hardware – Tales from the bits

Amazon Drones: Air Delivery in 30 minutes

George Bagropoulos — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 19:00:29 +0000

Amazon is waiting Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to launch Amazon Prime Air. Amazon hopes that the new rules for UAV will be in place early in 2015.

There are many questions for UAV delivery. Safety of the drones, security, privacy and many other issues.

Below is the footage of a test flight. In my opinion it is amazing. What is your opinion?

The 3 faces of Cloud Computing

George Bagropoulos — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 09:55:54 +0000

Cloud computing or simply “Cloud” is a term that is used in almost all “techy” conversations but what it actually means? First of all it means that the physical servers, solid state drives etc are at a remote location, a data center, and you have access to the application or the files that you want over the Internet.

There are three different acronyms for Cloud Computing, the 3 faces,

SaaS: Software as a service
IaaS: Infrastructure as a service
PaaS: Platform as a service

SaaS applications are run from your browser. Usually you do not have to install something to run them. Email services like Yahoo or Gmail are SaaS applications. Google search is a SaaS application. Using these services you do not care on what type of servers are run, who makes the OS (operation system) updates, who writes the code, where your data is stored, how the vendor load balances the traffic to the application. You only care on the availability of the service and the security of your data.

IaaS gives companies or individuals the opportunity to move their computers or servers on the cloud. Why you may choose to do that? Because of cost benefits, space benefits, stuff benefits, scale benefits etc.Infrastructure means that the provider of the service (Amazon, Google, Rackspace and many others) provides the tools to create a virtualization platform with storage and networking services. To give you an example, assume that you have two servers running your applications and sharing files / information at you premisses . When you decide to move them to the cloud you have the ability to create two virtual servers on a stronger physical machine. You can do it on your premisses too, but by putting them on the Cloud gives you more advantages like you will stop worrying about hardware issues, bandwidth, network infrastructure and scalability issues.

PaaS is a great way to create distributed applications that can have 99.999% availability. To leverage the benefits of a PaaS you have to architect your solution to take advantages of the platform offerings in queues, blobs, storage and other areas. Why to choose PaaS to develop your application? You have numerous benefits such as scalability, reliability, no OS administration time and costs and many other advantages. I will discuss in another blog post how to architect such solutions.

You have to remember that by just putting your application on a cloud server you do not transform them to a PaaS application or to a SaaS application. In almost all the cases you will need to rewrite parts of your application.

Which of the 3 faces of Cloud computing is suitable for you?

No More Woof technology translates dog’s brain signals to speech.

George Bagropoulos — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 21:27:07 +0000

The Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery (NSID) created a prototype called No More Woof that translates dog’s thoughts to speech. This is still work in progress and not a finished product. By using No More Woof you can let your dog speak its mind! Are you ready to listen?

The technology used in No More Woof is the result of combining the latest technologies in three different tech-areas, EEG(Electroencephalography)-sensoring, Micro Computing and special BCI (Brain Computer Interface) software. The EEG reads the brain’s electrical signals, they get analyzed and translated by the BCI using a Raspberry PI and you hear the results.

This is an ingenious use of technology which might improve inter species communication.

What are your thoughts?

Tablet Shipments Slow in the Second Quarter of 2013

George Bagropoulos — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 16:11:35 +0000

According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide tablet shipment growth slowed in the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13). The slowdown is compared with the first quarter of 2013. The 45.1 million units shipped in the second quarter of 2013 were up 59.6% from the same quarter in 2012, when tablet vendors shipped 28.3 million devices.

In the top five we have Lenovo and Acer tablet reappearing.

Top Five Tablet Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Second Quarter 2013 (Shipments in millions)

Vendor	2Q13 Unit Shipments	2Q13 Market Share	2Q12 Unit Shipments	2Q12 Market Share	Year-over-Year Growth
1. Apple	14.6	32.4%	17.0	60.3%	-14.1%
2. Samsung	8.1	18.0%	2.1	7.6%	277.0%
3. ASUS	2.0	4.5%	0.9	3.3%	120.3%
4. Lenovo	1.5	3.3%	0.4	1.3%	313.9%
5. Acer	1.4	3.1%	0.4	1.4%	247.9%
Others	17.5	38.8%	7.4	26.2%	136.6%
Total	45.1	100.0%	28.3	100.0%	59.6%

Source: IDC Worldwide Tablet Tracker, August 5, 2013

I am expecting to see some serious new models comming up on the third quarted to warm up the market. Let’s see what will launch Apple for the next quarter to close the gap.

The Keyboard is dead, long live Celluon’s Magic Cube!

George Bagropoulos — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 12:43:35 +0000

Celluon has developed the Magic Cube which projects a full-sized red QWERTY keyboard and multitouch mouse on flat surfaces. It connects easily to any Bluetooth HID devices, including the latest iPhone, iPad and Android devices. It has a built-in lithium polymer rechargeable battery. It is compatible with the latest operating systems.

In my opinion, this technology should be incorporated in all mobile devices and tablets. Say goodbye to the old heavy keyboard. Just think how less they are going to weight and also how easier it will be to type tp tablets without having the keyboard to hide half of the screen.
Amazon already sells Celluon Magic Cube Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard and Mouse