We are getting closer to the world’s biggest games convention which will run from Wednesday August 15th through the 19th in Cologne. Gamescom will feature tons of goodies including a festival with music , Retro-Exhibitions, the Speakers’ Corner, Job & Career Locations, and not to mention all the exhibitor booths as well. I hope your as excited as we are to see all the latest and greatest from Gamescom!
Bill Gates Gets Involved With Toilets
Bill Gates has decided to get involved with a re-invention of the toilet. “No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet, ” said, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global development program.
She mentioned that the toilet only reached about one-third of the world. Over a billion people defecate out into the open which causes major health impacts in many places around the world. Over a million children die each year from diarrhea due to contact with human feces. The foundation is helping the effort to solve this issue by putting $42 million in grants to find better ways of capturing and containing waste. Some ideas included turning human waste into fuel and having waterless toilets that don’t need a large sewer system to operate.
Even though he has stepped down from Microsoft, Bill Gates continues to be very actively involved in using his resources to help solve global issues.
Are Days of the Desktop Computer Numbered?
As I look around at so many smart phones and super light weight and thin laptops of today’s world, I can’t help but imagine the desktop computer fading out of the picture. For the longest time, it was said that laptops just don’t have enough power to do everything a desktop can.
Aside from making calls, mobile devices at best were used for mini-games, calculating a tip or text messaging. As our chips have become smaller and our wireless networks more advanced, we see our world becoming more connected while at the same time we become less connected, that is, in a wireless sense. I can do just about anything I need from my laptop and heck just about anything I need with my smart phone. Let’s not forget about the in between products like tablets, these things are great for handling day to day business and if I’m feeling bored at lunch I can open up my favorite game and update my achievements from anywhere.
To go even deeper, our devices look to become a nothing but a shell, a shell that connects to the cloud. The cloud won’t just be for storage either. Cloud computers may soon handle our processing needs. There is talk of cloud gaming in which our televisions connect to remote hardware to play our favorite titles. Cloud gaming would be a dream come true for developers who will no longer need to port from system to system or wonder how well the game will look and perform on a given machine. Why make thousands of small somewhat powerful devices when you can have everyone just plug into one massively powerful and connected “mega device”. It really can get hard to wrap your head around such a future.
There is however something that bothers me about this change. Perhaps it is the geek in me, but building my own machine is just the kind of weekend project I look forward to. Maybe there will be a market for custom built mobile devices with different CPU architectures for the same phones, a kind of a-la carte mobile experience for the uber geek in some of us or perhaps we focus our efforts elsewhere with the cloud. Mobile is guiding our future in computing faster than ever before and I can’t wait to see how this all evolves.
Wifi Analyzer
This handy little app will help you optimize your wireless network as well as find others with ease, and all for the great price of free. You can get this Android app from Google Play and start optimizing your wireless network immediately.
Besides being fun this app is useful when trying to pin down which wifi channels are less crowded. It has an easy to read display with good amount of customizable features. With the the Scan interval option set at its shortest you can watch your signal increase or decrease in near real time. One of the view options included is the signal strength over time which i found quite useful when checking for interference. This app is simple but very useful and for free its definately worth checking out.
The Nvidia Tegra 3
The Tegra 3 is one powerful little chip, featuring four cores plus a fifth “power saver” core to create what Nvidia is calling Super 4-PLUS-1™ which provides power when needed by enabling and disabling cores based on workload. The chip is made to deliver console quality gaming and superior HD video.
If your not familiar with this chip, this is the work horse behind the new Google Nexus 7.
The big thing I personally see with this chip when going through all of its specs are the all the power saving features and efforts to improve overall responsiveness. Mobile devices like the Nexus 7 have been noted for smooth performance, Nvidia attributes the smooth feel to its DirectTouch™ architecture that is designed to improve touch responsiveness by handing a portion of the touch processing onto the Tegra 3 processor.
The overall feel of the device has long been a deciding factor for me when choosing mobile devices. It really takes alot away from the experience even when there is a small amount of lag when navigating.
The Tegra 3 is also inside many other devices including the Acer Iconia Tab A510, Asus Transformer Pad TF300 and the Toshiba Excite 10 Tablet.