08:05 PM by Francesco in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

In a recent thread I got into troubles trying to explain what was "The emperor's new mind" about. Well, it seems it wasn't enough for me, as I try now to review "On intelligence", by Jeff Hawkins.
Ballistic pointed out this book to me. Before reading his post (in that same thread) I hadn't heard anything about Hawkins. This is the man behind the desing of the PalmPilot, Visor and Treo devices. That information sufficed to interest me in that book. I waited and waited until it was available in electronic format and bought it right away. This is the first eBook I ever buy, and I preferred the electronic format for one thing: IMMEDIATE delivery (beat that, paper books! LOL). This was an impulsive buy. I left the DRM concerns aside, I'll deal with that later. Just like with DVDs: as long as the bits are there, someone will find a way.
In this book, Hawkins explains his approach to the way the brain works. His approach, as he mentions right from the beginning, is built upon several previous theories. The objective is to provide a general frame to relate all the disperse works of people studying the brain from different fields in biology. His plan is to understand the brain from a biological point of view, before attempting to simulate its works artificially.
After the prologue, he moves onto explaining why he believes artificial intelligence is doomed and that no matter how fast and powerful a computer might be built, AI in its current approach will never be close to our intelligence. He call his theory "real intelligence". I admire this man.
The most important idea in this book is the concept of intelligence proposed: intelligence is not only the way the mind processes the data received by the senses, but also the ability to predict what will be perceived. The brain constructs the reality around by perceiving and predicting simultaneously. Perception and prediction are very similar phenomena going in opposite directions.
Prediction is built upon memories, or invariant representations, as he calls them. Invariant representations might be compared to Plato's ideals: abstractions of all the forms in the world (cups, staircases, etc.). Forms, situations, words, sounds, etc.
I have to say he convinced me right from chapter one that intelligence can be built. I said it couldn't be done. I guess I'm too easy.
This prediction theory has had a big influence in me, and now I relate every working of my brain to it. It's really funny.
The book is written very clearly, and you don't need any specific background to understand it. Heck, this is a book by the same guy who invented the PalmPilot! It means it's simple and straighforward.
I drifted away many times from the book, thinking about my own experiencies and hypothesis, and that talks very well about a book, I believe. It made me think a lot.
If you want more info about "On intelligence", you might want to check its site: onintelligence.org,it contains an excerpt, bios, a forum to discuss your opinions, and a form you can fill to contact the authors (the book was coauthored by Sandra Blakeslee).
On "The art of seeing", Aldous Huxley proposes an exercise consisting in looking at letters, at various distances and one at a time, trying to "memorize" the way they look. The result is not an increased chance to guess the letters you see, but an actually improved sight. This fits so well into the prediction model I had to tell the author. I did, and am still waiting a reply. Isn't Internet a sweet thing?
One last word, I was ultimately inspired by the Read/Write Web to post this review, whose author recently posted a link to his site. The concept behind Read/Write Web is that recently, the web finally became what it should be: a communication channel not only to receive information, but to publish it as well (from the point of view of the common user, of course). And that's what I just did.

09:38 PM by ricmac in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I did an interview with Tim O'Reilly, which I published in 3 parts over on my personal blog Read/Write Web. MobileRead regulars may be interested especially in Part 3, where Tim discusses eBooks and book publishing in general in the 21st century.

08:28 PM by cbarnett in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Gowerpoint have just released the newest version of ubook - version 0.9a.

Here's what's new (from the website):

# Added Install program for all versions.
# Added Swap Colors option (Back <-> Text; Easy Mode only)
# Added Auto-Scroll as a choice for Hardware Buttons (Pocket PCs)
# Added Support for new VGA screens on Pocket PCs (640x480)
# Added skin scaling control
# Improved Image zooming by allowing to define the zoom-in zone.
# Changed Auto-Open to look for a file with "index" or "toc" sub-string first.
# Fixed rounding errors, crashes, annoyances and corruptions. See download page.

Future features planned:

# i-book - Ability to easily read images-book, i.e. book made of images only, like magazine scans or comic books.
# Images Annotations - Ability to add annotations to images
# Table of Illustrations - Summary of all images in a book and their annotations.
# Export/Import of Annotations to file.
# e-books Catalog - Ability to catalog the content of CDs (or other removeable media)
# CHM compressed HTML support
# Improved PDB/PRC support
# Multiple User support.
# Export/Import of Configurations - Ability to easily carry your configuration, annotations from one machine to another through the internet.
# Multi-Lingual User Interface for Latin-1 languages.

One important point, is that ubook, from this version on, is now a shareware product. A licence costs $12US and works for all versions of the reader. The unlicenced version is not crippled in any way, but pops up an about screen every now and then. Licenced users also get access to other goodies like the larger versions of the 1913 Websters dictionary (> 3MB), more skins, and the promise of more stuff to come.

In my opinion, $12 is pretty reasonable for a product of this quality, and the level of support from David at Gowerpoint is excellent. I've already registered...

Craig.

04:34 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There's an interesting discussion going on at Pocket PC Thoughts.

As you are probably aware, Handango is one of the top PDA software web stores. It has recently boasted some positive press regarding it's success.

The topic of discussion is a change in the way Handango determines the best selling software. Instead of counting the number of copies sold, they have just converted to counting the most revenue produced by the sales. As a result there is a large bias towards the higher priced software, especially when it's not discounted.

It could be argued that this is a way to avoid some of the problems associated with titles getting too popular due to price cuts that don't last, but one has to think that the primary motivation is to get the biggest revenue producing titles high on the list. That's a powerful marketing tool, so I'm sure they want to get the most profitable titles the best publicity.

03:52 PM by sUnShInE in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Did you know that you can watch movies on your Photo iPod?

Well, not really, but you can patch together a type of custom flip book, by scroll-wheeling through thousands of pics, creating the illusion of a movie.

Time on your hands? Cool use of your 'spensive toy? (Yea, maybe to both...) Either way, it's a tip to Apple of what we gadgetphreaks are a'hankerin' for!

Read about it via Engadget.

11:59 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PDAmill has just released its biggest and probably best game so far: Arvale: Journey of Illusion. The game includes over 20 hours of gameplay, six immense continents with 280 maps to explore, 200 different monsters to fight against, and over a hundred different items, weapons, and magic spells to use.

For more info, check out the PocketGamer review and the PDArcade review.

A test version is available for download.

In this regard, we would like to wish Peter Balogh from PDAMill all the best for his upcoming wedding!!

08:17 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Intel has a technote explaining why Pocket PC games may run relatively slow on the VGA-enabled Axim x50v:

These types of applications are not natively capable of operating effectively in a VGA system, as they will only draw to a QVGA resolution display area. As such, a VGA-aware operating system (like Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition for Pocket PC) “translates”, via software, graphics accesses from a QVGA-specific application into the display area of a VGA system.

This enables applications that are coded with an assumption of QVGA to operate effectively in a VGA system. However, the operating system “translation” to VGA adds significant processing overhead. As a result, any measurement tests that are specifically designed to QVGA will show abnormal results when run on a VGA system. This is explicitly due to the overhead in the operating system associated with turning those QVGA-based calls into VGA-aware calls.

At least there is an unofficial solution to this problem: use a tweaked GAPI driver (more info).

06:57 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A follow-up to our recent PalmOne discussions (here and here): David Berlind from ZDNet explains why PalmOne may already have caused a devastating blow to PalmSource:

Since the beginning of this month, when Needham & Co. issued a research report that said PalmOne had "tacitly admitted" it was going to use PocketPC in its Treos, PalmSource's stock has dropped by over 30 percent. I've been hypercritical of PalmSource's failure to fully embrace Java as its primary development platform, thereby giving the more than three million developers that work in Java guaranteed access to the PalmOS market. My commmentary drew a response from PalmSource product marketing vice president Charlie Tritschler who tried to convince me otherwise. I'm still not convinced. Now, with PalmOne on the verge of making its decision, it may be too late.