Amazon's Invisible Phone?

Amazon are apparently making a phone. With some kind of 3d thing going on. Involving 4 cameras on the front, working out where you are.
This doesn't actually make anything 3d.
What would be very cool is an invisible phone. This is entirely possible. It just requires the phone's display to show what's behind it - I.e. the view as seen by the camera on the back. This isn't terribly effective (despite the (dis) appearance of the Aston Martin "Vanish") unless the viewer, screen, and background are nicely aligned. But with the addition of eye tracking, a much more realistic "invisibility" effect can be produced by compensating for the change in viewing angles.
I really hope amazon have thought of that. I will find out in about 10 days.

(The point of an invisible phone is mainly just because it looks cool. But also you can then have text and graphics apparently floating in mid-air. Augmented reality that can actually be useful, like Google Glass.)

Predicting the future

It's easy!

Here's the new iPad pro from 2014.  it's a 'new' A4 form factor.
It was made available with TouchID, 32-256 Gb memory, 4Gb internal RAM, and a 64-bit A7X processor.  With a starting price of $999, the range now overlaps with a basic Macbook Air.
There was some controversy over whether Apple would launch a new keyboard to complement this product.

One step closer to replacing the trad paper document.  Although in many uses, an eink display (as used by Sony's A4 gadget) is much nicer.

(A4 is a paper size used everywhere in the world* because of it's magic property of maintaining its aspect ratio when folded in half.)

* excluding USA.  Where I think they also still have capital punishment, too.

Incomplete ontology

I'm no good at maths. But Kurt Goedel was. As far as I remember he said something about the proof of a formal system always lying outside itself. Incompleteness.
 I was always interested in Anselm's ontological argument, too. Its says something like this: God must actually exist because it's better if He actually exists than if we just made Him up. And because He is by definition perfect, and so "better", then he must actually exist.
OK, not a lot of people find that convincing. I did once read a book by Alvin Plantinga on a many-worlds version of the same idea. But that was a long time ago.
Anyway, it turns out that if you put together Goedel's incompleteness with Anselm's ontology, formalize it and run it through computer software than analyses stuff like that, there's really no problem in asserting that God must exist.
According to these guys, anyway... Link to Cnet article

Prezi service

This is excellent work. I must try creating with Prezi some time.

Hypervisor dreams - or what you can do with 64 bits

Long ago, in a processor far away, there were two parallel sets of registers.  By the magic of EXX, you could hide the current register set in a safe place, and work using another set.
I haven't looked at an ARM instruction set recently, but I expect there's something similar.  Probably working by switching the high and low 32 bits of a register around.  So each 64 bit register becomes a set of two, 32-bit registers.
So what could be achieved by doing this?
In the old days you could do interrupt processing.  When an interrupt happens, the current working registers are switched out, the interrupt is processed, and the registers switched back.
Or you could run two 32-bit apps at once by switching between 32-bit register "sets".
Or the OS could use one register set, and the app another.  Now that would be useful.  Is this what Apple are doing in iOS7?
These are variations on a hypervisor theme.
They are deep mysteries, the answers to which even iOS developers are not privy.

Why the Commodore 64 was 64

Many years ago, I used to program 8-bit computers.  The first thing to know about them is that they were 16-bit computers.  Sort of.  The Z80 inside the ZX Spectrum had 16-bit registers (the things that actually do the work inside the processor), and a 16-bit address bus.  A 16-bit address bus means you can specify any one of  65536 RAM (memory) locations to store or retrieve a number.  65536 is commonly approximated and abbreviated to 64K.  Hence the name of the Commodore 64.
Similarly, 16 bit registers mean you can work with numbers (integers) in the range 0-65535.  This is a very useful range of numbers for most things you'd want to count.
But then along came 32-bit processors, allowing a number range of up to 4 billion.  Not many calculations need to use numbers that big.  (And anyway, FPUs came in about the same time allowing you to do calculations with non-integers for things like calculating the national debt down to the last penny.) 32 bit processors can access 4 billion memory locations, today known as 4 Gigabytes. Smartphones like the iPhone5S currently have less than 4GBytes of RAM anyway, so 64-bit addressing is irrelevant.
But people have more memory than that in desktop computers, so the next step up was to go with 64 bits. Which is really overkill for almost everything.  (48 bits would have done the trick for real-world amounts of RAM.)
As far as the registers in the processor go, there's not a lot you can do with 64 bits that you couldn't do with 32.  Unless you can swap the high and low ends around.  Which effectively gives you more registers. This is a good thing because the more registers in the CPU, the less you have to access memory.  Memory access is slow, which is bad.
So Apples's new A7 processor basically has twice the CPU internal memory of the A6.  Which makes it faster.  If it's used.  Which it probably won't be.  Unless...

Must stop thinking about Apples

Can't help thinking that Apple have really messed up with the iPhone 5C. It would have made sense had it been about $100 cheaper than it is. But pricing it only about two monthly payments short of the S is just dumb. Wall Street seems to think so too. I really hope it's not just plain greed.

And what are those 'croc' cases? Jony spends a whole video explaining how nice the plastic is. Then they decide to cover it up? And the holes aren't even in the right places! Apples logo hole? iPhone wording hole? No.

It all smacks of "committee" to me.

I hope the 6 will come in bright plastic colours, with the fingerprint sensor too. And NFC. And a bigger screen.
Sad to think Apple may have totally lost it by this time next year. They really need some innovation this October.