High Tech Ramblings

We hear a lot about extinctions happening all over the globe, but what is happening with White Rhinos is right in our face. Let me start by saying the Czech Republic zoo had tried to save this species by flying 3 White Rhinos over to East Africa and prodding them to go to the savannah grasses of Mount Kenya. The 3 White Rhinos were half of all the White Rhinos left in the world from this region. Yes that’s right we are down to 6 animals. It turned out the one male and two females flown to Africa are not going to reproduce naturally and the last hope is artificial insemination. Alastair Lucas who was the previous vice chairman of Goldman Sachs in Australia had donated $100,000 to the project. The animals are thriving just not reproducing. It has been determined the sperm count of the male White Rhino is very low and the females cannot get pregnant or carry a pregnancy to term.Β  There are still other species of White Rhinos living in southern Africa, but none in central Africa. What we might be witnessing is the end of the White Rhino species native to central Africa.

Twitter no longer has more people following it than Instagram, which has beat it out. Instagram claims it now has more than 300 million monthly users while twitter has 284 million. Linkedin has 330 plus million monthly users and may soon be passed by Instagram. What does all this mean? Possibly it could mean people like social networks and the one which has the newest and best tricks will get the most people. It is being said Instagram has hit an incredible number which is more than 70 million shared photos and videos every day.

Sometimes new scourges come from the least expected places. Who would have thought caffeine powder would have been something kids would have wanted to sniff? Not only that, but I don’t think many of us thought of it as a deadly substance. It has been said only one teaspoon full can kill. It turns out not only kids are taking it, but also adults. Originally it was marketed as a pick-me-up before workouts or to control weight, but now the FDA has stated it is impossible for people at home to measure it accurately. The symptoms of caffeine poisoning are rapid or erratic heartbeat, seizures, vomiting, diarrhea and disorientation. I hope hearing these symptoms will stop others from taking it.

Apple software always suffered from being beat out by Microsoft in the business world. This may be about to change as a joint Apple-IBM venture is yielding its first set of business apps. These are mobile apps and were created for specific enterprises. The industries include airlines, banking, financial services, government, insurance, retail and telecommunications. The first companies to jump on them were Air Canada, Banorte, Citi and Sprint. While this is a big step, it will be a hard uphill battle for Apple which is trying to put a big dent in the world of Microsoft which has been supplying business software almost since computers were installed in businesses. IBM will provide the support for the apps and Apple will supply the support for the devices.

Pirate Bay is one of the world’s best known sources for pirated content and one has to wonder how they have been getting away with it. Well that was in the past, because the police have seized their servers in Stockholm. They had become the target of a group which fights internet crime. The group made a formal complaint to the police and that is the reason for the raid. As hard as this is to believe, it was said the police found a data center inside a former power substation and it had thousands of servers in it. Pirate Bay has been operating for more than 10 years. It is said because of its operations billions of dollars of losses were incurred on copyrighted material. Pirate Bay moved to the cloud two years ago and spread servers throughout the world so I don’t think we have seen the last of them.

Don’t try and download the new free Ultra HD content from Amazon or Netflix to a computer screen, because it is not happening. What you will get is 1080P which is known as High Definition. The two services don’t think Ultra HD should go onto computers because of their security. I guess they don’t want it copied or streamed somewhere else.

The recent cyber-attack on Sony which was first thought to be by North Korea, and later denied by them is estimated to have cost the company at least 100 million dollars.

China has told Apple in can sell in China as long as it protects users’ privacy. I wish we had this rule in this country.
AMD the chip maker has come out with a new driver. Ho hum you say. This may be more exciting than you give it credit for. The reason I am saying this is the driver has more new features than anyone can remember before. It has virtual super resolution giving higher resolution which will be made to fit the screen. FreeSync is added which will straighten out objects by synchronizing the refresh rate for the screen. There are improvements for Dual-Graphics and CrossFire. The Alienware 13 gaming laptop has an external Graphics Amplifier and now there is support for it, so very high end graphics cards and higher graphics processing units in the Graphics Amplifier can boost your gaming. This is not all, besides the estimated 19% higher performance, look for improvements on monitor pictures since 24 Display EyeFinity is supported along with 5K Monitor Support. Many bug fixes have taken place.

The inventor of the first video game console Ralph Baer passed away. He was the developer of the brown box in 1966 which became the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 when it was released. He also developed the first video game peripheral, the light gun along with the electronic game Simon. He once said if he had listened to people 40 years ago who were telling him not to screw around with this stuff we might not be here today. I think he was probably correct.