Friday, December 14, 2012

Prayers and Reaction to Sandy Hook, Fairfeild County CT School Shooting

First of all my deepest prayers and heartfelt condolences for the victims of this evil act of terror, there are good people in the world who hold you in pure heartfelt ἀγάπη

I used the word evil because its more than mental illness at some point when you aim a gun at kindergarten kids, arguably at their most magical part of their life and most magical part of the year, its beyond sick, its demonic and evil.

Before we debate gun control, we need to take a hard look at our society that incubated recent terrorism.  Its time to recognize some people are not positive, they are negative -- they want to destroy things.  Perhaps instead of incarcerating people in a reactive fashion we should consider proactive measures that conform with the bill of rights.  Perhaps as a society we need to do better to identify people who are not satisfied and provide help and assistance to see if they can become for lack of a better term a positive influence; in practice the opposite of the Fairfield County shooter, purportedly a Mr. Lanza, in his 20s.

I think as a society we have to shed the labels of the old world while distilling their core meanings.  There are some people who do not want good things to happen, not in the name of competition but by their nature they desire destruction.  I also think there are influences and people who want a better America, a better world, and we should help these people succeed in their dreams, proactively and legally eliminating resistance from people who want to destroy positive progress, positivity, love.  The world is amazing these people want to make it horrendous.  We should identify things that aren't amazing in our world and try to change it for the better.   

This shooting is a statement, and the underlying statement (the shooter may have been too limited in mental capacity to identify or articulate) is fuck you to everything good we hold dear as humans.  I am not OK with that. I'm not sure gun control will stop one of these negative people from buying a truck and loading it with bombs, or identifying the next point of pain.  So it should only be part of the solution. 

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Purely Technical Articles and Reviews -> mark tech review

I've been playing around with the idea for awhile of having a blog devoted to technical reviews and technical articles.  I've posted some videos on youtube including the launch day "iPhone Problems", and I've also posted to both Ninja Tickets and this blog. I now feel that the time has come where posting technical articles confuses web crawlers and humans about what my blogs are about and should also be arranged in a more compelling verticals. 

New technical reviews and articles will be posted here: http://mark-tech.blogspot.com/

UPDATE: Range Rover Information and Offroading tech will be posted here: http://range-rover-l405-l322-p38.blogspot.com/

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Force dual core mode HTC Rezound

There are multiple threads on notable developer forums indicating the Rezound under its latest stock kernel will run in a very conservative single core almost always mode.  Rooting and just running "SetCpu" will enable independent scaling dual core mode, which engages both cores when expected. Although benchmarks may not reflect the performance gains they are significant in practice.  Running complex live wallpapers and visually rich HTC Sense widgets pose no lag when scrolling.  The overall effect is a phone without hiccups that's always responsive even while multitasking. Links to come. 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The Future (of personal computing) is Now.

Over the last few months several companies have been working on different projects which have come together to transform the world of personal computing.  I've always been a fan of the traditional form factor PCs and the power and user upgradable aspects and the first generations of tablets and phones seemed like a fun start but a far cry from the productivity from a true PC.  With the open nature of Android, the processing power available in the new tegra 3 chips and fast speedy mobile networks these portable devices which were once thought of as an addition to a PC have now come into their own as portable PCs.

There are some limits. At this point developers have still not pushed out "real" apps.  For example adobe doesn't offer the creative suite as apps, whether stand alone or complimentary to desktop versions. If your a web developer there are few options to manage large sites.  Now part of this is mitigated by web based environments, but not all.

The other main limitation at this point is in how the end users actually implement the device. Playing angry birds is great but there are powerful ways to utilize these portable PC's which haven't been fully baked.  I now use a transformer prime with an HDMI cord to give ppt presentations, but this is the tip of the iceberg. Companies are going to be able to implement these devices with some novel thought in compelling ways that will affect revenues. (Assuming of course the Mayan apocalypse does not materially change our way of life, although to be honest as a race we could use a bit of growth.)

We will have to see how post Jobs iOS turns out but at this point Android 4 seems posed to lead the transition from "big cell phone" to "small pc" in part because of how open the OS is.  The Asus transformer prime is the first such device that has enough power to challenge nerbooks. The Verizon LTE network is fantastic, offering the ability to execute and stream data from upcoming "personal clouds" or "corporate clouds" to process and crunch data.  New products are on the horizon which allows for gpgpu on such tablets and phones which should greatly improve processing abilities. 

Microsoft I believe sees this opportunity and is making a push to unify the new tablet PC and existing form factors with windows 8.  This is going to drive "real software" to tablets.  Google I believe is in a good position to lead this market but should make an effort to present a unified app market across devices.  This is why a unified app market is more important than a market which sells everything on specific devices.  A unified app market is a game changer and something I believe Microsoft will push for, I believe Google can out execute msft but they need to pivot and look to the future of tablets as computing devices rather than media consumption devices.

 UPDATE:  The PS4 and NVIDIA 780 series have video encoders which allow the remote play of games.