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> Articles about GUI's without images make baby Jesus cry

That's okay. Microsoft is King Herod [1][2];-)

---
[1] Microsoft's famous anti-trust 'Knife the baby' comment: http://www.businessweek.com/microsoft/updates/up81 105b.htm
[2] King Herod told his army to knife all babies could could be baby Jesus.

I find the related article on logistics of Nokia phone factories more interesting, at least considering the volumes: 900k phones per *day*, from 275 million components.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/aug2 006/gb20060803_618811.htm

Slideshow of Nokia Salo plant may also be of some interest. Everything on the photos looks reasonably like it did back '96 when I saw it on a tour, though...

is anybody else who uses OpenDNS having trouble visiting http://www.businessweek.com/?

Apple is committed to the EICC and demands that its suppliers treat their employees well.

Except that Apple buys a much of components from samsung directly, not even counting what they use as a result of the contracts they put out. At one point Apple was getting 40% of Samsungs flash memory capacity.

If you had presented allegations of worker abuse to either Acer or Samsung, their managers would have arranged for security to throw you out of their offices.

Where are you getting this? Can you back this up with any instances?

As an added bonus for your patience and forgiveness, click on the link to a story by the "San Jose Mercury News". Juniper must now restate its financial results for the last 3 years in order to account for backdating of options.

The corruption at Juniper has become so bad that its financial results are suspect. According to the news story, the analysts at American Technology Research (ATR), a Wall-Street securities firm, has stopped covering Juniper in ATR's research reports to the investment community.

Was David Abramson right in his criticism of Juniper?

YouTube et al will have to offer some incentive for a user to stay with their service for the long term.

I don't see blip.tv as even being in the same business as YouTube. From Business Week online: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspottin g/archives/2006/08/cnn_is_very_goo.html

Such an organization already exists. It is an employee-owned company, which often becomes employee-owned through an employee buyout. There are numerous examples of employee-owned companies.

The most famous example is United Airlines. It operated as an employee-owned corporation from 1994 until 2002.

The lesson here is that sometimes employee-owned companies succeed. Sometimes, they fail. There is nothing magical about being open source or about being a company structured on the open-source process. Such software and such companies are subject to the whims of the marketplace and can succeed or fail -- as determined by the invisible hand of the free market.

...brought to you by the same people who may be getting Apple delisted from Nasdaq.

Apple Computer Inc. maneuvered Friday to keep its shares listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market after reiterating that its mishandling of past employee stock options will cause it to miss a regulatory deadline for filing its latest quarterly results.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based maker of iPods and Macintosh computers said it will ask for an administrative hearing in response to a Nasdaq letter formally warning of a possible delisting because of the company's delay in making its quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report covers the three months ending July 1, a period in which the company has previously said it earned $472 million.

Where the fuck do you Apple kooks get this crap! Apple's worldwide marketshare has been in a constant decline ever since Jobs took over.

Here's some more links on the subject

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/02/safari.popu larity.growing/

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2006/tc20060615_080175.htm

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/07/19.18.s html

Explaination of the Myth of Market Share (Google Cache)

Yeah, it's long, but it's worth reading the second page. I take time & care in writing my posts. If you're going to mod it, at least read the whole thing and breath in & out a couple of times before you hit the wrong number. We're prodded to Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! before posting. Do the posters who carefully craft their posts like magazine articles. n.b. appropriate parties: it would be nice if the preview showed us where a page break is going to appear so we know whether to risk either an incomplete post or modded because people won't go to page two.

I'll throw away a karma point to get this in at the top - and dig for the precise information later -- as in a precise link. I've made allusions once or twice in the previous few months.

Ever hear of SBIR/STTR? (Small BInnovation Research Program) / Small Business Technology Transfer Program) ???

There are plenty of links and lots of portals which front end various aspects -- depending upon the purpose of that site, but here's the SBA (Small Business Administration's) take on it -- sort of a SBIR/STTR for Dummies. If you're looking to go out on your own and don't want to live on hot dogs for lunch and weenie broth for supper for if|until you get some traction, you might want to take a look what's going on.

Without digging any deeper than the SBA's first page and reading that article, do you see enough connections (e.g., specific numbers and wording) to be more than a coincidence? (oh, you own the patent but the gov't can use it royalty-free.

The hot thing these days is to create incubators, particularly at universities, where the right resources can be focused.

Re: Gates? $100M tossed around like a volleyball several times to innoculate a goodly portion of 3rd-world children against some of the scurges people deal with every day which we'd scream about if more than four kids in the same school district, not even school or class, came down with the same thing. He's now leaving what he dropped out of Harvard to do and spend [what will likely be] the rest of his life doing what he stated several years ago: giving away 95% of his accumulated worth.

$900 hammers? to toss out a cliche (trite cliche if you want the overkill people usually write), SBIR/STTR is supposed to be a multi-win situation: the military doesn't have black eyes for outrageous spending on these things; products are put together which have as much a civilian solution as military[1]; those interested in raising funding can do so without large risks; civilians are getting products on the market which might have an entry investment high enough only those who sniff at all of their food before they eat it or rely on Web 2.0 -- no grey areas. Do you know how that type of pricing comes about? Once the contract is established, the money is jostled about in spreadsheets until certain things balance. Every business does it. But when you're looking at billionz 'n billionz of dollars for a project, the detail load is so high they aren't going to be able to hide everything...some things ooze out the cracks.

People talk about $5/aspirin tablets at a hospital. The price is established the same way. An expectation is handed down as to how much revenue the pharmacy must bring in during the next year based upon a handful of factors. Sometimes you don't even have the final prices handed down by the vendor (or they may change them during the year if things don't work out). price + (markup * factor). (price * factor) + markup. (pRiceRange + markup) * factor. (priceRange + PriceRange[Market]) * factor. Sit back and imagine the possibilities. Everything is shifted around until things balance and things don't look too outrageous. Trust me. I don't work at a

A minor correction concerning the 20% figure (revenue of AP from online content) - BusinessWeek say it should be 14%.

The scale of this is much smaller than Enron.

Here is an article that explains how the options backdating scandal started:

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/may20 06/pi20060523_848601.htm

To summarize, a finance professor decided to calculate the return on companies for the 30 days
after the award on of options on an unusual date for such award. He looked at 1668 such awards
and found that those stocks did 5% better than average for those 30 days each time.
Later, the Wall Street Journal calculated odds of 300 billion to one that that would happen by chance.

So a red flag can be raised on a company by mining this data, but it doesn't prove that
backdating took place. The SEC has decided to investigate a bunch of these companies.
It is likely that they will find wrongdoing in at least some of these cases.

One interesting note was that this practice has been greatly reduced as of 2002, when Sarbanes-Oxley
required reporting of options awards within two days of the award.

The details of how options are granted determines whether they have to be shown as an expense or not,
so some companies involved are having to restate earnings.
The largest impact I'm aware of is UnitedHealth Group, which according to the above article may
have to report $300 million in additional expenses.

Enron was fraud on a massive scale to hide tremendous losses.

Backdating options is a lesser fraud that puts more money in the pockets of executives.
It does not imply that the companies involved are not making money.
It also hasn't been proven for any company, yet.

If you don't think there are any jobs for math majors, check out this article from businessweek.com:

http://businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_ 04/b3968001.htm?

Here's a quote:

"The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. This has happened before. In past decades, the marriage of higher math and computer modeling transformed science and engineering. Quants turned finance upside down a generation ago. And data miners plucked useful nuggets from vast consumer and business databases. But just look at where the mathematicians are now. They're helping to map out advertising campaigns, they're changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they're enabling marketers to forge new one-on-one relationships with customers. As this occurs, more of the economy falls into the realm of numbers. Says James R. Schatz, chief of the mathematics research group at the National Security Agency: "There has never been a better time to be a mathematician."

"the machine may be ineligible because of its specialized hardware"
What specialized hardware? I would really like to read a more technical article about this machine. I would guess that the Japanese focused on vector processing like they did in the design of the Earth-Simulator.

The best supporting evidence I have for this conclusion is the comparison of Japan's last two supercomputers:
Sun Fire X64 Cluster
Earth-Simulator

Sun Fire has 10,368 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 38,180.
Earth-Simulator has 5,120 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 35,860.
That's 49% less processors with 94% the processor power*.

Here's the original article link:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2 006/gb20060726_150659.htm?chan=topStories_ssi_5/

*Only comparing one aspect of performance.

An up-close look at the components and other materials used in the high-end version of the Xbox 360, which contains a hard drive, found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit -- and that is just the start.

Other items packaged with the console -- including the power supply, cables, and controllers -- add another $55 to Microsoft's cost, pushing the loss per unit to $126. These estimates include assumptions that Microsoft is getting a discount on many components.

First off, that article is rife with ads and I suggest the printer friendly version of it so you don't have to click "Skip this ad" or skip across memory intensive flash advertisements that cause your browser to crap out.

Secondly, this will most likely be a peer-to-peer application because it would be bandwidth expensive and problematic to centrally host these shows. A thing that concerns me with this is something I saw happen with Kazaa and the Windows media formats. Virus writers were figuring out ways to embed viruses into the files so that when your machine read them, the codec would unintentionally execute or behave like a virus or malware. Several of my friends suffered computer troubles due to downloading WMA files and trying to listen to them only to have their machine lock up with a worm. Later on, Kazaa included a BullGuard P2P Virus Protection Option in their product but in my opinion, it was too late. Everyone should be familiar with the potential JPEG exploit in Microsoft Windows, if it can be done for one two dimensional image, surely it can be embedded in a single frame of a video file.

I hope that the original Kazaa inventors realized this problem and are working to implement a secure system where I don't have to worry about receiving a file that might have malicious code embedded in it. A simple solution would be to compute a checksum on each file received by The Venice Project application. They would then require computers to ping a centralized server they set up to verify that the byte sum counted is indeed the correct sum and that the entire video is legit and unadulterated. There's probably easier schemes and forms of encryption to protect this but I sincerely hope this is a very real and concentrated point of this software for The Venice Project.

I think that Virus writers love applications built on names and not security. They love "industry standard" applications. Because that means a larger target base if they tailor a virus to that application. I fear that if people mindlessly buy The Venice Project only because of the inventor's fame but ignore security problems that may cause problems down the line. Kazaa was a virus writers dream, what are Zennstrom and Friis doing to prevent the same thing from happening again?

As of spring 2006, EEStor Inc. claims to have a supercapacitor with a barium titanate dielectric nearing production. The company claims a unit with 31 farads capacitance and an operating voltage of 3.5 kV, capable of storing up to 340 Wh/kg (1232 kJ/kg)and charging or discharging at up to 3.5 kW/kg (52 kWh = 187 MJ and 520 kW - 6 minute charging time - for the 152 kg unit), lifetime of over 1,000,000 discharge cycles and leakage of less than 0.1% per month [[4] US Patent 7,033,406] with a cost of $40-$60 per kWh ($3,200 - $2,100 per unit). [BusinessWeek, 3 September 2005]. The technology is scheduled for third-party verification during the summer of 2006.

Yes, matrox.com - their niche market is video post-production, so they were never affected by the 3D wars. A good number of the 25+ original 3D chip vendors are still around - most have abandoned the high-performance workstation/desktop market if not chip manufacture and went into either board manufacturing only and/or embedded systems - 3DLabs recently announced they were concentrating on embedded systems and laid off 100 people.

For a while, I tried maintaining a timeline of all the different 3D chip vendors starting from around 1995 (the days of GLint)with buyouts, mergers, lawsuits, but the DDR/SDRAM/RDRAM Samsung/Infineon/Mciron/Hynix patent lawsuit kept things boiling. The latest news article is RAMBUS settles lawsuit.

And China is simultaneously experiencing rising wages and labor shortages.

I don't know why labor protectionists are determined to raise trade barriers (fair trade?), but I think it is rooted in racism.

You need to put that metric into context. Analysts see signs of the PC market slowing in growth . Yet, Apple has actually grown in sales. The conclusion is that Apple stole sales from Dell, Sony, HP and the like and that is significant.

Nice clean printer friendly version. Yum. http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content /jul2006/id20060720_289503.htm

Here are some of the recomendations from TFA:

1. Don't wear earbuds, headphones, or use any attachment that might make sound incase a mugger in close proximity detects it
2. Avoid dressing in black and dancing like a zombie in public
3. Be prepared to one-up your semi-automatic carrying attacker at all times
4. Wear not one, but an array of bullet proof iPods to form a bullet proof iPod vest
5. Ensure that, for your own safety, your government is monitoring your phone calls. In a post-911 world we must all take additional steps to ensure the iTerrorist threat is neutralized

If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.

-MSN Messenger is beating ICQ, AIM, Y!Messenger

Last I checked, AIM has a lead of over 10 million subscribers, and is fairly entrenched in parts of the world. Unless that changed since...ummm...a week ago.

-X-Boxen are outselling Sony Playstatia

LOL: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul 2006/tc20060717_049057.htm?chan=top+news_top+news
Sony is STILL selling more PS2's than Microsoft is selling their brand new Xbox360

-MSN Seach is gaining market share against Google and Yahoo

Ummm, yeah, sure buddy, if you say so: http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticl e.jhtml?articleID=189601102

Do you always make stuff up and then state it as fact? Took me about 30 seconds for each of your points to find a link to rebut it. I could probably do the others, but they are outside my area of interest. MSN gaining share on Google?!?!? If you'd read that link, you'd know in the short term MSN is stalled while Google is still gaining, and over the last year Google has posted pretty impressive gains, while MSN has lost marketshare.

Apple now has 50% marketshare on the desktop and Microsoft will be bankrupt in a year. OpenOffice.org has knocked MS Office revenues down 90% YOY....Geee, I guess it is kind of fun making stuff up.

If they pass this bill, it pretty much puts the kibosh on partygaming.com (who floated in London in 2005) and the like. From this article, 87% of their $350m odd revenue comes from US customers... Sell those shares!

even the link is the same

Yes, here's some physical proof to save you all some time, but note the slight difference (you will see it because its the only bold text).

BusinessWeek: ( JULY 17, 2006)
Consumers have strong opinions about Direct Revenue's software. "If I ever meet anyone from your company, I will kill you," a person who identified himself as James Chang said in an e-mail to Direct Revenue last summer. "I will f------ kill you and your families." Such sentiments aren't unusual. "You people are EVIL personified," Kevin Horton wrote around the same time. "I would like the four hours of my life back I have wasted trying to get your stupid uninvited software off my now crippled system."

MSNBC: ( Updated: 5:51 p.m. CT July 7, 2006 )
Consumers have strong opinions about Direct Revenue's software. "If I ever meet anyone from your company, I will kill you," a person who identified himself as James Chang said in an e-mail to Direct Revenue last summer. "I will f------ kill you and your families." Such sentiments aren't unusual. "You people are EVIL personified," Kevin Horton wrote around the same time. "I would like the four hours of my life back I have wasted trying to get your stupid uninvited software off my now crippled system."

The text is exactly the same, only the date is different. Seems like this cover story that was either launched too early or it was an unintentional error. No big news here.

This results in lower total sales, as they sell in far fewer numbers than low-end CPUs, but should keep net income at a nice level since they're extremely high margin chips.

Except that AMD has lowered both its sales AND earnings guidance. Net income is expected to come in weaker than first anticipated.

I remember Gil Amelio saying the same thing back in 2000. Apple's success was due to Amelio's plans, not Jobs.

Fortunately, the market is regulating itself. For example, Gnarls Barkley rose on downloads in the UK and are signed with a small Indie label - no major. See http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun20 06/sb20060628_285213.htm?campaign_id=search

Here's their site. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet, because it's Windows only, and right now I'm on a Mac laptop only. Them's the breaks. I know the University doesn't have any responsibility to support less common OSes, but their bookstore is an Apple dealer and the certified repair shop for Apples in town. They showcase Apple machines--all of the laptops, iMacs, and the PowerMac--and just one Windows machine. Because of this, there's a decent amount of Mac laptops on campus. I see them around.

Other students don't like it because they can't put any music onto their MP3 players where they listen to most of their music, unless they pay, and it won't work on the ever popular iPod period. (I don't have one, but that's the majority MP3 player at my school, and the bookstore has a copious display case dedicated to them, too.) That's not surprising, of course, since Apple doesn't license their DRM out. The only MP3 players that work with Ruckus are ones with Microsoft's Playsforsure with subscription services. Evidently, having Playsforsure isn't quite enough to be sure it will work. Ruckus also serves as a movie serving network, but our campus hasn't had that running yet. The student organization is currently investing in the expensive on-campus download servers required to operate that service.

This article on BusinessWeek says that Ruckus can net anywhere from $10 to $100 dollars a student. I'm really just hoping my university is closer to the $10 side of the spectrum.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to animate a person? Even with mocap it takes a lot of time to clean up the data. Actors almost have to take a pay cut to be the voice because 3d movies are EXpENSIVE TO MAKE.

Have a read
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct200 4/nf20041020_7624_db011.htm

It seems like everyone is missing the coolest product - the Hover Creeper!. This is cool to begin with (hovering around under cars) but think of the possibilities! To name a few:

Fun:
-Sledding
-Bobsled racing
-Back-to-the-future style hoverboard (though it might have trouble if you're standing up)

Serious:
-Getting across potential landmine areas - yes, you're still pushing against the ground, but your weight is distributed so it would probably be much safer
-The ultimate luggage - forget wheels, have your luggage (or backpack!) float behind you!


Is there a reason no one else is excited about this?

Lotta articles so I'll link it

This site: http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/art icle/CA6338353.html seems to have a pretty good sized list of companies and news on this topic. My company http://www.intuit.com/ is also one of them and had a press release today http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8II3 R980.htm?sub=apn_tech_down&chan=tc saying that they have now been issued a subpoena after starting their own internal investigation over a month ago.

I really like the Cocoon disaster relief shelters. They sort of remind me of japanese capsule hotels, plus they seem very practical. I went to the company website and couldn't find any references to being an "open source design" as the article indicated, though.

As a designer I'll contest to the IDSA not being "in bed" with anyone... aside from industrial designers... and perhaps collective gatherings in pubs.

Take the Reveal CT-80 on page 6.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/idea2006/s ource/6.htm
That explosive detection machine may not scan as many bags per hour as the competition, but it is intuitive, affordable, and miles ahead of the competition when you consider how the machine exists within an environment or how users interact with the hardware.

I'm not saying engineering and features are not important, I'm simply saying those products are reviewed on a number of levels.

In the case of that camera I wouldn't spend time harping on what isn't there. I'd concentrate on why a panel of seasoned industrial designers found value in that particular product.

Sony do expect to lose around 100 billion yen on the PS3 (around $871.6 million). Obviously they expect to cut down on cost after the first couple of years, through chip shrinkage, etc, but they will take a hit on the system for at least the first year.

Holy crap! It's such a painfully glorious and obvious name. This thing deserves every possible prize it can get.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/idea2006/s ource/53.htm

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

• AMD Personal Internet Communicator - A replacement for the $100 laptop?
  
• DX1 Input System - very programmable keyboard-type device
  
• Water Tile - the coolest showerhead I've ever seen
  
• $100 Laptop - wait, here's the actual laptop
  
• The Nutty Buddy - the ??? before profit was "testicle protection" in this case
  
• Water Tile - To quote the byline, "This design strategy uses brand identity to revitalize the image of condoms and redefine traditional condom distribution channels"
  
• Sun x4100 servers - if you're into that sort of thing
  
• City Wing - LED streetlights
  
• Airwash - doing laundry without water
  

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/idea2006/s ource/1.htm
That way you only need to edit the number at the when somebody mentions a number

Sorry, that should have said 'as most any modern console'

PS3 will be sold at a loss, like the PS2, the PSP, the Gamecube, the Sega Saturn.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060219-6216 .html
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may20 06/id20060501_525587.htm?chan=innovation_game+room _top+stories


Loss Leader described on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Video game console makers that sell their console units at very low margins, or even at a loss, to achieve a higher market share. They rely on profits from software sales where the markups are considerably higher. They also receive profits from 3rd party software companies for licensing fees. Microsoft has used this technique with the Xbox. Sony has done the same, to a lesser extent, with the PlayStation 2 and PSP. Nintendo was able to profit on the sales of its Gamecube console for a short time before selling it at a loss.

http://www.actsofgord.com/Proclamations/chapter0 2.html an article on the myth of selling consoles at a loss. It does happen, but its not a historic all encompassing trend.

What US ? Well the market will also shift to Asia and Europe. Check out where NOKIA is selling its mobiles. Check out latest top 100 Tech companies released by BusinessWeek, to know where America stands. However, American institutional investors are making money ;-)

here is a similar article about the same thing:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar 2006/tc20060328_901806.htm

For all you phobic people out there who don't want them to "have a copy of your fingerprint" from what I found out from the employees it doesn't work that way. It doesn't store your fingerprint, just certain points on it. So really there is not a way to one way hash back to your actual fingerprint. Now, maybe the employee didn't know what they were talking about but for them to have any knowledge about the device at all suprised me so I believed them. The article also mentions that it doesn't store the actual fingerprint. By the way, I am a the paranoid type too so I don't use it.