Drew Clinkenbeard

The other day the following comic from XKCD struck me as amusing:

It also made me think, the last gift I got my mother was a robot. I bought my mother a roomba and now she has a robot roaming free in her home. I may be working with a team designing a robotic soccer team. My friends mother was buying digital picture frames for her parents. We live in a science fiction world and NO ONE NOTICED. We all carry communicators. I am laying in bed typing this on a machine about 10000 times more powerful than what sent men to the moon. If the allies had this computer during WWII Hitler would have been dead,,,, crap godwins law.

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So Google is pushing their new android platform for mobile devices. I have downloaded the API but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. If the big G follows the pattern of the past it will probably be pretty easy to work with. I am pleased with this development. I have many reasons ($10,000,000us is not the least of them) one of the biggest is the fact that it is open source. I think having a project that is open to the community of developers is the best way of ensuring a good product. Essentially this gives a good chance that your product will play well with others, an idea shunned by many.

It has always seemed to me that by making your product only work with your other products that you are cutting yourself off from a valuable portion of market share. If you make your product the best, then allow EVERY one to use it than people will love you. If you tell people it’s the best then force them to use it they will resent you. Well actually a lot of people will follow your lead regardless. There will always be the few that are interested in their own way though.

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Just a quick note.  I recently (last night) went to a talk on using AI for data mining. The interesting thing to me was the use of genetic algorithms to generate decisions trees.  This was essentially a program that took nodes from a binary tree and ditched the ones that were not performing and spliced in something with new parameters.

Also evidently some cities use RFID tags on trash cans to indicate when they are full and need dumping.  Evidently the future happened when I was looking the other way.  More later.