See how far robotics and AI software development have come with this video of Boston Dynamics’ “Big Dog”. Fascinating technology.

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If you’re into Battlestar Galactica, have a look at this before the start of the final season in early April 2008. It’s a recap of the first three seasons… in eight minutes! And it’s hilarious :).

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Tomorrow, March 14th 2008, T-Mobile will start to sell the iPhone in Austria — exclusively. While exclusivity as such is not such a big issue, the price tags are just abnormally high. Abnormally high for the Austrian market, that is.

I don’t know about the U.S. market, maybe customers there are used to much higher prices, but Austria is a very, very low-cost mobile phone country. Carriers here have, over the last couple of years, driven the prices down to rock bottom, with some plans below 3 Euro Cents per call minute, and data plans of €20 flat for 6GB per month. For most phones, you pay nothing (or maybe a small amount), and in exchange you sign a 24-month contract.

And now comes the iPhone: €399 (8GB) and €499 (16GB), with €39 and €55 monthly plans, and a 24-month contract period.

I am an Apple fan, I own a MacBook Pro and an iPod Touch, and I think they’re great products. But sorry, Apple and T-Mobile, this is just ridiculous. Maybe the iPhone will change the Austrian mobile phone market, or maybe the market will change the iPhone. I hope for the latter, because I would really like to have one (with UMTS and integrated GPS, that is… if that ever arrives).

With prices like this, I’ll stick to my Nokia E61, thank you very much. My cost of switching is already quite high anyway (I’m using a lot of its features and have a lot of very useful software for it)…

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The picture gallery has now been updated as well. I updated to the latest Coppermine gallery version, changed the theme to a brighter one, and removed the thumbnails on the home screen, so the initial page should load much faster now. The gallery pages overall seem a lot faster now, let’s hope this effect is permanent.

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Just a quick note: I’ve updated my blog software, and took the opportunity to add some minor changes.

There is now a “Newsmix” page (also see link in the left sidebar) which is basically an RSS feed integration of my Netvibes Universe public activities. If you don’t know what I’m taking about, check out my netvibes universe (and if you like the concept, get your own).

I’ve also added links to my other places on the net (see left sidebar, at the bottom, after the blogroll). This is basically another list of links, but with added XHTML Friends Network (XFN) information. If you don’t know what this is and are interested, have a look at the XFN website. Google recently got active in this area of socially-relational linking as well with their Social Graph API, and I think this might just be very interesting and valuable in the near future.

The image gallery is up for an overhaul next…

By the way, in the process of updating the Wordpress software this site is created with, German Umlauts and some other special characters were messed up. But I’m not going to go through all the posts and update them by hand, sorry ;).

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