Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?
That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Just for the record, Mac OS X has the ability to encrypt a user's home directory... and, for the IT managers,
"Company administrators can set up a computer-wide master password as a safeguard in the event someone forgets his or her login password." Corporate IT management problem apparently solved.
Personally, given the numerous recent stories of thefts and losses of laptops with sensitive information (TIAA customer files, VA patient data, etc). I would have thought corporate IT managers would be begging users to encrypt their data.
This is the cue for Microsoft to roll out a new! improved! disk directory format.
If I were Microsoft, I'd make just enough undocumented changes to screw up reverse-engineered implementations of NTFS... providing just enough increased functionality to which I could Point With Pride.
I might even called it WinFS 2007 or WinFS X-Treme or Enterprise WinFS. It wouldn't have anything to do with the real WinFS... anything more than Javascript had to do with Java, or Mac OS 9 had to do with Copland, but it would certainly muddy the buzzword waters.
Imagine a meeting with nerds and suits present in which the nerds make the mistake of mentioning Microsoft's failure to deliver WinFS, the suits would wave their magazine and say they had, then drum their fingers, yawn, and look at their watches while the poor nerds try to explain the complex technical issues and how WinFS was supposed to therblig the frammistan while WinFS Gold merely globulorns the ferthbernder.
When I try to help out "layperson" friends with email problems, the biggest problem is not how their email client works. The problem is that the average layperson at this point receives email in more than one way... and is totally unaware of what they are using or how it works.
"How do you get your email?"
"It just shows up in my inbox."
"OK, let me ask this. Do you get your email with an email client program like Outlook Express, or do you get it on your Web browser, like Internet Explorer?"
"I have just plain Outlook."
"OK, you probably got it as part of Microsoft Word."
"Is Outlook Express better? It sounds like it's faster, should I be using Outlook Express instead of Outlook?"
"No, it doesn't matter. Outlook Express and Outlook are both email clients. They do the same thing, Outlook Express comes free as part of Windows, Outlook is part of Office and is fancier."
"Actually, I wanted to ask you why Outlook just pops up sometimes."
"Does it pop up when you click on a "mail" link in a website?"
"Yes. Well, actually, I think it's 'Outlook Express,' but the icon on my desktop just says 'Outlook.'"
"OK, Outlook probably got installed as a desktop icon when you installed Microsoft Word, but Outlook Express is probably popping up because you still have it selected as the default mail client in Internet Explorer. Now: when you read your email, are you using Outlook? or Outlook Express?"
"It's Verizon."
"You mean Verizon is your internet service provider?"
"Yes, Verizon DSL."
"The screen you are looking at when you are using email. Does it say 'Outlook' or does it say 'Internet Explorer?'
"It says 'Verizon Central.' Then I log in and get my email."
"Do you ever use Outlook or Outlook Express?"
"They just pop up sometimes. I never know what to do so I just close the window."
"OK. Let me see if I've got this straight. You turn on your computer, you log in to your account, and you click on the blue E. Now you're in your web browser, and you could go to Google or Yahoo or something like that..."
"Oh, sometimes I get my email from Yahoo."
"Do you have a free Yahoo email account?"
"Yes, I set it up when I had that Earthlink dial-up account. But when I got Verizon DSL I started to use Verizon, too. One of the things I wanted to ask you was how to set up my email so I can get it all in one place."
"Well, first things first. You're in your Web browser, you can go places like Google and Yahoo, and one of the places you go is to Yahoo Mail, and another place you go is to Verizon's 'netmail?'"
"Yes..."
"And you don't send or receive email from Outlook or Outlook Express, the only time you've seen them is when they pop up by themselves because you clicked on a link?"
According to the article, this device is for transmitting your speech (not listening).I've always heard that the reason why we're shocked when we hear our own recorded voices, because we hear our own voice through bone-conduction... and the bone-conducted version sounds better.
If so, the person at the other end might not recognize you, because you would sound like a stranger... a stranger who has a richer, deeper voice than you.
If that's correct, the implications are interesting.
Who cares? It's now a boring company that makes boring products.
As a nerd who cares about "stuff that matters," what HP chooses to do or not do is about as interesting to me as what Whirlpool Corporation or Caterpillar, Inc. or Citicorp do.
If I'm buying a computer, sure I'm interested in whether HP's product is marginally better or cheaper than Dell's. If I'm investing money, sure I'll pay attention to whether it's making money or losing.
But when I'm wearing my nerd hat, nothing HP does is likely to matter very much to me. The days of engineering innovation are long over. Whether that's good or bad for the bottom line, I wouldn't know—although, looking at U. S. automakers, I'd at least suspect it's good in the short run, bad in the long run.
"your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them"
Speak for yourself, mister.
My Verizon DSL 768 Kbps/128Kbps service is a lot slower than my mighty 2.5" 5400 RPM Seagate ST9100823A (sustained transfer rate 38 MB/sec). Approximately fifty times slower "reading" (downloading), 300 times slower "writing" (uploading). No, wait... the DSL speed is in bits, the disk speed is in bytes. Make that 400 times slower "reading" and 2400 times slower "writing."
I'm darned if I see how it provides "tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object," "Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones," or implements "'Cradle-to-cradle' life-spans for objects: cheap effective recycling."
It appears to me to have, by my account, approximate 1-3/8 of the six facets of spimes.
They're not even limited to five machines. They're limited to five machines _at a time._
And if you sell a machine or two and forget to deauthorize them first, you have only the minor nuisance of performing a "deauthorize all" and then reauthorizing the machines you have.
The reason why trying to estimate times is a useless exercise is that you can only get a reasonable exercise if you can break the problem down into tasks that resemble similar tasks that have been done before.
But... ever since the days in the 1950s when the subroutine was first invented, there never should be such a thing as a "similar task." Anything that was done before should have been packaged as a subroutine. Or a reusable object. Or a programming system (entire library or language) designed to attack that class of task.
Managers that prize predictability over productivity assign their people to do trivial variations of the same work over and over again and get a predictable straight-line curve of time versus work accomplished.
Good managers allow their people to invest time into tools and techniques are new, hence risky, but pay off with a multiplier effect when they work. They get an unpredictable but exponential progress curve.
(Bad managers, of course, won't accept the notion that a new task should be estimated at the time that a similar task did in the past. They insist that the task should be estimated as if everything were going to go perfectly this time, no missteps, no problems. ("It will take about a year." "Why do you say that?" "Because, remember, the last time we developed the frammis for the foithboinder project, it took a year" "Yes, but a lot of things went wrong. We had several false starts, because the original spec we were given was wrong. And Jim left halfway through the project and it took a while for Kathy up to speed. And we lost a month when we changed over to the new source code control system." "And why do you think nothing will go wrong this time?")
My jaw dropped when I read Ars Technica's comment that Microsoft was "abandoning many years of a largely consistent user interface in favor of an almost entirely redesigned system."
Every new release of Office I've ever used has shuffled the commands into different menus, reorganized which commands are in menus, which are in toolbars, which are in both, which have shortcut keys, which do not, and what those keys are.
(Why do I have the feeling that Office's user interface decisions are made by marketing managers exercising their right to tailor Office to their personal taste, rather than by UI professionals performing user testing?)
(Yes, I am aware that Office has a sort of user-interface construction set that lets you remould all of these nearer to your heart's desire... thereby making it almost impossible for you to use any other copy of Word but your own...)
Just wondering. I realize that it would only be used in an extreme emergency... and that even if the remote landing system didn't work properly, the surface of the earth is very large and the risk to people on the ground would be small.
I also wonder whether it wouldn't be possible (and perhaps safer) to use the shuttle's remaining fuel to lift it into some stable orbit... (thereby, of course, only postponing the problem).
...It's not that the camera won't have enough pixels. It's not that you need an Ansel Adams-quality photograph.
It's that to get a nice, clear, useful, _recognizable_ thumbnail-sized picture of your destination requires a lot of intelligent thought, good framing of the picture, thirty seconds to walk around and pick a good angle, and a time of day when the light is reasonable.
Three-quarters of the pictures people take with this thing will be
a) unrecognizable due to reflections on the car window they're trying to shoot through, or
b) unrecognizable because of lighting issues (dark, muddy, illegible storefront against a nice bright sky), or
c) unrecognizable because the camera was pointed at the wrong thing, or
d) unrecognizable because a lot of buildings look pretty much like each other, or
e) unrecognizable because the store name is too small to read in the finished picture when displayed thumbnail size on the navigation screen, or
f) unrecognizable because important recognition features were hidden behind a parked car, or
g) unrecognizable because you don't have a view of the front of the building from the only place where you could stop the car, which happens to be the parking lot in back of the building, or
h) unrecognizable because it's night-time and the camera isn't sensitive enough to make a good picture by streetlight (and the streetlighting isn't even enough even if it were, and the flash isn't bright enough to light up a building thirty feet away, and even if it were all you'd get are the flash reflections off the windows...
Every week or so there's a news story about someone having a laptop stolen, or being lost, with thousands of customer files on it. I keep wondering why encryption isn't being used. Under Mac OS X, you click one checkbox to enable "FileVault" and everything in your home directory is encrypted. I don't know exactly what's available in the WIndows world, but I'm sure there are tools that are just as easy to use.
Of course, I don't use FileVault.
Why not? Well, it's one more thing to go wrong. I'm far more worried about losing my files or losing access to them, than I am about having other people look at them. And, frankly, I've never bothered to find out exactly what happens when you use a standard backup tool on a FileVault-protected Mac (presumably all the backups are UNencrypted if you are running the backup tool from within the protected account?)
So... I dunno. I don't understand why everyone doesn't use encryption, but I don't use encryption myself. Of course, I have reasons. Probably everyone else has reasons, too?
Karl Rove had the NSA upload H5N1 virus to it, because it was on the brink of finding scientific proof of global warming, the nonexistence of God, and the morality of same-sex marriage.
When the big news is that, in some country, some leader only got 90% of the vote instead of the 97% expected, it may be significant, but you know that country is no democracy.
When the big news is that IE's market share has dropped from 97% to 90%, it may be significant, but you know that the product did not get its market share on the basis of open competition on a level playing field.
Reminds me of a minister leading off a church newsletter by saying "Some feel that the church is old-fashioned in today's modern fast-paced world, but starting next month we are going to make use of contemporary technology to spread the Good News and help parishioners stay in touch. Yes, we are going to put a up what is known as 'web site' on the international communications system known as the Internat. Any one with a 'modem' will be able to 'download' our newsletters. It is not so different from the letters Paul used to communicate with the early churches, but instead of ink and paper we will use electrons moving at the speed of light."
The article describes Jobs as "a tough-minded executive who knows when to cut and run."
What? Cutting and running is always the wrong thing to do, in all situations, under all circumstances. It is always a craven act of cowardice. Nervous-Nellyism.
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Stay the course. Never give up the ship! Now matter how deep you are in the Big Muddy, the right decision is always to push on. Where would the lemmings be if they had turned back? What if Custer had chosen to retreat?
Doesn't Jobs remember the Think Different posters with the pictures of Icarus, Captain Ahab, and the Earl of Cardigan?
145 watts? That's a lot more than your good old-fashioned five-tube radios of the 1950s used.
Now, before everyone piles on me, I fully understand a five-tube radio didn't have exactly the same computing power as a modern chip... and that to match the number of switching elements you would need [insert 1 followed by about ten zeroes here] vacuum-tube radios, which would consume the total output of [choose one: Niagara Falls, Three Mile Island, the total world output of cow flatulence methane].
It's still shocking to those who remember all the hype about the electric that was going to be saved by solid state electronics. Which, of course, were also going to be completely free from failures...
And in further news, Georgia Tech scientists have designed a printer with an integral shredder that shreds all output continuously as it is printed.
They have also designed a novel camera which, instead of a digital CCD array, uses a tough, thin strip of polyester polymer coated with a chemical, light-sensitive substrate. Intended for spy applications, if caught the captured images can be destroyed in seconds simply by opening the back of the camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?
That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Just for the record, Mac OS X has the ability to encrypt a user's home directory... and, for the IT managers,
"Company administrators can set up a computer-wide master password as a safeguard in the event someone forgets his or her login password." Corporate IT management problem apparently solved.
Personally, given the numerous recent stories of thefts and losses of laptops with sensitive information (TIAA customer files, VA patient data, etc). I would have thought corporate IT managers would be begging users to encrypt their data.
This is the cue for Microsoft to roll out a new! improved! disk directory format.
If I were Microsoft, I'd make just enough undocumented changes to screw up reverse-engineered implementations of NTFS... providing just enough increased functionality to which I could Point With Pride.
I might even called it WinFS 2007 or WinFS X-Treme or Enterprise WinFS. It wouldn't have anything to do with the real WinFS... anything more than Javascript had to do with Java, or Mac OS 9 had to do with Copland, but it would certainly muddy the buzzword waters.
Imagine a meeting with nerds and suits present in which the nerds make the mistake of mentioning Microsoft's failure to deliver WinFS, the suits would wave their magazine and say they had, then drum their fingers, yawn, and look at their watches while the poor nerds try to explain the complex technical issues and how WinFS was supposed to therblig the frammistan while WinFS Gold merely globulorns the ferthbernder.
Looking for explosive performance?
You may find Dell's new laptop too hot to handle!
It puts you in the middle of the action, with sound effects so real you'll swear you can feel them.
Blazing action so intense it's practically assault and battery!
When I try to help out "layperson" friends with email problems, the biggest problem is not how their email client works. The problem is that the average layperson at this point receives email in more than one way... and is totally unaware of what they are using or how it works.
"How do you get your email?"
"It just shows up in my inbox."
"OK, let me ask this. Do you get your email with an email client program like Outlook Express, or do you get it on your Web browser, like Internet Explorer?"
"I have just plain Outlook."
"OK, you probably got it as part of Microsoft Word."
"Is Outlook Express better? It sounds like it's faster, should I be using Outlook Express instead of Outlook?"
"No, it doesn't matter. Outlook Express and Outlook are both email clients. They do the same thing, Outlook Express comes free as part of Windows, Outlook is part of Office and is fancier."
"Actually, I wanted to ask you why Outlook just pops up sometimes."
"Does it pop up when you click on a "mail" link in a website?"
"Yes. Well, actually, I think it's 'Outlook Express,' but the icon on my desktop just says 'Outlook.'"
"OK, Outlook probably got installed as a desktop icon when you installed Microsoft Word, but Outlook Express is probably popping up because you still have it selected as the default mail client in Internet Explorer. Now: when you read your email, are you using Outlook? or Outlook Express?"
"It's Verizon."
"You mean Verizon is your internet service provider?"
"Yes, Verizon DSL."
"The screen you are looking at when you are using email. Does it say 'Outlook' or does it say 'Internet Explorer?'
"It says 'Verizon Central.' Then I log in and get my email."
"Do you ever use Outlook or Outlook Express?"
"They just pop up sometimes. I never know what to do so I just close the window."
"OK. Let me see if I've got this straight. You turn on your computer, you log in to your account, and you click on the blue E. Now you're in your web browser, and you could go to Google or Yahoo or something like that..."
"Oh, sometimes I get my email from Yahoo."
"Do you have a free Yahoo email account?"
"Yes, I set it up when I had that Earthlink dial-up account. But when I got Verizon DSL I started to use Verizon, too. One of the things I wanted to ask you was how to set up my email so I can get it all in one place."
"Well, first things first. You're in your Web browser, you can go places like Google and Yahoo, and one of the places you go is to Yahoo Mail, and another place you go is to Verizon's 'netmail?'"
"Yes..."
"And you don't send or receive email from Outlook or Outlook Express, the only time you've seen them is when they pop up by themselves because you clicked on a link?"
"Yes..."
According to the article, this device is for transmitting your speech (not listening).I've always heard that the reason why we're shocked when we hear our own recorded voices, because we hear our own voice through bone-conduction... and the bone-conducted version sounds better.
If so, the person at the other end might not recognize you, because you would sound like a stranger... a stranger who has a richer, deeper voice than you.
If that's correct, the implications are interesting.
Who cares? It's now a boring company that makes boring products.
As a nerd who cares about "stuff that matters," what HP chooses to do or not do is about as interesting to me as what Whirlpool Corporation or Caterpillar, Inc. or Citicorp do.
If I'm buying a computer, sure I'm interested in whether HP's product is marginally better or cheaper than Dell's. If I'm investing money, sure I'll pay attention to whether it's making money or losing.
But when I'm wearing my nerd hat, nothing HP does is likely to matter very much to me. The days of engineering innovation are long over. Whether that's good or bad for the bottom line, I wouldn't know—although, looking at U. S. automakers, I'd at least suspect it's good in the short run, bad in the long run.
"your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them"
Speak for yourself, mister.
My Verizon DSL 768 Kbps/128Kbps service is a lot slower than my mighty 2.5" 5400 RPM Seagate ST9100823A (sustained transfer rate 38 MB/sec). Approximately fifty times slower "reading" (downloading), 300 times slower "writing" (uploading). No, wait... the DSL speed is in bits, the disk speed is in bytes. Make that 400 times slower "reading" and 2400 times slower "writing."
I'm darned if I see how it provides "tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object," "Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones," or implements "'Cradle-to-cradle' life-spans for objects: cheap effective recycling."
It appears to me to have, by my account, approximate 1-3/8 of the six facets of spimes.
This seems more like Where's George. But less interesting.
They're not even limited to five machines. They're limited to five machines _at a time._
And if you sell a machine or two and forget to deauthorize them first, you have only the minor nuisance of performing a "deauthorize all" and then reauthorizing the machines you have.
The reason why trying to estimate times is a useless exercise is that you can only get a reasonable exercise if you can break the problem down into tasks that resemble similar tasks that have been done before.
But... ever since the days in the 1950s when the subroutine was first invented, there never should be such a thing as a "similar task." Anything that was done before should have been packaged as a subroutine. Or a reusable object. Or a programming system (entire library or language) designed to attack that class of task.
Managers that prize predictability over productivity assign their people to do trivial variations of the same work over and over again and get a predictable straight-line curve of time versus work accomplished.
Good managers allow their people to invest time into tools and techniques are new, hence risky, but pay off with a multiplier effect when they work. They get an unpredictable but exponential progress curve.
(Bad managers, of course, won't accept the notion that a new task should be estimated at the time that a similar task did in the past. They insist that the task should be estimated as if everything were going to go perfectly this time, no missteps, no problems. ("It will take about a year." "Why do you say that?" "Because, remember, the last time we developed the frammis for the foithboinder project, it took a year" "Yes, but a lot of things went wrong. We had several false starts, because the original spec we were given was wrong. And Jim left halfway through the project and it took a while for Kathy up to speed. And we lost a month when we changed over to the new source code control system." "And why do you think nothing will go wrong this time?")
My jaw dropped when I read Ars Technica's comment that Microsoft was "abandoning many years of a largely consistent user interface in favor of an almost entirely redesigned system."
Every new release of Office I've ever used has shuffled the commands into different menus, reorganized which commands are in menus, which are in toolbars, which are in both, which have shortcut keys, which do not, and what those keys are.
(Why do I have the feeling that Office's user interface decisions are made by marketing managers exercising their right to tailor Office to their personal taste, rather than by UI professionals performing user testing?)
(Yes, I am aware that Office has a sort of user-interface construction set that lets you remould all of these nearer to your heart's desire... thereby making it almost impossible for you to use any other copy of Word but your own...)
Just wondering. I realize that it would only be used in an extreme emergency... and that even if the remote landing system didn't work properly, the surface of the earth is very large and the risk to people on the ground would be small.
I also wonder whether it wouldn't be possible (and perhaps safer) to use the shuttle's remaining fuel to lift it into some stable orbit... (thereby, of course, only postponing the problem).
...It's not that the camera won't have enough pixels. It's not that you need an Ansel Adams-quality photograph.
It's that to get a nice, clear, useful, _recognizable_ thumbnail-sized picture of your destination requires a lot of intelligent thought, good framing of the picture, thirty seconds to walk around and pick a good angle, and a time of day when the light is reasonable.
Three-quarters of the pictures people take with this thing will be
a) unrecognizable due to reflections on the car window they're trying to shoot through, or
b) unrecognizable because of lighting issues (dark, muddy, illegible storefront against a nice bright sky), or
c) unrecognizable because the camera was pointed at the wrong thing, or
d) unrecognizable because a lot of buildings look pretty much like each other, or
e) unrecognizable because the store name is too small to read in the finished picture when displayed thumbnail size on the navigation screen, or
f) unrecognizable because important recognition features were hidden behind a parked car, or
g) unrecognizable because you don't have a view of the front of the building from the only place where you could stop the car, which happens to be the parking lot in back of the building, or
h) unrecognizable because it's night-time and the camera isn't sensitive enough to make a good picture by streetlight (and the streetlighting isn't even enough even if it were, and the flash isn't bright enough to light up a building thirty feet away, and even if it were all you'd get are the flash reflections off the windows...
Well, someone had to say it.
Every week or so there's a news story about someone having a laptop stolen, or being lost, with thousands of customer files on it. I keep wondering why encryption isn't being used. Under Mac OS X, you click one checkbox to enable "FileVault" and everything in your home directory is encrypted. I don't know exactly what's available in the WIndows world, but I'm sure there are tools that are just as easy to use.
Of course, I don't use FileVault.
Why not? Well, it's one more thing to go wrong. I'm far more worried about losing my files or losing access to them, than I am about having other people look at them. And, frankly, I've never bothered to find out exactly what happens when you use a standard backup tool on a FileVault-protected Mac (presumably all the backups are UNencrypted if you are running the backup tool from within the protected account?)
So... I dunno. I don't understand why everyone doesn't use encryption, but I don't use encryption myself. Of course, I have reasons. Probably everyone else has reasons, too?
Where would we be if a bunch of naysayers had gone around knocking Polavision, quadraphonic sound, or the IBM 4 inch diskette?
Karl Rove had the NSA upload H5N1 virus to it, because it was on the brink of finding scientific proof of global warming, the nonexistence of God, and the morality of same-sex marriage.
Like a nice, compact, almost-silent, energy-efficient, but slightly-underperforming Mac Mini?
How could anyone write a whole article about 2.5" drives in desktops without even mentioning the Mac Mini?
you ''know'' something is rotten.
When the big news is that, in some country, some leader only got 90% of the vote instead of the 97% expected, it may be significant, but you know that country is no democracy.
When the big news is that IE's market share has dropped from 97% to 90%, it may be significant, but you know that the product did not get its market share on the basis of open competition on a level playing field.
Reminds me of a minister leading off a church newsletter by saying "Some feel that the church is old-fashioned in today's modern fast-paced world, but starting next month we are going to make use of contemporary technology to spread the Good News and help parishioners stay in touch. Yes, we are going to put a up what is known as 'web site' on the international communications system known as the Internat. Any one with a 'modem' will be able to 'download' our newsletters. It is not so different from the letters Paul used to communicate with the early churches, but instead of ink and paper we will use electrons moving at the speed of light."
With a camera not much larger than an old Speed Graphic, you could take one picture of a crowd and get ID-quality pictures of everyone in the crowd.
The article describes Jobs as "a tough-minded executive who knows when to cut and run."
What? Cutting and running is always the wrong thing to do, in all situations, under all circumstances. It is always a craven act of cowardice. Nervous-Nellyism.
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Stay the course. Never give up the ship! Now matter how deep you are in the Big Muddy, the right decision is always to push on. Where would the lemmings be if they had turned back? What if Custer had chosen to retreat?
Doesn't Jobs remember the Think Different posters with the pictures of Icarus, Captain Ahab, and the Earl of Cardigan?
145 watts? That's a lot more than your good old-fashioned five-tube radios of the 1950s used.
Now, before everyone piles on me, I fully understand a five-tube radio didn't have exactly the same computing power as a modern chip... and that to match the number of switching elements you would need [insert 1 followed by about ten zeroes here] vacuum-tube radios, which would consume the total output of [choose one: Niagara Falls, Three Mile Island, the total world output of cow flatulence methane].
It's still shocking to those who remember all the hype about the electric that was going to be saved by solid state electronics. Which, of course, were also going to be completely free from failures...
And in further news, Georgia Tech scientists have designed a printer with an integral shredder that shreds all output continuously as it is printed.
They have also designed a novel camera which, instead of a digital CCD array, uses a tough, thin strip of polyester polymer coated with a chemical, light-sensitive substrate. Intended for spy applications, if caught the captured images can be destroyed in seconds simply by opening the back of the camera.