Self Reassembling Robot

This is very cool but also very scary when you think through the possibilities.

Dell Can't Catch A Break

Dell doesn't seem to be able to catch a break so far this year. In the first bit of bad news, they were ordered to pay $1.5 million in a class action suit involving poor customer service. This suit was filed by the attorney generals of 46 different states. Hey, I always knew that Dell customer service was bad at best but wow.

The second bit of bad news was a slap in the face from none other than Vladimir Putin. At the official opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, Putin gave a 40 minute speak then opened the floor to questions. The first question from from Michael Dell. Mr. Dell asked "How can we help" you to expand IT in Russia. Mr. Putin's rely - "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity." It would seem that the Russian's are also aware of Dell's customer service problems.

Robots Invade Warehouses

Zappos, the large on-line shoe retailer, is now using robots built by Kiva systems to handle their order processing. Zappos claims that the elapsed time from order inception to placing the order on the truck for shipping is now 12 minutes. This represents a paradigm shift in distribution!

Gmail Goes Offline

Many of us have been waiting for this for a long time. Gmail is now available offline. Using a Google Gears download, your computer will automatically sync with the Google servers when you are on-line, and store your Gmail on your hard drive when you are offline.

The cloud is certainly maturing!

Who Needs Spys Anymore?

Who needs spy's anymore when incompetent people let secrets into the wild on electronic devices. You may remember my blog post about a guy that bought a digital camera full of MI6 secrets on eBay. Yesterday a 29 year old named Chris Ogle connected an MP3 player that he bought at a thrift store to his computer. What he found were 60 files of US Army secrets. The government is ignoring this little security breach.

The worst part of this for Mr. Ogle is that the MP3 player will no longer play music.

Is The G-Drive Finally Here?

It has long been rumored that Google plans to offer a service which would allow users to store all of their data in the cloud. This long rumored GDrive may soon be a reality according to an article in the Guardian. This is certainly an exciting paradigm shift in data storage.

Not everyone is excited about this. There are those that feel that a GDrive would pose a security risk. On the other hand, if the data were in the cloud and not on an insecure laptop, security actually increases.

My only real concern is data backups. What happens is one of your documents in the cloud goes missing. My advise to people is to never have only one copy of your data.

The Apple Macintosh is 25 Years Old

It was 25 years ago that the famous Super Bowl ad appeared that introduced the Apple Macintosh. It was directed by Ridley Scott one year after he released Blade Runner. Time certainly flies