There are two things that drive increased e-book reader sales:
1. Lot easier to pick up an e-book reader compared to a hardback book. If you've ever picked up the hardback version of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs or "Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN" by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, they're physically imposing monsters that make a MacBook Air look totally light in comparison.
2. You can change the display font size on an e-book reader. That has suddenly opened up many older Americans who had increasingly difficulty reading conventional books be able to read again.
That would be great but unless you have an Audible-compatible portable media player that has long battery life per charge like an iPod touch or iPod classic, be aware that with Audible files they can run down the battery charge pretty quick after several hours of use, especially with the higher-resolution audio quality files.
I'd rather get an Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, which is lighter than any 7" tablet and can store many, many books with microSD memory expansion. And you can use it at night if you need to read it in a darkened room with very little effect on battery life.
Actually, during the 1960's Oak Ridge National Laboratory built a small 5 MW reactor based on what we call molten-salt reactor (MSR) design, using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. The design actually worked quite well, but was discontinued because it didn't produce uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two main fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
But now, they're dusting off the old research and studying the idea of scaling up this MSR design (best known today by the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR) for a new generation of extremely safe nuclear reactors that offer these advantages of conventional uranium-fueled reactors:
1. Uses a cheaply-made form of nuclear fuel, and thorium-232 is widely more abundant than uranium. 2. Doesn't need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel. 3. Reactor shutdown happens in only a few minutes just by dumping the fuel from the reactor. 4. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, eliminates the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big source of cooling water such as a lake, fast-flowing river or ocean. 5. Can even use spent uranium fuel rods or plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel. 6. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to a uranium-fueled reactor, and more importantly, the radioactive half-life is under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal (it can be dumped into any disused salt mine or salt dome). Mind you, the nuclear medicine industry wants that "waste," since the byproduct of an MSR has enormous medical uses.
If I remember correctly, the Fukushima plant was scheduled for permanent shutdown by 2012 anyway due to the sheer age of the reactor plant and the fact the reactor lacked a truly modern containment structure like what you see at American nuclear plants.
That would be great except Micro USB is designed for raw data transfer and device charging ONLY. Apple wants a connector with a lot more functionality, especially video out, which has very high bandwidth requirements.
Interestingly much of the MyFord Touch interface is done completely by voice command. That way, you don't need to even take the hands off the steering wheel most of the time.
It's obvious that the pages for President Obama, Vice President Biden, Governor Romney and Representative Ryan have been "locked" (which means only a very tiny cadre of editors can change the page) for some time. As such, this avoids most of the issues of editors putting in incorrect information.
At where I work, they switched everyone to Windows 7 for one reason: Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP officially as of April 8, 2014. As such, my machine at work runs Windows 7 Professional (SP1) with Internet Explorer 9.0 as the web browser, though it may be updated to IE 10.0 probably early in 2013.
Windows Vista had the misfortune of coming out when x86-64 architecture hardware was not widely available, which really limited its usefulness. It was only when x86-64 desktop computers and laptops started to become more widely available by the spring of 2008 and the release of Service Pack 1 that Windows Vista finally became a viable OS.
Windows 7 lucked out because at the time of its release in 2009, x86-64 architecture hardware had become widely available and as such, new machines ran very well right from the start.
Scientists had warned for several DECADES that New Orleans was extremely vulnerable to a storm surge damage from a hurricane precisely because much of the city was built below sea level. As we noted from Katrina, what defenses the city had was totally inadequate to deal with the storm surge---it took weeks to get the water pumps working again just to remove the water from the city. This is why after scary rainstorm seasons in 1986 and 1997, the city of Sacramento, CA completely revamped their flood control procedures and ordered earlier water releases from Folsom Dam and Natomas Dam, along with earlier opening of the Sacramento Weir, in order to reduce water pressure on the city's levees during major rainstorms.
Actually, molten salt reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) could be the solution the our nuclear waste problem.
Here's the issue: besides the spent uranium fuel rods, we also have a large amount of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons that need to disposed of. With an LFTR, the spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium can be reprocessed into a form that can be dissolved with molten sodium fluoride salts and used as LFTR reactor fuel. We get a large source of nuclear fuel, and best of all, the radioactive waste from a LFTR only has a half-life of under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal by using disused salt mines or salt domes as disposal sites--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
But Katrina was unusual in that it was just about a direct hit on the New Orleans area, a place well-known for its extreme vulnerability to hurricanes due to much of the city being under sea level. And as that storm demonstrated, much of the city that was under sea level DID get flooded pretty substantially.
What is totally amazing about that image is not only do you clearly see the shading of the parachute itself, but you also see _in the same picture_ the protective heat shield cover falling away from the lander, too. In short, one of the most amazing images ever produced by NASA. (thumbs up)
When Alvin Toffler's book came out in 1980, the most prophetic chapter in that book was called "De-Massifying the Media." Once the public Internet took off in the first half of the 1990's, the cost of a single person being able to disseminate information on a huge scale dropped dramatically, especially with full web sites, weblogs, and now with the social media sites Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Wikipedia has become in many ways a practice ground for "crowd sourced" fact checking.
As such, Toffler's prediction in 1980 that as communications technology improve, the days of unfettered control by big media conglomerates will come to an end. Why do you think newspapers and news magazines are rapidly dying? What hurts newspapers and news magazines is the fact they are _too slow_ in disseminating news; news web sites, news discussion sites like Reddit and Twitter/Facebook can do it almost as fast as the event happens.
I think potentially, the first really serious competitor against the iPad could be devices that run Windows RT. Besides the Microsoft Surface, there may be at least 2-3 other manufacturers selling such tablets by the end of 2012.
People who have played with the "Metro"-like interface of Windows 8 say that's it's actually well-suited for touchscreen operations and once mastered, pretty easy to use. If Microsoft can sell a 32 GB (local storage) Surface for US$500 including the screen cover/keyboard, they could have a winner on their hands.
One of the biggest problems with large scale solar power is the fact it takes up a LOT of land to build viable solar power generation sites. Small wonder why there has been concern about building them in the US Southwest, where it may interfere with ecology of large amounts of desert areas.
1. An LFTR uses thorium-232, which is far more common than uranium--the USA has a huge stockpile of the stuff, so does India, and China has a lot of it from its rare-earth mining operations. 2. LFTR's use thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, far cheaper to make than uranium pellets assembled into fuel rods. 3. LFTR's can even use spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium dissolved in sodium fluoride salts as fuel, which means we can eliminate a major radioactive waste disposal problem from spent uranium fuel fuel rods and plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. 4. LFTR's don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels, since the reactor does not run under high pressure. 5. To quickly shut down the reactor for any reason, all you do is quickly drain the fuel from the reactor into a safety holding tank. This can be done in a matter of a few minutes. 6. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, we can eliminate the need for expensive, large cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of cooling water such as a river, lake or oceanside. It also means the physical size of the entire reactor plant could be a tiny fraction of a uranium-based reactor power plant. 7. The amount radioactive waste generated is a tiny fraction of what you get from a uranium reactor, and only has a half-life of under 300 years. This means the waste can either be dumped in former salt mines and/or salt domes cheaply--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
Actually, if we do find signs of current or past life on Mars, it would be TREMENDOUSLY exciting because it proves what scientists have long suspected: life could evolve on other planets besides Earth. Given what we've seen from the Kepler spacecraft, the number of planets that could potentially sustain life could be much large than originally estimated.
I wonder is it possible that in return for Apple heavily investing in Twitter, Twitter moves its data servers to one of the big server farms Apple operates. That way, Twitter has the capacity to handle even more message loads.
We know that Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully designed and built a test reactor that used thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel--and the reactor ran completely safely for _five_ years with no undue problems.
And you wonder why both China and India are heavily investing in developing the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) into something that can generate power on a large scale. Unlike uranium-based reactors, LFTR's offer these advantages:
1. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels. 2. The fuel is much cheaper to make than uranium-235 pellets assembled into fuel rods. In fact, it's even possible to use spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, which means we get rid of a huge radioactive waste problem. 3. If there is a need to quickly shut down the reactor, all you need to do is empty the thorium/sodium fluoride mix from the reactor vessel. 4. By using closed-cycle Brayton turbines, you eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or locate the reactor near a large source of cooling water. That also means the physical "footprint" of the reactor powerplant could be vastly smaller, cutting construction costs. 5. The amount of nuclear waste generated in a tiny fraction of the waste generated by a uranium reactor, and this waste has a very short half life--under 300 years. That means the waste can be dumped into any disused salt mine and/or salt dome cheaply, if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
In fact, I consider Windows 7 to be the best version of Windows since Windows 2000 Professional--very stable and hard to bring down. I've had some problems with Google Chrome with the Norton Toolbar from Norton Internet Security 2012, but it appears Google has resolved this problem with the current version of Chrome and Norton may have fixed it with a new Norton Toolbar update originally intended for compatibility with the current version of Firefox.
I think there may be still another reason for the new 19-pin dock: because it's physically smaller, that frees up space inside the iPhone case for more circuitry--which means we could get a bigger battery, 3GPP LTE support, NFC circuitry/antenna, and other new features.
I think contrary to what people think, robotics technology for parts assembly is very commonplace, even on high-end products.
For example, take a look at even a high-end car like a Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan. Anyone who's seen the assembly line notes much of the assembly work is done by robots, with human hands primarily involved in assembling the interior of the car and certain exterior trim pieces. For most lower-end models, a huge fraction of the assembly of the car itself is done by robots nowadays.
The USA has one gigantic advantage for manufacturing almost no other country has: a magnificent ground transportation infrastructure. Thanks to our railroads and the Interstate Highway System, good assembly can be done almost anywhere in the country.
I think one of the reasons why Apple has NOT gone to a bigger size screen was the fact they feared that users would not be able to use the iPhone one-handed--note that with the Samsung Galaxy SII and SIII models, it works best in two-handed operation.
This is why if the rumors are true, Apple kept the width of the next-generation iPhone the same, but increased the physical height to accommodate a true 4" (diagonal) display screen. In short, it's been said the new iPhone looks a lot like a "taller" iPhone 4S.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two things that drive increased e-book reader sales:
1. Lot easier to pick up an e-book reader compared to a hardback book. If you've ever picked up the hardback version of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs or "Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN" by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, they're physically imposing monsters that make a MacBook Air look totally light in comparison.
2. You can change the display font size on an e-book reader. That has suddenly opened up many older Americans who had increasingly difficulty reading conventional books be able to read again.
That would be great but unless you have an Audible-compatible portable media player that has long battery life per charge like an iPod touch or iPod classic, be aware that with Audible files they can run down the battery charge pretty quick after several hours of use, especially with the higher-resolution audio quality files.
I'd rather get an Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, which is lighter than any 7" tablet and can store many, many books with microSD memory expansion. And you can use it at night if you need to read it in a darkened room with very little effect on battery life.
Actually, during the 1960's Oak Ridge National Laboratory built a small 5 MW reactor based on what we call molten-salt reactor (MSR) design, using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. The design actually worked quite well, but was discontinued because it didn't produce uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two main fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
But now, they're dusting off the old research and studying the idea of scaling up this MSR design (best known today by the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR) for a new generation of extremely safe nuclear reactors that offer these advantages of conventional uranium-fueled reactors:
1. Uses a cheaply-made form of nuclear fuel, and thorium-232 is widely more abundant than uranium.
2. Doesn't need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
3. Reactor shutdown happens in only a few minutes just by dumping the fuel from the reactor.
4. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, eliminates the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big source of cooling water such as a lake, fast-flowing river or ocean.
5. Can even use spent uranium fuel rods or plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
6. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to a uranium-fueled reactor, and more importantly, the radioactive half-life is under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal (it can be dumped into any disused salt mine or salt dome). Mind you, the nuclear medicine industry wants that "waste," since the byproduct of an MSR has enormous medical uses.
If I remember correctly, the Fukushima plant was scheduled for permanent shutdown by 2012 anyway due to the sheer age of the reactor plant and the fact the reactor lacked a truly modern containment structure like what you see at American nuclear plants.
That would be great except Micro USB is designed for raw data transfer and device charging ONLY. Apple wants a connector with a lot more functionality, especially video out, which has very high bandwidth requirements.
Interestingly much of the MyFord Touch interface is done completely by voice command. That way, you don't need to even take the hands off the steering wheel most of the time.
It's obvious that the pages for President Obama, Vice President Biden, Governor Romney and Representative Ryan have been "locked" (which means only a very tiny cadre of editors can change the page) for some time. As such, this avoids most of the issues of editors putting in incorrect information.
At where I work, they switched everyone to Windows 7 for one reason: Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP officially as of April 8, 2014. As such, my machine at work runs Windows 7 Professional (SP1) with Internet Explorer 9.0 as the web browser, though it may be updated to IE 10.0 probably early in 2013.
Windows Vista had the misfortune of coming out when x86-64 architecture hardware was not widely available, which really limited its usefulness. It was only when x86-64 desktop computers and laptops started to become more widely available by the spring of 2008 and the release of Service Pack 1 that Windows Vista finally became a viable OS.
Windows 7 lucked out because at the time of its release in 2009, x86-64 architecture hardware had become widely available and as such, new machines ran very well right from the start.
Scientists had warned for several DECADES that New Orleans was extremely vulnerable to a storm surge damage from a hurricane precisely because much of the city was built below sea level. As we noted from Katrina, what defenses the city had was totally inadequate to deal with the storm surge---it took weeks to get the water pumps working again just to remove the water from the city. This is why after scary rainstorm seasons in 1986 and 1997, the city of Sacramento, CA completely revamped their flood control procedures and ordered earlier water releases from Folsom Dam and Natomas Dam, along with earlier opening of the Sacramento Weir, in order to reduce water pressure on the city's levees during major rainstorms.
Actually, molten salt reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) could be the solution the our nuclear waste problem.
Here's the issue: besides the spent uranium fuel rods, we also have a large amount of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons that need to disposed of. With an LFTR, the spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium can be reprocessed into a form that can be dissolved with molten sodium fluoride salts and used as LFTR reactor fuel. We get a large source of nuclear fuel, and best of all, the radioactive waste from a LFTR only has a half-life of under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal by using disused salt mines or salt domes as disposal sites--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
But Katrina was unusual in that it was just about a direct hit on the New Orleans area, a place well-known for its extreme vulnerability to hurricanes due to much of the city being under sea level. And as that storm demonstrated, much of the city that was under sea level DID get flooded pretty substantially.
Here's the picture from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog on Discover magazine's web site:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/08/06/curiosity-update-heat-shield-spotted/
What is totally amazing about that image is not only do you clearly see the shading of the parachute itself, but you also see _in the same picture_ the protective heat shield cover falling away from the lander, too. In short, one of the most amazing images ever produced by NASA. (thumbs up)
...This does not surprise anyone.
When Alvin Toffler's book came out in 1980, the most prophetic chapter in that book was called "De-Massifying the Media." Once the public Internet took off in the first half of the 1990's, the cost of a single person being able to disseminate information on a huge scale dropped dramatically, especially with full web sites, weblogs, and now with the social media sites Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Wikipedia has become in many ways a practice ground for "crowd sourced" fact checking.
As such, Toffler's prediction in 1980 that as communications technology improve, the days of unfettered control by big media conglomerates will come to an end. Why do you think newspapers and news magazines are rapidly dying? What hurts newspapers and news magazines is the fact they are _too slow_ in disseminating news; news web sites, news discussion sites like Reddit and Twitter/Facebook can do it almost as fast as the event happens.
I think potentially, the first really serious competitor against the iPad could be devices that run Windows RT. Besides the Microsoft Surface, there may be at least 2-3 other manufacturers selling such tablets by the end of 2012.
People who have played with the "Metro"-like interface of Windows 8 say that's it's actually well-suited for touchscreen operations and once mastered, pretty easy to use. If Microsoft can sell a 32 GB (local storage) Surface for US$500 including the screen cover/keyboard, they could have a winner on their hands.
One of the biggest problems with large scale solar power is the fact it takes up a LOT of land to build viable solar power generation sites. Small wonder why there has been concern about building them in the US Southwest, where it may interfere with ecology of large amounts of desert areas.
Or to be more specific:
1. An LFTR uses thorium-232, which is far more common than uranium--the USA has a huge stockpile of the stuff, so does India, and China has a lot of it from its rare-earth mining operations.
2. LFTR's use thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, far cheaper to make than uranium pellets assembled into fuel rods.
3. LFTR's can even use spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium dissolved in sodium fluoride salts as fuel, which means we can eliminate a major radioactive waste disposal problem from spent uranium fuel fuel rods and plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.
4. LFTR's don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels, since the reactor does not run under high pressure.
5. To quickly shut down the reactor for any reason, all you do is quickly drain the fuel from the reactor into a safety holding tank. This can be done in a matter of a few minutes.
6. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, we can eliminate the need for expensive, large cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of cooling water such as a river, lake or oceanside. It also means the physical size of the entire reactor plant could be a tiny fraction of a uranium-based reactor power plant.
7. The amount radioactive waste generated is a tiny fraction of what you get from a uranium reactor, and only has a half-life of under 300 years. This means the waste can either be dumped in former salt mines and/or salt domes cheaply--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
Actually, if we do find signs of current or past life on Mars, it would be TREMENDOUSLY exciting because it proves what scientists have long suspected: life could evolve on other planets besides Earth. Given what we've seen from the Kepler spacecraft, the number of planets that could potentially sustain life could be much large than originally estimated.
I wonder is it possible that in return for Apple heavily investing in Twitter, Twitter moves its data servers to one of the big server farms Apple operates. That way, Twitter has the capacity to handle even more message loads.
We know that Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully designed and built a test reactor that used thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel--and the reactor ran completely safely for _five_ years with no undue problems.
And you wonder why both China and India are heavily investing in developing the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) into something that can generate power on a large scale. Unlike uranium-based reactors, LFTR's offer these advantages:
1. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels.
2. The fuel is much cheaper to make than uranium-235 pellets assembled into fuel rods. In fact, it's even possible to use spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, which means we get rid of a huge radioactive waste problem.
3. If there is a need to quickly shut down the reactor, all you need to do is empty the thorium/sodium fluoride mix from the reactor vessel.
4. By using closed-cycle Brayton turbines, you eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or locate the reactor near a large source of cooling water. That also means the physical "footprint" of the reactor powerplant could be vastly smaller, cutting construction costs.
5. The amount of nuclear waste generated in a tiny fraction of the waste generated by a uranium reactor, and this waste has a very short half life--under 300 years. That means the waste can be dumped into any disused salt mine and/or salt dome cheaply, if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
So what are we waiting for?
In fact, I consider Windows 7 to be the best version of Windows since Windows 2000 Professional--very stable and hard to bring down. I've had some problems with Google Chrome with the Norton Toolbar from Norton Internet Security 2012, but it appears Google has resolved this problem with the current version of Chrome and Norton may have fixed it with a new Norton Toolbar update originally intended for compatibility with the current version of Firefox.
I think there may be still another reason for the new 19-pin dock: because it's physically smaller, that frees up space inside the iPhone case for more circuitry--which means we could get a bigger battery, 3GPP LTE support, NFC circuitry/antenna, and other new features.
I think contrary to what people think, robotics technology for parts assembly is very commonplace, even on high-end products.
For example, take a look at even a high-end car like a Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan. Anyone who's seen the assembly line notes much of the assembly work is done by robots, with human hands primarily involved in assembling the interior of the car and certain exterior trim pieces. For most lower-end models, a huge fraction of the assembly of the car itself is done by robots nowadays.
The USA has one gigantic advantage for manufacturing almost no other country has: a magnificent ground transportation infrastructure. Thanks to our railroads and the Interstate Highway System, good assembly can be done almost anywhere in the country.
I think one of the reasons why Apple has NOT gone to a bigger size screen was the fact they feared that users would not be able to use the iPhone one-handed--note that with the Samsung Galaxy SII and SIII models, it works best in two-handed operation.
This is why if the rumors are true, Apple kept the width of the next-generation iPhone the same, but increased the physical height to accommodate a true 4" (diagonal) display screen. In short, it's been said the new iPhone looks a lot like a "taller" iPhone 4S.