That's a completely different technology. It's similar to the circular polarizers sometimes used as glare filters for CRTs. Those rotate the polarization of incoming light by 45 degrees, so reflections off the surface underneath are rotated 90 degrees and are then blocked by the polarizer on the way back out.
That's been done. It was called the
"I-Opener.
Worked fine. Booted from non-volatile memory. Ran QNX. Microsoft killed it by making IE incompatible and took over the browser market.
You could redo the I-Opener today. In fact, you could even get the latest version of QNX with the new embedded browser and load it into an I-Opener.
Something like that should be in every hotel room, where you really want a stateless client machine.
The web site looks weak, but Nanosolar has an issued patent which describes how they claim to do it.
First, by "manufactured by printing", they don't mean a roll to roll process like a printing press. They propose to deposit materials with an inkjet-like mechanism.
Second, what they call "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry. There are ways to make semi-regular structures by bulk chemical means, and that's what they're doing. They did throw a reference to "bioengineered self-assembly" in, but that's not how they do it. The processing looks much more like processes you'd do in a wafer fab. There are common fab processes like electrodeposition, chemical removal of support substrates, and heating in an inert atmosphere.
The basic idea is to address the reasons that solar cells are inefficient. In bulk materials like silicon, only a small fraction of the photons do anything useful. Most of the photons are at the wrong wavelength. And many of the photon interactions that do occur don't result in an electron being delivered to the output. They're trying to fix both of those problems.
Their policy seems to be to shut up until it works. It might work, or it might not. They're not selling stock, and they're not issuing press releases. They have VC funding and some money from DARPA.
(Bob Weis) "I'd like to put some opposing views forward to what I've just heard. I would like to give an example about what happens with brand name. Encyclopedia Brittanica lost their number-one status as the leading encyclopedias in the world when they weren't quick enough to take up Bill Gates' offer of a partnership. Gates then invented Encarta, which is now the biggest installed base of encyclopedias in the world. Brittanica has changed hands three times since that conversation.
Also see Brittanica on the Virtual Bookshelf. "The biggest problem was that the company was driven by the sales organization, and the notion of selling just the information without the books at a cheaper price was abhorrent to them," - Harold Kester, former vice president of research and development at Britannica.
At one point, before doing Encarta, Microsoft considered buying Brittanica. But Brittanica wanted too high a price. Microsoft did discover, during negotiations, that Brittanica had a very small updating operation, and that keeping a classical encyclopaedia updated wasn't very expensive.
After Microsoft did Encarta and began to crush Brittanica, Brittanica management went back to Bill Gates and proposed a lower buy-out price. Gates told them that their product now had negative value, because their sales force was so expensive to operate that it made the product noncompetitive.
That "E" suffix on SCOX has already driven their volume way down to about a third of the three-month average. They're now thinly traded.
And they still haven't filed their 10-K for last year. If it's not filed by the hearing date, they're going to be delisted.
There just has to be something really, really embarassing in the 10-K. Nobody files a late 10-K because of good news. And remember, since Sarbanes-Oxley became law, Darl has to personally sign the 10-K under penalty of perjury. Hide bad news, go to jail.
Browsers need some work to deal with this. Firefox has some real opportunities here.
First, we need to get Flash under user control. This may require implementing an open-source Flash player, or beating hard on Macromedia. Flash animations need to respond to a "block all images from this site" right-click.
All animations should come up static, dimmed, and silent, requiring user action to activate them. This keeps the annoyance level down.
Then we need to make page ownership hierarchical. If a page opens another window, the new window is considered a child of the parent window. When the parent window closes, so must the child.
Further, child windows should be restricted to the area of the parent window. They must be in front of the parent, and they must have some minimal overlap.
(Restricting them to the parent window frame is probably too restrictive, but requiring some overlap means they can't move freely around the screen.)
The writer is one of those "op-ed" people, those whose screeds are found on the newspaper page facing the editorials. Neither editor nor reporter nor essayist, the "op-ed" author is typically a pundit or, worse, a lobbyist.
Mr. Gorman, sadly, falls into the latter category.
He is the president-elect of the American Library Association, which maintains a lobbying office three blocks from the White House.
This is all very strange. Marchex is a small company. In their last reporting quarter, they made only $144,000 on revenue of about $12 million. Then, suddenly, despite their lousy track record, they did an IPO for $222 million and got onto the NASDAQ National Market System.
With the revenue from this, they bought a collection of domain names of marginal value.
It looks like they actually paid out only only $24.6 million on cash upfront for Name Development. And even that goes into escrow for 18 months. Name Development's income for 2004 was $4.6 million.
Name Development seems to be one guy operating out of the Virgin Islands who sold click-throughs to Yahoo:
Name Development currently earns 100% of its revenue through the outsourcing of its pay-per-click listings to one major provider, Yahoo!
Marchex is the target of spyware/adware litigation:
On February 3, 2005, we received notice of a purported class action complaint entitled Pagniello v. Cool Web Search, Enhance Interactive, Inc., Marchex, Inc., FindWhat.com Inc., Google Inc., Yahoo/Overture Search Engine Co., Microsmarts, LLC, STOPzilla, Inc., PC Tools Pty Ltd., eBlocs.com, and Network Dynamics Corporation, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on January 24, 2005. The complaint alleges that the defendants have exploited web browsers and reconfigured his and others' computers by installing code on their computers without their approval or knowledge and seeks injunctive relief and damages. Based on our initial review of the complaint, we believe that we have meritorious defenses to these claims and intend to contest them vigorously. However, since the litigation is in a preliminary stage and any litigation is inherently uncertain, it is not feasible at this time to predict how this matter will proceed, what the ultimate outcome will be or whether an unfavorable outcome could have a material adverse impact on our business.
I don't see how this adds up to a company with a market cap of $761 million.
This looks more like a dud dot-com.
The Bibliotheque Nationale has the special authority, under French law, to legally make copies of copyrighted works. So they can scan in anything they want.
This is completely different from the guy who published a rumor about some future Apple music product. That's ordinary journalism. Bulk distribution of a commercial operating system that isn't yours is theft.
If you want to distribute an OS, contribute to Linux.
you might want to consider the oh-so-tiny possibility that this is the result of Jobs running the company
That makes sense. It's typical of the process by which ageing hippies become Republicans. Understand that while Jobs has a following, it isn't here in Silicon Valley, where too many people have actually met him.
True. As of late 2004, 79% of the US population had access to the Internet, but only 63% had used it in the last 30 days. Those numbers are not increasing much. There's a fraction of the US population that tried the Internet and didn't like it.
Those numbers are well above the comparable figures for newspapers.
Check the current numbers for the US.
55.5% of US Internet users have broadband. That number keeps climbing, at around 1% per month. It passed 50% last summer. It should pass 75% sometime next year.
So quit worrying about the US falling behind in broadband.
Actually, the Internet isn't that bad at 56Kb/s if you have strong ad blocking.
It's a broad deregulation bill, intended to deregulate Texas telephone companies. The "no municipal telecommunications services" section
is at 54.202, "PROHIBITED MUNICIPAL SERVICES".
But there is much more in there. Basically, Texas telcos would be offered the opportunity to opt out of being public utilities. They then get to do anything they want to do - raise rates, put additional confusing surcharges on bills, provide lousy service, etc. The "free market" is supposed to fix this.
It's amusing to see what regulations remain. Texas elected officials must be listed in the front of phone books. The state of Texas cannot be charged fees for late payment.
Radioactive cobalt shows up in Mexico. Recycled into rebar and metal furniture. One known dead, injuries unknown. Discovered when some of the furniture was trucked to Los Alamos and set off radiation alarms.
And that's with the stuff in big chunks. "Weaponized", ground into a powder for distribution, it would be far more dangerous.
The NASDAQ changed SCO's ticker symbol today, because they didn't get their 10-K in on time.
Tney're now SCOXE, instead of SCOX. The Motley Fool is now talking about the SCO Death Spiral.
No. They're fighting delisting.
And it doesn't mean they can stop reporting to the SEC. They have too many stockholders for that.
If the stock drops to the pink sheets, the insiders will have a very hard time unloading it. Pink sheet stocks are thinly traded - there are few buyers. Insitutions and funds won't touch pink sheet stocks.
Slashdot Mirror
What site should your firewall block to prevent a drive-by Yahoo toolbar install?
Star Trek had ratings comparable with "Walker, Texas Ranger" when they were both on. Give it up.
That's a completely different technology. It's similar to the circular polarizers sometimes used as glare filters for CRTs. Those rotate the polarization of incoming light by 45 degrees, so reflections off the surface underneath are rotated 90 degrees and are then blocked by the polarizer on the way back out.
You could redo the I-Opener today. In fact, you could even get the latest version of QNX with the new embedded browser and load it into an I-Opener.
Something like that should be in every hotel room, where you really want a stateless client machine.
First, by "manufactured by printing", they don't mean a roll to roll process like a printing press. They propose to deposit materials with an inkjet-like mechanism.
Second, what they call "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry. There are ways to make semi-regular structures by bulk chemical means, and that's what they're doing. They did throw a reference to "bioengineered self-assembly" in, but that's not how they do it. The processing looks much more like processes you'd do in a wafer fab. There are common fab processes like electrodeposition, chemical removal of support substrates, and heating in an inert atmosphere.
The basic idea is to address the reasons that solar cells are inefficient. In bulk materials like silicon, only a small fraction of the photons do anything useful. Most of the photons are at the wrong wavelength. And many of the photon interactions that do occur don't result in an electron being delivered to the output. They're trying to fix both of those problems.
Their policy seems to be to shut up until it works. It might work, or it might not. They're not selling stock, and they're not issuing press releases. They have VC funding and some money from DARPA.
It's H.R. 550, and can be read from the Library of Congress. It has 102 cosponsors, all of them Democrats.
Tough bill. All voting code must be available for inspection by anybody. Diebold will hate this.
Also see Brittanica on the Virtual Bookshelf. "The biggest problem was that the company was driven by the sales organization, and the notion of selling just the information without the books at a cheaper price was abhorrent to them," - Harold Kester, former vice president of research and development at Britannica.
Flashblock is too heavy handed, and too buggy. The problem is that it's a plugin that modifies another plugin, which doesn't really work reliably.
After Microsoft did Encarta and began to crush Brittanica, Brittanica management went back to Bill Gates and proposed a lower buy-out price. Gates told them that their product now had negative value, because their sales force was so expensive to operate that it made the product noncompetitive.
And they still haven't filed their 10-K for last year. If it's not filed by the hearing date, they're going to be delisted.
There just has to be something really, really embarassing in the 10-K. Nobody files a late 10-K because of good news. And remember, since Sarbanes-Oxley became law, Darl has to personally sign the 10-K under penalty of perjury. Hide bad news, go to jail.
First, we need to get Flash under user control. This may require implementing an open-source Flash player, or beating hard on Macromedia. Flash animations need to respond to a "block all images from this site" right-click. All animations should come up static, dimmed, and silent, requiring user action to activate them. This keeps the annoyance level down.
Then we need to make page ownership hierarchical. If a page opens another window, the new window is considered a child of the parent window. When the parent window closes, so must the child.
Further, child windows should be restricted to the area of the parent window. They must be in front of the parent, and they must have some minimal overlap. (Restricting them to the parent window frame is probably too restrictive, but requiring some overlap means they can't move freely around the screen.)
Me too. You run Windows 2000. Windows XP runs you.
When the Win2K box goes, its replacement won't run a Microsoft OS.
Mr. Gorman, sadly, falls into the latter category. He is the president-elect of the American Library Association, which maintains a lobbying office three blocks from the White House.
No, Jonathan Sacks developed Lotus 1-2-3.
There are various figures for Name Development's 2004 income, but the balance sheet on page F-70 of the SEC filing says $11,474,620.
Presumably there's some payment schedule for the Name Development acquisition, but it doesn't seem to appear in the prospectus.
Name Development seems to be related to Ultsearch, the company that puts up those worthless "search" pages on dead domains.
This sort of thing will become much less valuable if Google zeroes out the PageRank of domains when they change ownership.
With the revenue from this, they bought a collection of domain names of marginal value. It looks like they actually paid out only only $24.6 million on cash upfront for Name Development. And even that goes into escrow for 18 months. Name Development's income for 2004 was $4.6 million.
Name Development seems to be one guy operating out of the Virgin Islands who sold click-throughs to Yahoo:
Marchex is the target of spyware/adware litigation:
I don't see how this adds up to a company with a market cap of $761 million. This looks more like a dud dot-com.
This is going to be interesting.
If you want to distribute an OS, contribute to Linux.
you might want to consider the oh-so-tiny possibility that this is the result of Jobs running the company That makes sense. It's typical of the process by which ageing hippies become Republicans. Understand that while Jobs has a following, it isn't here in Silicon Valley, where too many people have actually met him.
Those numbers are well above the comparable figures for newspapers.
So quit worrying about the US falling behind in broadband.
Actually, the Internet isn't that bad at 56Kb/s if you have strong ad blocking.
It makes its own hydrogen, though, from natural gas.
Texas HB789 is the actual legislation.
It's a broad deregulation bill, intended to deregulate Texas telephone companies. The "no municipal telecommunications services" section is at 54.202, "PROHIBITED MUNICIPAL SERVICES". But there is much more in there. Basically, Texas telcos would be offered the opportunity to opt out of being public utilities. They then get to do anything they want to do - raise rates, put additional confusing surcharges on bills, provide lousy service, etc. The "free market" is supposed to fix this.
It's amusing to see what regulations remain. Texas elected officials must be listed in the front of phone books. The state of Texas cannot be charged fees for late payment.
-
Radioactive cobalt dumped in vacant lot in Bangkok. 3 dead, 12 injured.
-
Radioactive cobalt shows up in scrapyard in Turkey. Two injured cutting up the scrap.
-
Radioactive cobalt shows up in scrapyard in Brazil. Four dead, 300 exposed.
-
Radioactive cobalt shows up in Mexico. Recycled into rebar and metal furniture. One known dead, injuries unknown. Discovered when some of the furniture was trucked to Los Alamos and set off radiation alarms.
And that's with the stuff in big chunks. "Weaponized", ground into a powder for distribution, it would be far more dangerous.This is the end game.
No. They're fighting delisting. And it doesn't mean they can stop reporting to the SEC. They have too many stockholders for that.
If the stock drops to the pink sheets, the insiders will have a very hard time unloading it. Pink sheet stocks are thinly traded - there are few buyers. Insitutions and funds won't touch pink sheet stocks.