Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Android is now the new Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/09/2025
» Some may be wondering why have I used an Android phone up to now compared to, say, Apple iPhone? In the beginning, it was for the following four reasons -- a headphone jack, a removable battery, the ability to insert an SD card for storage and the ability to load a program into the computer. That last part may sound a little strange but a 12GB device with 1TB of storage and a graphics unit built in is a computer now. The "program" loading here means you can put your own operating system on the device and install applications, bypassing the Play Store. So where are we now? No headphone jack, no SSD support, no removable battery and based on a recent announcement, no ability to "side-load" programs any more. In other words, Google phones have now or will soon be turned into iPhones.
Graphene semiconductors mark new start
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024
» We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.
7 levels of AI await humanity
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/08/2023
» This week is AI week, both to date and going forward. Some don't understand the difference between AI and AGI, the latter being artificial general intelligence, denoting a system that behaves like a human being in capabilities. So, for your amusement I've put together, with credit to the YouTube channel AI Uncovered, a description of the seven levels of AI.
Scams on the rise as inflation bites
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/07/2022
» We start this week with a webserver with extras in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operation system. Enter redbean 2.0. Created by Justine Tunney, it uses the "Actually Portable Executable" that you can read about here, justine.lol/ape.html. When you compile a program to its native binary, in this case x86-64 code, and don't call any external code, then the only difference between a Windows and a Linux would be the file format. If you can solve this, then it could run on any platform. To do that you need Cosmopoliton libc because any real program needs to make some calls, in this case the standard C ones. So, with Cosmo and the APE format, you can write a C program and compile it to a single file that will load and run on six very different operating systems and the same binary can also be booted directly from the PC BIOS. It's not perfect, but any programmer would be scratching their heads by now. Pause for techie amazement.
Change is nigh?
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/10/2020
» A long-awaited US congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google has been published. The surprise for some is that this report from the Democrat-run House Judiciary Committee concludes that the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.