BlackBerry 8820 and Curve 8320 Overviews at DigitalLife
Sascha Segan, PC Magazine’s mobile Analyst, gives us a brief overview of the BlackBerry 8820 and Curve 8320 from DigitalLife ‘07.

How to browse the internet with your BlackBerry 8800 The guy definitely looks geeky so it should be useful!

BlackBerry Pearl in 6 Minutes

81dayexperiment
Music
Videos
Ringtones Management
Zoom Technology
Voice Dialing
Calender
Notes
Fantastic Smartphone but much smaller and neater.

Blackberry Pearl 8100 Screen Replacement & Dissection

Phonescoop Blackberry Curve review!

A realy good review with some good tips!

Check the exciting Blackberry Cure for AT&T!
Fantastic
I personally love the solid style style of the BB devices.

Ok could not resist this one, two cats putting pro boxers to shame.
You show em BY an cognac.

Which Blackberry do you prefer?

• The pearl with its flashy street style cool.
• The curve with its again street groove.
• Or the solid 8800 the business persons favorite.

 Off Grid Living

Learning to live off the grid with solar,wind,geothermal.
Hi’
offgrid I’ve been to your site, and I think the content is excellent and very useful.
A good thing would be to target your blog to Energy conservation sites, and companies involved in marketing these products.
Rather than expecting google add sense to do it.
Its much the same as this Blog catalog you got to push your product to those who want to use it to push theirs.
Relative linking and advertising.

Robin Muirhead BSc IS (HONS)
Salford University UK
KCdesigns
ringtone-3g.com

Good luck offgrid nice site, good content.

P.S. many companies now grade their products A B C.. as to their energy conservation qualities.
Your site could make them look very energy clean in the eyes of the public!

offgrids Blog site

http://www.offgrid-living.blogspot.com/

HAL’s history: {Sourced from wikipedia}

HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, after HAL appears to be mistaken about a fault in the spacecraft’s communications antenna, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting his cognitive circuits. They believe that HAL cannot hear them, but are unaware that HAL is capable of lip reading. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL decides to kill the astronauts in order to protect and continue “his” programmed directives. HAL proceeds to kill Poole while he is repairing the ship, and those of the crew in suspended animation by disabling their life support systems.

A view of HAL 9000’s Central Core in the Discovery.

Realizing what has occurred, Bowman then shuts down the machine. HAL’s central core is depicted as a crawlspace full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, HAL’s consciousness degrades. HAL regurgitates material that was programmed into him early in his memory, including announcing the date he became operational as 12 January 1992. By the time HAL’s logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song “Daisy Bell“, which is perhaps the most recognized scene in the film. HAL’s final act of any significance is to prematurely play a prerecorded message from Mission Control which reveals the true reasons for the mission to Jupiter, which had been kept secret from the crew and not been intended to be played until the ship entered Jupiter orbit.

HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two

In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL is restarted by his creator, Dr. Chandra, who arrives on the Soviet spaceship Leonov. Prior to leaving Earth, Dr. Chandra has also had a discussion with HAL’s twin, the SAL9000 (see [1] and section below). Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL’s crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for “the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment”, yet his orders, directly from White House officials, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a “Hofstadter-Moebius loop,” reducing HAL to paranoia. This paranoia produced a creative solution: HAL would not have to withhold information if there were nobody from whom to withhold the information. Ergo, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full and his orders to keep the monolith a secret — nobody remained from whom to keep the secret.

The alien intelligences controlling the monoliths have grandiose plans for Jupiter, plans which place the Leonov in danger. Its human crew devises an escape plan, which unfortunately requires leaving the Discovery and HAL behind, to be destroyed. Dr. Chandra explains the danger, and HAL sacrifices himself for the Leonov’s crew. In the moment of his destruction, the monolith-makers transform HAL into a non-corporeal being, so that David Bowman’s avatar may have a companion.

The details in the book and film are nominally the same, with one important exception: in the film, HAL functions normally after being reactivated. In the book, it is revealed that his voice circuits were destroyed during the shutdown, forcing him to communicate through screen text. Also, in the film the Leonov crew lies to HAL about the dangers that he faced (suspecting that if he knew he would be destroyed he wouldn’t initate the engine-burn necessary to get the Leonov back home), whereas in the novel he is told right at the outset. However, in both cases the suspense comes from what HAL will do when he knows that he may be destroyed by his actions.

Prior to Leonov’s return to Earth, Curnow tells Floyd that Dr. Chandra has begun designing HAL 10000. 2061: Odyssey Three indicated that Chandra died on the journey back to Earth, making the point moot.

The session of keyboard/screen interaction between HAL and Dr. Chandra has a taste of SHRDLU, which both increases the realism of the scene, and gives an interesting insight of the perception of Artificial Intelligence at the time the book was written.

HAL in 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey

In 2061: Odyssey Three, Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.

3001: The Final Odyssey introduced the merged forms of Dave Bowman and HAL. The two have merged into one entity called Halman after Bowman rescued HAL from the dying Discovery One spaceship towards the end of 2010: Odyssey Two. Halman helps Frank Poole infect the monolith (which it once served) with a computer virus; as the primitive life in Jupiter’s clouds were sacrificed to make Jupiter into a sun to warm Europa, it is feared that humanity as well as life on Europa would be destroyed as humanity had the potential to be dangerous and the Europans had stagnated, according to the monolith’s reasoning. The plan succeeds, and all of the monoliths disintegrate; however, Halman (which survived by downloading itself onto another storage medium) is subsequently isolated in a special containment facility due to this virus infecting itself.

Influences

The scene in which HAL’s consciousness degrades was inspired by Clarke’s memory of a speech synthesis demonstration by physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr, who used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly’s voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song “Daisy Bell“, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews.^[4]

Characterization

The book differs from the film in a number of details, e.g.

1. The book explains far more explicitly the causes of HAL’s behavior; it is implied that HAL’s programmed objective to ensure the mission’s success — at any cost — vaguely resembled the human drive for a purposeful existence, while the prospect of being shut down resembled the fear of death. When these factors began to contradict his primary objective of preserving the ship’s crew, his malfunction was the result.
2. In the film, HAL shuts Bowman out of the craft after Bowman attempts to retrieve Poole’s body. In the book, Bowman stays within the ship and is forced to shut down HAL after he attempts to kill him by opening the ship’s airlocks.

SAL 9000

HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000. SAL was used as a reference system for HAL; when the twin computer fails to predict any communications failure, Bowman and Poole begin to suspect HAL’s reliability. SAL is clearly “female”, and features similar camera plates like HAL, but the “eye” is blue. Dr. Chandra has a private terminal to SAL’s mainframe in his office, and his influence causes her to develop a slightly Indian accent (2010: Odyssey Two). In the film version, SAL is voiced by Candice Bergen, who was credited only under a pseudonym (as “Olga Mallsnerd,” a combination of the surname of Bergen’s husband, director Louis Malle and that of Mortimer Snerd, one of her father Edgar Bergen’s famous puppet characters).

SAL is not mentioned by name in the film 2001, and the novel implies that Mission Control had more than one 9000-series computer available. Given the acronym behind HAL’s name (Heuristic ALgorithmic), it is not clear if “SAL” is just a nickname, or if the name is a different acronym.

Before the Soviet-USA mission to retrieve Discovery, Chandra uses her for a simulation of the possible effects that a prolonged “sleep” might have induced in HAL, and the project is code-named Phoenix. When Chandra asks SAL to guess the reason for the name Phoenix she understands that the there are many possible meanings, and her first guess that it refers to the tutor of Achilles is not what he had in mind; her display of culture makes it clear that SAL has access to some form of encyclopedic knowledge database, or has it built in with the rest of her programs.

2010 reveals that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychopathy that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction.

The future of computing

HAL’s capabilities, like all the technology in 2001, was based on the speculation of respected scientists. Marvin Minsky, director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the most influential researchers in the field, was an advisor on the film.^[5]

When the film 2001 was first screened in 1968, the year 2001 was a long way away and a computer like HAL seemed quite plausible at the time. In the mid-1960s computer scientists were generally optimistic that within a generation or two we would have machines that could pass the Turing test. For example, AI pioneer Herbert Simon had predicted in 1965 that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.”^[6]

As 2001 approached though, it became clear that 2001′s predictions in computer technology were too far fetched. Natural language, lip reading, planning, and commonsense reasoning in computers were simply still elements of science fiction.

However, 2001 also failed to predict many of the advances that would take place in computing by 2001. The film’s creators felt that as computers got more powerful, they would get bigger and bigger—partly true: Blue Gene, a modern supercomputer is very large. HAL occupies much of the living area on Discovery. A thin laptop or notepad computer is alluded to in a few scenes where they are used to relay news broadcasts from Earth. Also, the film’s portrayal of computer graphics are elegant, though minimalist compared to the graphics and visualization techniques available in 2001.

HAL’s eye and point of view

HAL’s POV shots were created with a Cinerama 160 degree Fairchild-Curtis wide angle camera lens. This Fairchild-Curtis wide angle lens was not used as the eye in the Hal 9000 prop seen in film, because this Fairchild-Curtis wide angle lens is about 8″ in diameter, while the Hal 9000 prop eye is about 3″ in diameter. Stanley Kubrick chose to use the Fairchild-Curtis lens to shoot the Hal 9000 POV shots after attending the 1964 World’s Fair and seeing To the Moon and Beyond, a film produced with the lens and projected onto a planetarium-like dome.

• HAL 9000 has been used and parodied in several movies and shows, such as the episode Treehouse of Horror XII (Section: House of Whacks) on the Simpsons, where Ultrahouse (HAL), voiced by Pierce Brosnan, is installed in the house as an automatic butler/maid/cook/cleaner; falls in love with Marge, and attempts to kill Homer. Another production that spoofed the 9000 was Futurama, when a new personality chip was installed in the space ship. Eventually Bender and the ship begin dating and the ship had to be de-activated after becoming psychotic after Bender decided to break up the relationship.
• The character Dr. Hal Emmerich in the Metal Gear Solid videogame series was named after HAL 9000. He hates the movie, and prefers to be called “Otacon” instead. When he and Snake reveal their real names to each other (Hal and David), Snake jokes that they should take a trip to Jupiter together.