Is this the best possible use of a car and an iPad?

Did someone talked about gamification of the driving experience?

The clock ticks on

Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy Gear Smartwatch.
Does someone still wear watches these days?
Does this mean that I'll have another device to charge every night with another different charger?
Fail or Feat?

Steam on your car dashboard

Following up my post on car driving gamification, I'm going to push it a little further.
Using data from GPS, the car will be able to rate our driving style:
did we drove on that uphill curvy road optimally?
By uploading driving data, it will be possible to compare them with other drivers that drove the same road and crown a real "king of the hill".

Are we going to see Steam on our infotainment systems?

Will we get Steam achievements while driving?

The gamification of the driving experience

Driving an hybrid car is a different experience from driving a traditional car.
Silence and smoothness are the prevailing sensations.

An hybrid car is a complex system that provides statistics while driving, like instant and average mileage, battery status, traction type (electric/gasoline/mixed).
All that information seems to foster the driver to improve himself.
Driving an hybrid car may turn into a satisfactory experience, even if by different standards from a traditional car.
Should the automotive industry bet on gamification of the driving experience, providing even more feedback to the driver?
The gamification is already in place in sites like spritmonitor: dashboard integration is the next logical step.
Will driving pleasure be measured by these new factors rather than old parameters like acceleration and horsepower?

Do they still matter when 80% of your driving is in slow moving traffic?

Attack of the QWERTY Androids

Android phones with full QWERTY physical keyboards are virtually non-existent.
Samsung has one low-spec phone targeted at the young chat addicted, HTC has none, the last Motorola is the years-old Droid.
No interesting phones in sight either.
As more and more businesses are ditching Blackberry as Yahoo in http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409780,00.asp, someone in charge will finally realize that doing serious email work on a touch keyboard is false promise.
Will we see more QWERTY Android phones in the near future?

Apple's Fusion Drive

It looks like someone has long sight:

This:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
is precisely this:
http://pleasedonttouchthescreen.blogspot.it/2012/05/defrag-tools-are-on-verge-of-extinction.html

"I finally cracked it"

There's one feature that will be killer on a TV:
rolling back the news ticker

I always arrive late at reading the scrolling text, so I read the last words of something that seems interesting, wondering what it's all about, and I need to wait for it to return again.
I dream of a button on the remote that rolls back only that part of the screen, and lets you read the full sentence again.

As usual, I'm writing it here and now, so I can become a patent troll when Sony or Samsung or even Apple will really implement that.

How this could be done, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Goodbye Euro?

It's since 2002 that euro is a running currency, but it seems that RaiNews24 still hasn't updated its broadcasting font:

Oh, wait... maybe they know something we don't know yet?

Goodbye defrag, hello (again) HSM.

Defrag tools are on the verge of extinction.
SSD drives are making them superfluous when not plain disruptive.
But SSD sizes are not catching up anytime soon with conventional HDs. Multimedia files are filling up gigabytes of space and their placement on solid state drives is too expensive, while benefits are minimal for occasional access.
What is really needed is a hierarchical file system that can handle multiple drives at once.
A big mechanical HD would be paired with an SSD drive.
Frequently accessed sectors would be replicated on the SSD for faster access. All writes should be directed on the SSD for faster I/O completion. Files would then be written back to the HD in the background while optimizing placement and seeks of the magnetic head.
Hybrid disks like the Seagate Momentus seems to be moving that way, but a really small cache limits its benefit.
A software solution at the file system level can be more flexible by allowing mixing different sizes of SSD and HD, and a higher level of abstraction may allow better optimization than a simple cache.
After virtualization, is this another Mainframe technology going from datacenters to homes?

DailyTech - Honda, University of Tokyo Create Preventative Traffic Jam System

DailyTech - Honda, University of Tokyo Create Preventative Traffic Jam System

This study aims at reducing traffic jams by suggesting driving behavior to the driver.
It's interesting they're using Italy as a test case, but I bet it will fail: Italian drivers are notoriously "road warriors" that don't accept advices while driving.

Unity redemption?

So, I wasn't at fault when I criticized Unity Launcher: 12.04 introduces the top-left-corner activation that solves the "browser back button" syndrome.

The Mobile Browser Syndrome

Ever since I've become acquainted with browsing the web on my Android phone, I've began showing the following unvoluntary behavior: while browsing a web site on my desktop PC, I just double click the text column, expecting it to zoom full screen, as it happens on a mobile browser.
I've come to the idea that it wouldn't be bad.
And it seems I'm not the only one.
What browser will be the first one to actually implement it?
I'd bet on IE, as probably it'll use the same code base for the desktop and the tablet version in Windows 8.

Who controls the remote control?

Would you click on allow?

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/03/aghast-at-avasts-iyogi-support/

The original story is about exploiting free product support by trying to sell premium support on non-existent issues.
Would you allow a complete stranger full control over your PC?

I've made some tests myself with two of the most prominent remote support offering: WebEx and Teamviewer.
WebEx does not allow unattended download of files: each file should be explicitly shared by the owner.
Teamviewer, instead, allows full filesystem access, and a file transfer request from the controlling end, opens a notification window on the remote side with full logging. Sadly that window can be minimized and can be easily ignored by a less expert user.

I'm not saying here that Teamviewer GmbH will exploit your computer, but there's a chance that someone using it, could.

So much for the corporate level support, but there is a whole market for personal connectivity.
I was browsing the appstore for an RDP/VNC app to control my PC, and I saw that there are plenty. Some of them even require you to install an host component on the target PC. Apparently this trend has been fueled by Microsoft, by disabling Remote Desktop on the Home edition of the latest Windows versions.
What kind of guarantee the user has that the host and the remote app don't do anything suspicious?
Most of them, don't even connect directly the client to the server, but use some kind of external gateway, to overcome NAT issues.
This a classic man-in-the-middle scheme.
Do you trust their encryption?
Do they keep a copy of your remote control session?
Nearly all of this remote control apps have file transfer capabilities:
Once you have given full access to your pc, how much it takes for the "man-in-the-middle" to download browser history, password cache, "My Documents" folder?

So, by looking at my cristal ball, I may say that the next wave of phishing malware will come in the form of free remote control tools.

Behavioural Adaptive Driving

Lately I'm being interested into hybrid cars.
It seems that you can optimize your fuel consumptions with some careful driving, like anticipating an impending slope or recovering energy from braking before a stop.
I think there's some room for improvement: with a GPS, a street map with altitude information also, and by recording usual routes with an onboard computer, the system may suggest actions or even control the engine to cope with incoming kinetic energy demand or surplus.
So, by learning daily commute habits, the system may know that 500 meters from now, you're going to brake at a crossroad, so it may be possible to stop the engine from charging the battery, as it will be charged anyway by the impending brake.

I'm just writing it here now, so I can become a patent troll in the next few years when this idea will be implemented.