I always read news articles in technical magazines. Some are both believable and have potential to be commercially viable, but usually the researchers at universities make announcements that are so weird that if I was directly involved I would only announce them on April Fool's Day.

Here is one that I read today:

A team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a unique type of camera lens, composed of a pair of water droplets which vibrate upon exposure to sound, thereby changing the lens's focus. Although liquid lenses are not new, this system doesn't attempt to maintain focus the way other designs do. Instead, it captures images in a continuous stream. Because the lenses are constantly vibrating, some frames are in focus and some are not, and advanced imaging software ignores the blurry frames and retains the in-focus ones. Consuming less energy than traditional lenses and capable of capturing 250 pictures per second, the technology could find its way into systems such as cellphones, automobiles, miniature spy planes and autonomous robots.

What hints that the story is flawed is that it "could find its way into automobiles" - ha ha, cars don't use camera lenses.

Obviously students are just doing this sort of 'research' to earn their qualifications - but why do the professors allow such futile projects? Well, it turns out that it is the professors that are doing the research and it was U.S. National Science Foundation that funded the project. Go figure!

I have been a radio ham since my teens, but never thought of this until my daughter asked me today; "why is long distance radio called short wave?". Well, in radio broadcasting, 'Long wave' is used for medium distance, 'Medium wave' is used for short distance, and 'Short wave' is used for long distance. (Actual distances depend on factors that are seemingly totally unrelated to wavelength, such as sun spots and the time of day.)

And, while the longer waves are use for small amounts of data transmission, it is the 'Micro waves' that can carry huge amounts of data.

It's the same with computers - the smaller they get the more powerful they can be. Science can be so mystical! I love it.

I realised today that artificial intelligence can be far more intelligent than human intelligence. But not because AI is humanlike.

The fact is that humans are not all that intelligent. Humans think relatively slowly and make many mistakes. Humans also suffer from delusions, paranoia and other psychoses. Humans tend to 'think' with their hearts rather than their brains. If humans were reasonably intelligent we would all agree with each other, there would be no arguments as to how best to spend money or who has the best political policies. There would be no civil unrest and no wars.

To prove the point, Vodacom recently rolled out a "Content Adaption" system. CA has the job of "reformatting web pages on-the-fly to fit better on small screen devices (SSD) and thus give an easier browsing experience."

Further quoting an article by a Vodacom spokesperson:

The idea is to seamlessly take the HTML stream between the SSD and the web site and reformat the layout of the page to fit better on the SSD.

Especially, it should make navigating the site easier by removing the need to pan all over the original page.

It will also reduce the amount of traffic flowing down to the SSD as the CA takes place on the Vodacom network and only the resultant new, small screens are sent down to the SSD and are counted as part of your data use.

To do this, the SSD must first connect to an intermediated box where the CA will take place. This box will then connect to the requested web site on the internet, retrieve the web pages, re-format them and then pass it down to the SSD.

This concept of implementing intermediate, in-line devices in the data stream to perform specific functions is well known and employed by all ISP's. Examples include Firewalls, Virus Scanners, Caching Engines and Proxy Servers. These boxes all perform some important function, either to improve the customer experience, reduce network traffic or both. The CA engine is just another of these in-line engines albeit with quite a complex task; trying to think like a human!!

I believe that they succeeded admirably in "trying to think like a human". It was a big mistake. They should rather have left it alone.

A survey on the mybroadband.co.za web site showed that only 1 out of 35 respondents found the CA system to be successful.

This must be a good test for artificial intelligence. And it also includes engineering, electronics and programming challenges. These tiny autonomous robots have been programmed to play soccer.

See the RoboCup website by clicking on the related link.

Microsoft Vista is generally considered to be an 'Operating System'. According to Webopedia, an operating system is:

"The most important program that runs on a computer. Every general-purpose computer must have an operating system to run other programs. Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.



"For large systems, the operating system has even greater responsibilities and powers. It is like a traffic cop -- it makes sure that different programs and users running at the same time do not interfere with each other. The operating system is also responsible for security, ensuring that unauthorized users do not access the system."

Now Vista does a good job as an operating system, and Microsoft should be congratulated for that. But unfortunately Microsoft saw fit to add much, much more to Vista than just what can be called parts of an operating system.

I think the main trouble is that Microsoft makes its own graphical user interface (GUI) inseparable from Vista. It is arguable whether the user interface is the job of an operating system or not. I think it should be optional because otherwise it ties one down to Microsoft's own version of GUI while at the same time hiding the lower level control from the user.

Most of the bad things about Vista, all the irritation, and all the difficulties that I know of, are related to the user interface rather than the operating system itself. My complaints fall into two main categories:

• Difficulty of finding the function or option that you want because of the huge number of options available.
• The artificial intelligence that is built into the menus, dialog boxes and 'widgets causes behavior that is not always welcome. And this is exacerbated by the unsolicited automatic updates that change appearance or behavior of GUI controls.

The problems start with the Start menu. This shows a list of the programs that you have used so that you can easily access them again - but the user has no real control of this. Open the wrong program accidentally and the new, unwanted, program gets recorded on the quick access list. Apart from searching the registry, where I guess Microsoft keeps that sort of data, I could find no way of deleting it. (I since discovered that you have full control by right-clicking the item.) The only option was a check box to 'Show' these items. Well, anything seemed better than having that unwanted icon, so I unchecked the Show box. This removed all the old icons that I had been using for months. No, let me rather have the one unwanted icon together with all the ones that I do use. But, checking the Show box again made no difference - the careful collection of icons were lost.

The Windows Explorer suddenly began showing all sorts of properties that may suit a music folder. The properties that I need - size and modification dates - were now hidden. I never did find a global preferences setting and so have been changing them one at a time. And why have they added the extra little selection buttons to control the sort order? What was wrong with the simpler method of clicking on the heading?

In spite of the huge size and profusion of options, many of the messages and dialog boxes limit the amount of technical data that is presented to the user. For example, if you want to set up a blutooth modem you are totally dependent on Vista's choice of virtual comm port. Sometimes it works. It would be nice if it would grant the user some intelligence.

In short; Vista is fatware that wants to be cleverer than me and I hate it for both of those things.