The UpStream (Page 528)

This week, Apple has decided to take a page out of everybody else's book, Courtney Loves the rock and robot rehabilitation is in!

To hear this week's show, hit the break!

The days of fitness gurus and cardio DVDs with people in them may very well be numbered. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and General Robotics have developed Taizo, a small humanoid robot with 26 joints that closely resembles Frosty the Snowman wearing a space suit. Taizo's purpose is to help elderly Japanese with rehabilitation efforts by taking them through calisthenics routines.

It is capable of performing 30 different moves and can keep the workout going for up to 2 hours on one charge. Taizo is made of fiberglass reinforced plastic and recognizes simple voice commands and can even link to computers with WiFi or Bluetooth (that's awesome)!

Russia's president Dimitry Medvedev has officially made September 13th a new professional holiday, "Day of the Programmer." It has actually been celebrated unofficially around the world for a long time on the 256th day of the year,

The number 256 is chosen because it is the number of integers that can be expressed using a single eight-byte, and also is the maximum degree of 2, which is less than 365.

I am an aspiring programmer myself as most of us are at PLuGHiTz Live! so we can certainly appreciate this and look forward to one day officially celebrating it here in mother U.S.A. It's good to see Russia leading the way again.

Do you think professional holidays are appropriate? Will more soon follow?

Steven Hirsch, head of Vivid Entertainment, wants to get involved with Sony, namely on the PS3. He believes that the PlayStation is grown up enough to start carrying adult content, and he believes his company has the right product to kick off the new product.

Hirsch says,

The competition in the smart phone market is fierce. Apple with its iPhone (not as "smart" as the others), Google has its G1 with Android and Palms very successful Pre are giant contenders in this market right now but Motorola is looking to get its piece of the pie and they aren't just hungry for it, they need it.

It's no secret that Motorola has been teetering on the edge of financial meltdown for a long, long time now and they are finding themselves in a position that isn't all too different from Palms before the successful Pre released that raised their stock from $4 to $14. Motorola hasn't put out a popular handset since the RAZR (yikes) and if you are familiar with some of their previous smart phones like the Motorola Q then they have a long way to go in order to break the mold and make it in this market. In an effort to achieve this and save themselves Motorola would like to introduce us to the Cliq.

With Windows7 expecting to be released in just over a month, many are looking forward to the upgrade with all new features, like a new taskbar, new netbook edition, and speeds faster than Vista. But there may be a downside to this program which originally appeared to have no flaws.

The creators of Windows7 set out to make the operating system download 5 percent faster than Windows Vista, and in some cases this is true. That is, if you have optimal conditions (1-2 programs and an amazingly fast computer.) So, best case scenario, you may download this upgrade 5 percent faster. But the shocking news? In some instances it took up to 1,220 minutes to download, that's just under 21 hours!