The Swede in the middle of Silicon Valley

Friday, November 21, 2008

The stupidity of spending money

Since I started getting a decent salary I've just given price tags a blind eye, and a deaf ear to what customer reps are saying, i.e. I never ask or check what the price for something is.

So tomorrow I'm going to a wedding, friend of mine is getting married. Since this week has been pretty stressful I didn't end up doing it until today. Getting into the store all the reps are friendly as always, shows me different options and I select something I think looks good.

After fitting I go our to the cashier to pay, as a small surprise the cashier says, that's $1299. Ugh, my credit-card has a limit of $700 and my debit card is limited to something similar. So I end up buying a gift-card to split the cost on. But oh yeah, that hurt, really bad, especially since I wear suits like, 1 time per year, based out of this I ought it to myself to wear it every freaking day.

Yes I'm stupid and I'll try to start looking at the price tags, for now it's shop-stop for the rest of the year (I've already bought my family xmas-presents).

*sigh*

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Dear Santa Jobs

The other day me and my colleagues were discussing what the next step for the iPhone could be. One of them proposed that it could make sense to integrate the mini-DisplayPort, and further use it as a portable computer. This idea tingled me a lot. If I would be able to carry my actual computer in my pocket, dock it and be ready to run with the data and apps it would be golden. What might make more sense is to put some of the cababilities in the dock, say core OS but let the iPhone do the actual CPU work.

Looking at the technical aspect of this there might be some possibilities using the Intel Atom CPU which supports clock-frequencies of 800Mhz-1.87GHz. The current CPU in the iPhone is an ARM 1176 620@412 MHz. If the iPhone were to use the Atom CPU it could run at a slower clock-rate in "phone-mode" and faster in "computer-mode". As far as the graphics goes this might be a more valid concern, I've some doubts that the PowerVR GPU would be able to handle the 1920x1200 pxls of an Apple Cinema Display.

So please Apple and Mr. Santa Jobs get to work. I bet this would tingle more people than me!