Oh dear oh dear… Men, or should I say big kids of a certain age may remember the US TV series Knight Rider where David Hasselhoff drove around nabbing bad guys and generally saving the world in a computerised talking car called Kitt.
I bet you can see this one coming because GPS SatNav makers Mio have developed one that uses the voice the voice of a chap called William Daniels – the voice of the original Kitt to tell you where you are, and where you are going. If you think that you can live with a GPS with swishy red lights and which says ‘ hello Michael, where do you want to go today?’ or you really are called Michael then your prayers have just been answered.
Last week I alerted you to the fact that a machine has been created that can replicate itself by manufacturing the parts needed to build a copy. My concern was that the killer robots that we all know will eventually take over the Earth and either enslave or destroy mankind could use this technology.
It could happen and we really should be afraid. From San Francisco comes news of the latest round of RoboGames (a bit like our own Robot Wars but a lot more violent!). As you’ll see from the video on the site these machines are really vicious, which is okay as most of them are radio controlled and only do what they are told but the really scary thing is that there are now autonomous robots that fight on their own heaven help us if they ever lean how to reproduce. Heed my warning people, before it’s too late!
Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It’s clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.
The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s another item from the ‘it was bound to happen sooner or later ‘files. Researchers at the University of Bath have just demonstrated a prototype of a machine that can replicate itself. Sci-Fi fans will be all too aware of the dangers and what this means to future generations; the Rise of the Machine surely can’t be far behind,…
For the moment at least, there doesn’t seem to be too much to fear from the RepRap (Replicating Rapid–Prototyper). Basically it is a three dimensional printer that creates objects by building up layers of molten plastic. Read the rest of this entry »
A Digital Video Disc or DVD is one of the most popular forms of storage media nowadays. It is an optical disc and mainly used to store videos. However, data in any form can be stored on a DVD. The dimensions of a DVD are generally the same as a common compact disc but the amount of data that can be stored is six times greater.
The different variations of DVD are based on the way data is being stored on it. A DVD-ROM has pre-written data that can only be read. A DVD+R and DVD-R are the ones on which the data can be written only once; and on a DVD+RW the data can be written and erased more than once. The lasers used to read DVDs are typically of 650 nm wavelength.
The terms DVD-Audio and DVD-Video discs are DVDs with suitably structured and formatted audio and video content respectively. Other types of DVDs are called DVD-data discs. Read the rest of this entry »
