is flawed. It will never deliver a real winner application. Only mediocre piece of s..t meeting the specs. Why? Because the contractors first lower the price to win the tender and then they cut the corners to make ends meet. Real quality requires a lot of polishing work. And I do mean a lot. A good piece of software is like a painting. Or a sculpture.

Connected Home. Internet Of Things. Smart Home. Like a procession of ants, micro computers are creeping into our homes. Sometimes I try to count how many computers I have at home. But first, what is a computer today? If we define a computer as a device with a network card (wired or wireless; the not connected ones do not count!), it is relatively easy to count MAC addresses on Ethernet frames circulating the home network. My recent count was 97. Soon I will be celebrating 100 connected gadgets at home! And among the 100 there are only about 5 real computers ("PC's"). The rest are various "things". Music players. Temperature loggers. Pods, Pads, etc. Managing them all becomes a real job. I need an administrator. Or a new / better method of making sure they all do what they are supposed to do. And they all have the right version of software. This is important. I heard most attacks targeted at connected homes are via the new Internet - enabled TVs (as they have man

Last week I touched on the subject of the fall of the social networks and raised the question asking what would be the next big thing. Of course there are many big things ahead of us. Telecoupling, mixed reality, the Internet of things, semantic Web,... I could go on and on. But the question people often ask is what will be the next Facebook. The next single trend that will be very hot and product or service everybody will be using. The next big thing will be intelligent personal assistants. Or personal robots. Or PBots (Apple will call their version an iBot). So what exactly will these bots be? They will be personalized automated services acting intelligently on your behalf. Helping you ease the information load and on the other hand making sure you make most of an every bit of that information. We have been using them today already, albeit in a limited fashion. Let me give some examples. Spam filters are probably the most popular bots today. If you use Gmail you have probably noticed