T-Mobile’s new myTouch Google Android Phone presale will begin on July 8.
http://www.t-mobilemytouch.com/
No hard keyboard, but Android now has a touchscreen keyboard since the Cupcake upgrade. The size looks great.
Wolfram Alpha has Add-ons for their search. The add-ons come in many different flavors, from a FireFox addon to a Windows start bar search to an iGoogle gadget. An iGoogle Gadget? Aren’t Wolfram and Google enemies?
Its pretty cool that there seems to be comfortable interaction between Google and Wolfram Alpha.
This is probably a smart move considering that they could potentially end up in the same niche market in the future. Friendly competition is just so much more pleasant than all out rivalry. We could also see Wolfram get bought out by Google if the product proves its worth and Mr. Wolfram finds himself in need of a gadzillion dollars (unlikely considering that he has many other successful products on the market including the famous Mathematica).
Then the big question becomes, how does Wolfram Alpha monetize this type of search? Why would you want to click through to a website for info on a product when all you are looking for is the answer to a question? In Google you are looking for websites and ads are just another website that happens to be paid for. Perhaps Google/Doubleclick with their advertising genius will be able to help Mr. Wolfram find the answer to this advertising conundrum.
Or maybe Mr Wolfram should just install his addon and ask Wolfram Alpha:
How can Wolfram Alpha make money off of Wolfram Alpha?
Because regardless of how amazing a product is, if it can’t make money its survival comes into question.
Dowload the addons here:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/downloads.html
(I’m sure Mr Wolfram already thought of all of this. I hear he’s really smart.)
I’m going to try something new for myself and for you. A daily quick summary of what I learned and/or accomplished today.
- Left joins are different than inner joins in that with a left join a comparison predicate (in the where statement) and the same predicate as a join predicate (in the join “on” statement) do not necessarily give the same result as would be the case in an inner join.
- Wrote a song about breaking up again with someone I broke up with over a month ago and have not gone out with since.
- Roman Polanski is a pretty awesome guy with a very complicated life. I have pity for him and I don’t think he was a horrible rapist. I learned this from the Documentary about Roman Polanski on HBO:
http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/romanpolanski/
- Some programmers are incapable of organizing their logic. It makes people around that person work twice as hard and be 5 times as stressed out.
No more Vista! For everyone who has heard about Vista, but did not want to install it on their machines (ie most people), Windows 7 will be released on Oct 22, 2009.
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/06/02/the-date-for-general-availability-ga-of-windows-7-is.aspx
Apparently the Tmobile G1 Android update I got earlier (http://www.chilledoutbeardedman.com/2009/06/01/g1-firmware-upgrade-to-slick/) is the infamous long awaited Cupcake update.
Some more feature updates that I’ve noticed on my G1 phone:
The camera can now shoot video.
The browser zooming has a button to return to the standard zoom.
The browser zoom box magnifier is better.
An onscreen keyboard with autocomplete that you load by tapping on a text field.
The camera loads up a little faster than before and has two onscreen buttons. In the top left corner is a small thumbnail of the last photo or video you shot. And in the top right corner is a button that you can use for taking photos.
Still missing zoom on the camera (though technically you don’t need it cause you can crop it later and its a high enough quality photo that cropping is feasible).
If you don’t have the updates, yet, those are some of the things you can look forward to getting in the near future.
As far as when your phone will be updated with G1 Cupcake update… I received the phone the day it came out and I received this update at about 8am PST. Two of my friends who have the G1 have not yet received the update. The first friend got the Tmobile G1 in mid-November 2008 and the second purchased it in Febraury 2009.
After I wrote all of that I discovered a full list of the new Android features here:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.5-highlights.html
The firmware upgrade today on the new G1 seems to have taken the phone from cool to slick. It still does not feel as smooth as the iPhone, but lots of things are better.
The desktop widgets have nicer smooth shiny gray borders.
The screen seems to come out of standby faster than before.
When programs/apps load, they fade in and out more smoothly and quickly.
The buttons on the built-in gmail app are much prettier and not clunky like the old ones.
Also, there are now checkboxes on the gmail list of emails, so that you can apply an action (such as archive) to multiple emails. This is familiar from the traditional gmail.
And there just seems to be nice font, border and background improvements throughout.
One issue that I encountered was that on the first restart after the firmware update, all of the icons on the desktop were missing. This resolved itself when I restarted, again.
What else did people notice?
Microsoft’s Bing Website doesn’t have an RSS feed, only Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter seem to be outshining plain old blogs as a source of basic information. I doubt the blog will die anytime soon, but perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of the end for blogs.
Just by chance, Chilled Out Bearded Man joined Twitter today. Perhaps its time to join Facebook, as well. We’ll see how long that lasts, as rumor has it that alternate personalities are removed from Facebook (without notice) if they get too much attention. Might test this soon.
Wolfram|Alpha has been live for one week and it sounds like its a huge success. They received a ton of feedback from users and seem satisfied with how the system functioned for the week. The latest from the Wolfram Blog:
- Subjects of interest need to be expanded.
- 25% of queries were not interpretable by the system. but most of them had partial interpretations.
- Mathematics notation is working very well
- For testing, validating code symbolically using Mathematica saves them time
Go Wolfram! Its not there yet. But the concept is still awesome and will change the way we find information over the next few years.
Keep up with the latest about Wolfram Alpha on the Wolfram Alpha Blog:
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/26/the-first-week-of-wolframalpha-thank-you/
Originally, it sounded as though Wolfram|Alpha would be able to answer any question under the sun – and perhaps that is the eventual goal. For now, it seems as though Wolfram is capable of answering only Factual questions. In other words, unless there is an exact answer to your question, Wolfram cannot answer.
For example, type in Thomas Jefferson. You get a few dates and the fact that he was “head of state”. But it does not tell you that he was the President of the United States of America, nor that he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Something cool to note is that there is a link at the bottom of the page that tells you where the information most likely came from. It says, “This list is intended as a guide to sources of further information.” Then it follows with, “The inclusion of an item in this list does not necessarily mean that its content was used as the basis for any specific Wolfram|Alpha result.” In other words, it seems like Wolfram Alpha checks a variety of the most respectable and accepted sources of knowledge to find the correct value.
Tell me more. This thing is cool and will only get cooler.
I am curious what will happen once there is too much information about a specific topic. How will it get organized on a page. A simple example of this is entering the names of 3 public companies:
Dell Citigroup johnson & johnson
It gives you quite a lot of information for that question. But it is still nowhere near the length of a long Wikipedia article. But what will happen when you ask it an extremely complex and convoluted question? Will it spit out a 100,000 line answer that your browser will barely be able to load? Or will it find some beautiful way to organize the information?
Tell me more, please.