Technocracy of retards

Like almost every year did I pilgrim to this giant exposition in Hanover called CeBit. And like almost every year before was I not expecting much. Just to avoid the frustrating moment of pure disappointment about the things I’ve seen and/or not seen. And my assumptions were proven to be correctly.

It was by far the most boring and most uninspired exposition I’ve visited for years. A majority of the booths were the same. No real innovations were to be seen and a lot of things I’ve seen were simply displaced. I mean, why can I visit halls and halls of senseless gadget stuff and accessories on an exposition that was once mainly focused on the “big business”?

This big business is almost gone. Big manufacturers just appear on CeBit just to be there because people expect them to be there. No matter if there’s something worth to present or not. The amount of young kids storming the CeBit is another weird point that summons my dislike. I was once a young kid to that stroke on CeBit, but I was also a technology-phile kid that was interested in the stuff that could be seen there. These days, young kids just get there to get a day off school and collect useless crap.

On the other hand, and without a doubt, the time for real innovations in computer science is gone and over. The standard that we’ve reached in technology these days has reached such a high level, that it’s almost impossible to place a product on the market that makes people jaws drop. The last product that has gained such a high attention was the iPod and the iPhone. Even though those two weren’t actually real innovations. More a demonstration of how to do a perfectly initiated marketing campaign for a product that lacks of true innovations and improvement and to some degree already exist on the market. For e.g. multi tasking was one of the features that came with one iPhone, highly branded as THE new innovation, where BlackBerry and even Android users were just sitting there face palming.

But one of the main problems these days is also that a wide majority is simply too dumb to understand today’s technology even though they are using it each and every day. A problem case that I seriously cannot understand. It’s like driving a car without knowing what the steering wheel is good for. One can also notice this problem when you take a closer look at some students and apprentices these days. Most of just swallow facts without understanding how things match together. More and more do I get the impression that the world is drowning in a huge idiocracy.

What’s the conclusion for all these things mentioned? Well, finally, there’s no conclusion. The exposition was boring. Innovation time is over. The youth leads us into a dark and progressively stupid future.

Androidify me

Reading, researching, experimenting, reading, researching and sometimes you fail and sometimes you gain success. Due to the fact that the evenings are getting colder and darker I turned to some more home oriented hobbies. Actually, ninety per cent of my hobbies happen at home, but that’s another story.

Back in the days I hated working on phones and tweak them or whatever. You system memory was ridiculously tiny and the processor was some kind of a joke. Nowadays mobile phones and especially smart phones come up with one or two cores and a clock rate beyond 1,000MHz. And additionally, we were gifted with a RAM that can take more than just 64KB.

My passion are Android phones and the Android operating system. I’ve started with a entry model, a Motorola Backflip MB300. I did a lot of counterproductive to this phone, but it survived without waving the white flag and surrendering. Right now it runs CyanogenMOD 7.1 which is based on Android 2.3.7. This makes this phone pretty bleeding edge and totally bad ass. Anyhow, this phone is slow. Patience is what you need to tweak and hack this ugly thing.

I switched to an HTC Desire S as my new main phone. It also runs CyanogenMOD 7.1. I’m not planning to run a lot of ROMs on this phone. After having struggled so much with the Backflip I want at least one phone that is highly available. My next “big thing” is a Motorola Defy. This will be the phone for my next evil experiments. I’ve found a used one really cheap on Amazon and it’ll hopefully be delivered.

If you want to ask what makes Android so interesting to me, it’s basically the way endless possibilities to customize your phone. On iOS for instance you have one store to get your software. You have only one interface that you can use. If you want to have something special or something the Appstore does not offer, you have to jailbreak your device. The iPad I once had was a jailbreaked one and it was terribly monotone anyway. Appstore alternatives were terrible and most of the apps that should modify the GUI made minor changed not worth to mention.

Windows mobile is not an option. The overall design of and the usability of the phone is decades behind the today’s state of art. As far as I’ve seen the GUI, it’s a giant step backward and far from transparent. I don’t like such things. But discussing this could lead to a discussion like “Windows vs. Linux”

Would lead to nothing and is in the end a matter of taste and user skill. Whatever the case, I’ll hopefully get the Defy pretty soon and experiment with it. I’ll keep you informed about my evil plans.