The Halo: Reach Beta just became within our reach yesterday early afternoon (EST) or late morning (PST). I was unable to get my hands on it until later last night. The multi-player beta currently provides a mix of solo and team-based matches, sorted into 2 different playlists Grab Bag (4v4) and Free-For-All (8 player FFA). Players can adjust settings based on gaming habits and even how they prefer during online battles.

Overview and Purpose

The iCub robot is a small-size humanoid robot 5 years in the making, being designed by the RobotCub Consortium in Europe in collaboration with a number of European Universities and other partners worldwide. The robot's design was modeled off of a 3.5 year old human child, but when it was originally built robotic hands were not being engineered that size so instead of a 3.5 year old hand they replaced the design with the equivalent of 8 year olds' hands. The general purpose of iCub is to create a robotic child in all meanings of the word. Meaning that iCub has the capability of copying or mimicking complex human actions and teaches itself to learn. In 2009 iCub learned how to play the drums, and the scientists behind it has been quoted saying "it will eventually be capable of mimicking many other human activities, such as walking, negotiating obstacles and sitting up". The groups behind the iCub's creation made this project an open project in different ways to help encourage innovation and creativity while creating a sound design and implementation of both design and engineering.

The Motorola Droid handset is the first Android 2.0 device to become commercially available exclusively on Verizon's 3G Network. The Droid is a high-powered Android phone, maybe the best Android experience to date. It comes with a very large high-resolution screen, a compact design, high-resolution camera, a physical QWERTY keyboard and Google latest build of Android. The Motorola Droid is a Google experience device, meaning that Google helped Motorola's software team on the implementation of the new Android SDK (2.0) which comes preinstalled with all of Google's pristine applications: Gmail, Maps (with voice navigation), Browser (new), Calendar, Contacts, gTalk, Voice Search, YouTube. Google has also added native support for Exchange; however, I have not been able to try this out due to not being connected to an Exchange server. Another big selling point that is being advertised is the new Google Navigation Beta application that comes pre-installed on the Droid with voice to text and vice versa for easy hands free navigation on the go.

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks" and "most of the user experience takes place on the web." That is, it's "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel" with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lays security architecture that's completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update.

Google Chrome OS, What is it exactly? Well besides a very wordy concept that Google has announced to be coming to netbooks in 2010 (a year from now) it is Google's interpretation of the Operating System if it were invented today. Similar to how the Chrome web browser was a reinvention of the web experience, Chrome OS is to be to the Operating System department. Most of the time spent at a computer is using the web browser for use with online tools like: Email, Chat, Music, Movies, Social Networking, Document Creation, Corroboration, and the list goes on. Because of this fact, why do people need this monster hog called an Operating System? Google took this idea and came up with an innovative concept of mixing the browser and the Operating System into one (a kind of mesh if you will). Will it work? Only time will tell.

If you were a little overwhelmed by the 80 minute - Google Wave Demo or if you watched the whole demo and still don't really know what Google Wave is all about. How about this one? It is a really quick, animated 2:14 video posted on YouTube by Epipheo Studios that tried to explain Google Wave in a basic, overly-simplified fashion. Now you will have a quick answer for those people in your life that ask you to explain exactly what Google Wave is and what it does for us.

Wolfram Research, the same people that brought us Mathematica. A knowledge computation engine, instead of showing a list of websites and documents that might contain information on the search query this search engine will attempt to "understand" the query using natural language algorithms. After the engine is able to parse the query into something the machine can understand it will then try to directly compute the answer from structured datasets. This web service was announced just a few weeks ago and has gone live today. You can view their blog which contains information on the launch and other general knowledge of the idea of computational searching.

Classes have started, Intermurals are beginning, and the cold weather is on its way to Rochester. This all means that the RIT campus has all of its students back, everyone and their new iPhone. As most of you know I have never liked any generation of iPod or most of Apples hardware. There is a long list of reasons why this is the case, which I will not get into right now. If you want to know why then just ask me. Anyways coming to my next point. It seems like everyone has one of the new iPhones or an iTouch. When I say everyone I don't really mean everyone because I know many people like myself that do not own one. If you know anything about the new iPhone you need to know this ... that it can "kill" you! Yes, I said that your new beloved $300+ toy can "kill" you. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, confirmed that the new iPhone has secret code hidden in the file system that has one purpose and that is to "kill" anyone that is using the device. His admission came a couple days after a software developer found this code buried in the iPhone's operating system files.

Almost everything in today's world is either made in China, Japan, or Korea. Look at a cell phone, computer, video game system, alarm clock, clothing, automobiles, etc. The list goes on and on. Today many companies are making their products or at least the parts that are required to make the end-user product as cheaply as possible. This is done by either manufacturing the parts or outsourcing the manufacturing to companies in China and other poor developing countries.