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A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar shipped its first solar panels — priced at $1 a watt. That’s the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. According to one reader, paying the $3,000 initial investment is the biggest problem here. You will start breaking even in 2 1/2 years and then you will not have to pay any more electricity bills ever(or atleast until the panels bust which is in about 25 years).

Good read.

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So tonight my brothers are finally back from college and decide to get in on some XBox action. I make up my mind to join them later once I’ve finished some work. Fifteen minutes later, I walk into the family room and find that my XBox 360 finally died - we were finally members of the Red Ring of Death. (It’s really not as cool as it sounds) Well, it had to happen one day…I am still glad it didn’t happen when Halo 3 came out.  Need to wait till Monday to return it.

It’s taken a few more days than I would have liked but I finally got my MacBook Pro in the mail today. More details when I feel like sharing them with you. Still, kind of sore from the Windows to OS X move but I think it is the right decision. For now, I am breathing deep… the air smells a bit more cleaner for some reason.

Another one of Microsoft’s attempts to dominate the PC market. The target this time is developing third world countries. Shame on them! If Microsoft does indeed want to play “fair and square”, they might want to release an open-source version of their OS to keep the OLPC project financially feasible for other countries. Sorry, I am not seeing it with Microsoft… not going to hold my breath… the cynic in me knows what Microsoft wants… more market share.

For some reason, this latest move of theirs reminds me of what tobacco companies will do… they already got the adults hooked, now go after the (third-world) children!

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bsangel at hawtymcbloggy.com comes up with a Top Ten List that Master Chief fans are sure to enjoy. I have to admit - some of these are actually very good! Check it out!

hawtymcbloggy.com

For those of us tired of carrying around 4 or 5 gadgets in your pocket right now or tired of their $200.00 brick of a phone, this article may be encouraging.

Over the past year, new advances have been emerging in the area of the mobile phone industry that’s have cellphone makers raising their eyebrows. Among the major pieces of news was the fact that Google is introducing a new standard to develop mobile applications using their Android SDK. The toolkit has everything from the Linux 2.6 kernel, Webkit, SQLite, OpenGL and other libraries built with C/C++ so that you may be able to build your application from the ground up and as you see fit.

The Apple iPhone, seen as the trailblazer for next-gen mobile systems are also reluctantly opening it’s phone to third party developers. So much can be done with it’s UI system ( the term “blank slate” is fitting here ) that it just makes sense to allow developers a shot at creating applications for it. Initially Apple had a very closed attitude about letting developers at the heart of their sleek machine but realizing the competition, they finally had to concede. Regardless of what they say, my gut feeling is that Apple’s definition of “open” might only be as deep as the core libraries and NOT the OS itself.

And now it seems like Verizon is joining the Open Source Movement by announcing today that it will be opening up their network to outside devices and applications by the end of the first fiscal quarter next year. It will work something like this: You will be able to sign up for a Verizon plan with any network authorized phone that you purchase. Applications can also be built for the phones but the safety of these applications will not be monitored by Verizon.

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The Android SDK borrows a lot of it’s UI philosophy from the world of web applications. It attempts to use XML files to give the developer an easier way to manage layout issues. This reduces the “spaghetti code” that gets produced when munging logic with presentation.

The file structure of these XML-based layout files are very simple to grasp. Each class that is a descendant of View can be represented as an element within the layout. The attributes that belong to that element determine how much of the properties of that layout element. The XML files are placed within the res/ folder of your project along with any other assets that your application would require such as images, videos, etc.

Using these XML based layouts, development the User Interface becomes easy. So, you get something like:

public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {

super.onCreate(icicle);
TextView tv = new TextView(this);
tv.setText(”Hello Android”);
setContentView(tv);
setContentView(R.layout.main);

}