Jesus In IKEA

Following reports in recent years ranging from toast to marmite, it seems the son of God also likes his Swedish furniture, with his face turning up at the Glasgow IKEA store, says The Telegraph. Is this another sign of the second coming, Armageddon or 2012? Or we does the Internet generation just have a really good imagination.

Missing The Airport By 150 Miles

This week should reveal some interesting results about what really happened on NW188 to Minneapolis, which failed to make radio contact and missed the airport by 150 miles. Air traffic controllers feared a hijacking and had to request nearby planes to make contact on the last known frequency before the pilots responded. Contrary to media reports there was no alcohol or arguing involved, though perhaps a heated discussion was to blame. CNN reports here.

Windows 7

It's here. The Vista killer. There seems to be too much hype at the moment about what kind of new features it brings. Looking around it seems like they've taken feedback from users to optimise performance and touch up the user experience a bit over the last 2.5 years. To be honest looking at the reviews and Microsoft's own requirements for Vista and Windows 7, Windows 7 looks like Vista, has the same requirements as Vista with a more user friendly UAC and a bit of extra eye candy like tool bar preview Windows.
What's pissing me off a bit is the calls in the media that Windows 7 seems to have a smaller footprint than Vista. The system requirements from Microsoft themselves show that the footprint is the same and in fact 7 requires slightly more minimum disk space. Even Vista came with a miniumum requirements list that 7 doesn't seem to have. If this was based on user experience I could understand it, but it is the media that are saying and I'm sure they haven't tried to install it on 5 year old hardware. Also don't forget that 2.5 years has passed so 7 on new hardware will always be faster than Vista was on what was new hardware 2.5 years ago.
So if you ask me, this looks more like what Windows 98SE was to Windows 98 than anything truly groundbreaking. I do agree with the claim that this could be the last tru client OS from MS, considering the growing importance of mobile and cloud computing. In any case, MS had a launch party, reported on The Register here.

R2D2 In Star Trek XI

This blog post tells of a cameo appearance of R2D2 in the latest Star Trek film. Industrial Light and Magic which was first set up by George Lucas of Star Wars fame included the droid in the scene in which the enterprise comes out of warp into a debris field around Vulcan.

Sci-Fi Reality

The BBC magazine has an article about applications of technology popular in science fiction series. Unfortunately the only thing that looks to have any kind of application is induction as means to wireless charge electronic devices, though personally I find induction which is used for toothbrushes and shavers very ineffecient, when at the same time we are supposed to be saving energy.

Smartphones Sap Cellular Capacity

Smartphones are selling like hot cakes at the moment, while the rest of the mobile market sags. However their increased popularity may have an undesired side effect. Ars reports on how smartphones consume up to 8 times as much cellular bandwidth than laptops because they are constantly determining their location and other actions that a laptop connection that does not. It takes only three smartphones to generate the same signaling impact as a laptop, though of course the amount of data downloaded is much smaller.

Computer Game Violence

Two cases this week of how computing games lead to violence (yeah, right). Firstly a Finnish guy gets so pissed off with his broken Internet connection during a spot of online play, that he decides to go out and stab the first person he finds, in this case a 15 year old girl. Secondly a disagreement that started with the purchase of a video game led to a teenager being set alight. I hope this doesn't fuel the whole violence debate again. Some groups just need a scapegoat instead of looking at the real issues of responsibility and upbringing.