…fat lot of good that will do!

Ok, I made up the part about the MP. In truth, the report centres on research being carried out at Reading University. Men with huge, domed foreheads have been using parts of a rats brain (you can see how easy it was to make the mistake!) to aid robotic navigation.

The project marries 300,000 rat neurons to a robot which allows the mechanical freak of nature to be taught how to navigate obstacles and walls via sonar. By studying what happens to the neurons as the boffins hope learn how memories are laid down.

Pointy-eared hybrids

“The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons.

Sensory input from the sonar on the robot is piped to the blob of cells to help them form new connections that will aid the machine as it navigates around its pen.

As the cells are living tissue, they are kept separate from the robot in a temperature-controlled cabinet in a container pitted with electrodes. Signals are passed to and from the robot via Bluetooth short-range radio.”

Hmm, I can see the headlines - ‘Robot horde gave me Weil’s disease’!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Outage dampens enthusiasm for Google Mail service

Internet darling Google has publicly apologised to users for an outage that prevented users from accessing free and paid services. On the Google blog, the company has promised to carry out a review to see what went wrong and implement processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. No money back for paid subscribers?

The Gmail problems follow Google Docs and Spreadsheets access problems in July when customers were locked out of their cloud-based applications for over an hour.

Google really can’t afford problems like this to happen again. Microsoft is preparing to launch a rival to the Gmail and Apps services in 2009 which could leech customers away from the Goog.

The Microsoft offering, Business Productivity Suite (do they really pay someone to think of these names?) will offer customers a subscription service. A range of Microsoft software will be available to customers, including Exchange, Dynamics, and Office SharePoint, Communications and Meeting for around £90. Hmm, time for Google to sort their house out!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Mini Amilo on the way.

With all the hype around the Ultra Mobile sector it’s no surprise that every man and his rusty dog is jumping on the band wagon. UMPC’s sales are predicted to eclipse those of laptops and PC’s combind by 2011 - that’s a whole lot of hardware.

So, into the fray steps Fujitsu Siemens Computers with a mini Amilo offering. The new device will be unveiled at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin later this month.

The mini Amilo will be powered by Intel’s Atom processor and run Windows XP (I don’t which version yet but hopefully not Home Edition). Prices of about £300 are being touted so it should easily be within the budget of most buyers. Users will be able to choose a number of differently coloured clip-on casings - a pretty crap idea if you ask me but in reality feature has been added to keep prices down.

More details will be disclosed at IFA.

There’ll be some info available over here at this UMPC news site.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Not a scratch on Google…

…but what do you really expect? Ok, the founders of Cuil are ex-Google employees but remember ther early days of Google search results? I do - they were crap!

I’ve had a look at Cuil and all I can say right now is that it’s ‘ok’ - not great but I’m sure that a little more time and money may just make this a real competitor for the Goog!

As a search technology, the Cuil results don’t really match up to Google or even Yahoo in some respects - there’s no image search for a start and I REALLY like pictures, so much easier than reading! However, Cuil do state that they have indexed over 120 billion web pages which leaves Google trailing on a paltry 40 billion. I’ve done some testing here and I would like to know where those pages are coming from as I searched for a couple of well known sites that have a high number of inbound links using a specific anchor text….err, nothing! I’m not suggesting that the Cuil front page is lying but I’d expect to see at least a couple of hits for the searches I entered.

Ok, so Cuil could eventually knock Google of the search top spot but they some serious cash injections if they are to catch up in other areas i.e GMail, Google Apps, YouTube, Knol…. the list goes on.

All interesting news, I’ll leave you with a well thought out and deliverd quote echoed by many of the search engine users community, “…it’s crap.”

Popularity: 22% [?]