The current issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine has a piece giving an overview of current E-Ink-based mobile displays, particularly how they relate to newspaper distribution. They don't mention this new product specifically, but hold out the notion of flexible E-Ink displays as near-future possibilities.
A big hint was dropped during Jobs' keynote address when he played the Beatles on the iPhone. Everything about those presentations is scripted, certainly the addition of Beatles music was no accident. This latest deal might mean that one of the last barriers between the Beatles vast music collection and the iTunes Music Store has been cleared. Whether the Beatles still resist online distribution (through anyone) remains to be seen. They were a late adopter of CDs. Their music, their prerogative.
Vista is, from all I've heard, a sizeable change for software developers. Its relationship and interactions to programs and hardware is very different. Problems are to be expected when you have such a tightly integrated hardware/software product like the iPod and iTunes. While Windows has doggedly tried to ensure that Vista is backward compatible with previous releases (and the software for those releases), it is hardly surprising that something like this is happening. It's happened with other Windows releases, it happened when Apple moved to OS X and universal binaries. Everyone is having difficulty getting things working on Vista, customers and developers alike, and will for months. I don't really think it's a matter of blame. It's one of the burdens of being an early adopter.
Yours is a bit of a false analogy, because the whole Dodge community doesn't go around harping how superior their cars are for real drivers, how easy it is to mix those Dodge parts into the Ford hegemony, and how those who have to resort to duct-tape should have just RTFM.
You probably glossed over the part in his article where he granted that, if he didn't need to interact with Microsoft products every day, he would have been just fine, because Linux worked quite well on its own. He's not complaining about Dodge parts and cars not being any good, easy to use, or interoperable. He's merely owning up to the fact that, in a Microsoft-dominated corporate world, he's been unable to be a (corporate) Linux user.
These sorts of things crop up every few years: poll a bunch of people - prominent scientists, celebrities, politicians, bum-on-the-street, [insert other demographic here] - on what the best invention of the last X years (or ever) was. You can getsomeinterestingresults. I would be facinated to see a histographic breakdown of the results of this contest among space enthusiasts.
He told Secret Service agent Michael Levin what he'd done for the Russians, but Levin wasn't impressed. According to Thomas, the agent replied that he had multi-million-dollar cases on his desk and wasn't going to waste time on a lousy $50,000 internet scam.
Unfortunately, this is true of all crime: the scarce resources of law enforcement are generally allocated to the relatively small number of big crimes, while the much larger number of petty crimes are often left untouched. I'd guess that this is particularly true of cybercrime, where the law enforcement resources are more scarce, the big crimes are bigger, and the little crimes like "petty" identity theft are a drop in the bucket. Identity theft is hardly petty to the victim, however, it can ruin their finances and credit for years, and takes tremendous amounts of work to clear up, even when you are lucky enough to not get stuck with the bill.
One possible reason why that insanely great band from Japan (love the hyperbole, by the way) can't have its songs show up in the U.S. version of iTMS is that the label that produced the music hasn't licensed Apple to sell it in the U.S. I'm not sure why that would be, but there are all kinds of idiotic details in music contracts. There may also be weird export and tariff issues at stake - different country, different laws. Ever notice that the import version of a CD on amazon tends to be 2x-3x more expensive than the domestic release, if you can even find it?
Is anyone else a bit weirded out by the massive incentives the local governments have offered. I know this is nothing new, and the locals hope that these will spur further high-tech development in the area, but let's examine these cases:
San Antonio (Microsoft): No property taxes for 10 years. A $5.2 mil grant from the CPS Energy economic development fund to pay for the electrical infrastructure to build the site.
South Carolina (Google): No property taxes for 30 years (essentially, for the life of the site). The 150-acre site was granted to them, and the state government has granted about $5 mil, too. Google has been incentivized to the tune of about $100 million.
Some of the structural construction will undoubtedly be done by locals. The technical work of building the data center (installing servers, wiring everything together) is probably outside of a local construction company's expertise. The real bulk of all those hundreds of millions of dollars goes to purchasing the actual computer equipment, none of which is local. A handful of the most-well-educated locals could be employees, but most employees will be transplanted. In less than 10 years, both sites will probably be obsolete (or, worse, axed as excess capacity). As the article on Google's site notes, the obscene incentives equate to "a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create."
For half a million dollars, I'm sure the local economy could get more bang for its buck than just one Google employee. What exactly are these local governments getting in return for their obsequiousness and prostration?
The real question here, which I don't think has been resolved in legislation or court judgements, is that of ownership. Whose data is it, anyway? Is it yours, because it describes and identifies you (not to mention the potential harm to you if it is released)? Or, since the company has taken pains to acquire, organize, and analyze it, and presumably has made some profit from it, does it belong to them? If the former, then one could argue that no company can legally hang on to something that ultimately belongs to you. If the latter, then you likewise can't really expect a company to give it up just on your say-so.
The answer, of course, is that it doesn't exclusively belong to either party. For instance, Amazon.com might have your credit card and mailing information, which one could argue belongs to you (the customer), but also has your buying history and has generated recommendations and analyzed then for trends to better their business and processes, all of which could be considered Amazon's.
This won't be settled anytime soon. At the risk of bringing the libertarians down on me, I would suggest that some intelligentlycrafted legislation (note the stress - it's easy to come up with crap legislation, or let the lobbyists write it for you) should be drafted to make a clear demarkation about what rights a customer has to what data, and what companies are allowed to do with it, particularly after you sever your relationship together.
Nowadays, many copiers don't use traditional xerography, but are just fast scanners with printers attached. The network copier/printer down the hall can be used as a document scanner, and even spits out PDFs with searchable text. I don't think it would be too difficult, if one knew the model they were working on, to write a script to send off a PDF of every single document that's scanned, printed, or copied using that machine. In a business with lots of sensitive work, that could be as bad as letting someone rifle through your files after hours.
I think that CES 2007 debuted several devices that allow you to stream video (wirelessly, in many cases) from a PC to a set-top box, and thence to the TV. These are not widespread yet, but there are enough products that the link from PC to TV is bridged.
I couldn't agree more. I have my cable modem, wireless router, stereo, and laptop power cord all plugged into the same power strip at home. For the 18-23 hours a day when I'm not using my computer, the laptop is sleeping and the power strip is off. This simple action cuts the power usage down to nothing (other than the
All it takes is a single flick of the switch - how much easier do people need it to be?
MRO has only been on station a few months, since March. Imaging these four American landers were probably higher priorities than older Soviet landers. One might also ask when we'll get images of the defunct Beagle 2 lander from the ESA's Mars Express mission. It died somewhere on descent.
Give JPL enough time, I'm sure they'll locate every little man-made scap we've placed on the surface of Mars.
Just about anyone who looks at the two devicesside by side will acknowledge that the Luxpro product is a clear knockoff of the original. Since that is the case, Apple was justified in seeking the injunction - it was not an abuse of power.
The injunction was granted but later overturned. FTFA:
Luxpro appealed and won subsequent lawsuits in the Taiwan High Court and the Taiwan Supreme Court. Last month, the Shihlin District Court lifted the original injunction, saying that "the appearances of the two products are significantly dissimilar".
Now, I don't actually think they are all that dissimilar, but that's only tangentially related to this countersuit. Apple's original suit, seeking the injunction, was not a frivolous move by a monopolistic juggernaut - just a company defending its interests. Apple's shareholders could have sued if Apple hand't sought the injunction.
Had Luxpro's device pre-dated Apple's, or if the two devices really were dissimilar, that would be another thing.
Building a rotating tower is neat and all - reminds me of those roundiround restaurants that seemed so cool in the 70s and 80s - but wouldn't all that effort be better spent on:
* Building a more energy efficient living complex that uses various technologies to reduce resource consumption,
* Building a real solar farm (the vertical walls of a tower aren't well suited to solar collection, especially in Dubai),
* Creating affordable living space without an "It's solar! Far out, man!" premium?
That may be true in an area that already has plenty of electrical service wired up. But away from main roads, in the countryside, where the nearest utility pole isn't 50 feet away, but 5000, you can expect to pay on the order of $10,000/mile to bring service to your house. In some cases, this is incentive enough for people to forego the electric company and build an off-grid house - the capital investment is essentially the same, but they end up getting their electricity nearly free afterwards.
Ok the Background picture that honestly looks like.... a young oriental women being raped.
For those of you who want to see what he means, here's a screen capture of a Zune installer error from google image search - you can see the background image clearly. And, yes, I am deeply disturbed by it.
The real reason (tongue in cheek) that the iPod has nothing to fear boils down to the ineptitude of many people who sell consumer electronics. FTFA:
Moreover, some MP3 salespeople hadn't even heard of Zune, even though the players are being sold at their stores, he wrote in his report.
Quotes from retail clerks cited in Munster's report range from them claiming they don't know what the Zune is, to comments that Zune is a good option if a customer does not use Apple's iTunes software.
"To be honest, I don't really know much about the Zune," one clerk is quoted as saying in Munster's report. Another said, "I don't suggest the Zune because it is really heavy," according to the report.
If these are the people that Microsoft is relying on to sell the Zune to the masses, they are seriously outgunned by the hordes of iPod lovers.
One thing that web access in the third world can do is to lower barriers to trade. Farmers in most third world countries don't have a buyer for their crop lined up until it is about harvest time, which is entirely the worst time to try and get a high price for it. They sell to local and traveling middlemen, who are able to turn quite a profit by selling that crop to wholesalers at real market rates.
If a farmer knew what the actual market rate for his crop is, he would be in a much better position to negotiate a fair price. Even if it is only a single computer in a village that had this access, the whole village could sell their crop as a cooperative, cut out the middleman, and have real bargaining power.
As it is, lacking this information, they are completely at the mercy of what the middleman is gracious enough to pay.
And, yes, they will have better information for fixing and upgrading their irrigation systems. You don't use the internet to learn how to fix your truck because it is a much better use of your time to take it to a garage and let a professional work on it while you go to your job and make money to pay him with. In the third world, there aren't any professionals, and people wouldn't have money to pay them with anyway, so they must do that kind fo repairwork themselves.
This discussion mirrors an article that appears in the current issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. They review the pros and cons of LCD and Plasma technologies, with a brief look at DLP, SED, LCOS.
Their take on it? It won't be settled for another couple of years, and there will be two distinct categories: screens below 50" (or 42"), and screens larger. LCD will dominate the smaller screen size market, though SED may replace that when the cost comes down (after 2010?). For larger screens, don't discount projection technology, particularly in terms of cost.
It is very important to note that this is a treatment for reversing Type I diabetes, not Type II.
Type I diabetes comes from an autoimmune reaction against the insulin-producing cells. It is more common in children, and accounts for about 10% of all insulin cases.
Type II diabetes tends to be caused by an insulin insensitivity - the insulin receptor in cells looses its effectiveness. The complications from Type II diabetes tend to be worse, and none of them are pleasant. There are many risk factors for Type II diabetes, some of which a person can't do anything about (i.e., genetic predisposition), but the primary risk factor is obesity and inactivity. So, for the foreseeable future, doctors will no doubt continue to caution people to be vigilant about their weight and, for those under treatment for diabetes, to still be especially vigilant about monitoring their blood sugar levels.
The energy is just "stored" in the coils and when you remove the power supply the field dissipates. Now, should you short-circuit the coils - that would be interesting.
The coils are short circuited - each barrel toroid is a very large loop of superconductor. A circuit with no resistance is, almost by definition, a short circuit. But, because the coils are superconducting, the current in them flows without dissipating. You can disconnect the power supply, and the current still flows. That's the beauty of using superconductors to create large magnetic fields - once the current level is established, the magnetic field does not require additional energy input to exist (well, aside from the power to keep the coils at a superconducting temperature).
Slashdot Mirror
The current issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine has a piece giving an overview of current E-Ink-based mobile displays, particularly how they relate to newspaper distribution. They don't mention this new product specifically, but hold out the notion of flexible E-Ink displays as near-future possibilities.
A big hint was dropped during Jobs' keynote address when he played the Beatles on the iPhone. Everything about those presentations is scripted, certainly the addition of Beatles music was no accident. This latest deal might mean that one of the last barriers between the Beatles vast music collection and the iTunes Music Store has been cleared. Whether the Beatles still resist online distribution (through anyone) remains to be seen. They were a late adopter of CDs. Their music, their prerogative.
Vista is, from all I've heard, a sizeable change for software developers. Its relationship and interactions to programs and hardware is very different. Problems are to be expected when you have such a tightly integrated hardware/software product like the iPod and iTunes. While Windows has doggedly tried to ensure that Vista is backward compatible with previous releases (and the software for those releases), it is hardly surprising that something like this is happening. It's happened with other Windows releases, it happened when Apple moved to OS X and universal binaries. Everyone is having difficulty getting things working on Vista, customers and developers alike, and will for months. I don't really think it's a matter of blame. It's one of the burdens of being an early adopter.
Yours is a bit of a false analogy, because the whole Dodge community doesn't go around harping how superior their cars are for real drivers, how easy it is to mix those Dodge parts into the Ford hegemony, and how those who have to resort to duct-tape should have just RTFM.
You probably glossed over the part in his article where he granted that, if he didn't need to interact with Microsoft products every day, he would have been just fine, because Linux worked quite well on its own. He's not complaining about Dodge parts and cars not being any good, easy to use, or interoperable. He's merely owning up to the fact that, in a Microsoft-dominated corporate world, he's been unable to be a (corporate) Linux user.
These sorts of things crop up every few years: poll a bunch of people - prominent scientists, celebrities, politicians, bum-on-the-street, [insert other demographic here] - on what the best invention of the last X years (or ever) was. You can get some interesting results. I would be facinated to see a histographic breakdown of the results of this contest among space enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, this is true of all crime: the scarce resources of law enforcement are generally allocated to the relatively small number of big crimes, while the much larger number of petty crimes are often left untouched. I'd guess that this is particularly true of cybercrime, where the law enforcement resources are more scarce, the big crimes are bigger, and the little crimes like "petty" identity theft are a drop in the bucket. Identity theft is hardly petty to the victim, however, it can ruin their finances and credit for years, and takes tremendous amounts of work to clear up, even when you are lucky enough to not get stuck with the bill.
One possible reason why that insanely great band from Japan (love the hyperbole, by the way) can't have its songs show up in the U.S. version of iTMS is that the label that produced the music hasn't licensed Apple to sell it in the U.S. I'm not sure why that would be, but there are all kinds of idiotic details in music contracts. There may also be weird export and tariff issues at stake - different country, different laws. Ever notice that the import version of a CD on amazon tends to be 2x-3x more expensive than the domestic release, if you can even find it?
Is anyone else a bit weirded out by the massive incentives the local governments have offered. I know this is nothing new, and the locals hope that these will spur further high-tech development in the area, but let's examine these cases:
San Antonio (Microsoft): No property taxes for 10 years. A $5.2 mil grant from the CPS Energy economic development fund to pay for the electrical infrastructure to build the site.
South Carolina (Google): No property taxes for 30 years (essentially, for the life of the site). The 150-acre site was granted to them, and the state government has granted about $5 mil, too. Google has been incentivized to the tune of about $100 million.
Some of the structural construction will undoubtedly be done by locals. The technical work of building the data center (installing servers, wiring everything together) is probably outside of a local construction company's expertise. The real bulk of all those hundreds of millions of dollars goes to purchasing the actual computer equipment, none of which is local. A handful of the most-well-educated locals could be employees, but most employees will be transplanted. In less than 10 years, both sites will probably be obsolete (or, worse, axed as excess capacity). As the article on Google's site notes, the obscene incentives equate to "a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create."
For half a million dollars, I'm sure the local economy could get more bang for its buck than just one Google employee. What exactly are these local governments getting in return for their obsequiousness and prostration?
The real question here, which I don't think has been resolved in legislation or court judgements, is that of ownership. Whose data is it, anyway? Is it yours, because it describes and identifies you (not to mention the potential harm to you if it is released)? Or, since the company has taken pains to acquire, organize, and analyze it, and presumably has made some profit from it, does it belong to them? If the former, then one could argue that no company can legally hang on to something that ultimately belongs to you. If the latter, then you likewise can't really expect a company to give it up just on your say-so.
The answer, of course, is that it doesn't exclusively belong to either party. For instance, Amazon.com might have your credit card and mailing information, which one could argue belongs to you (the customer), but also has your buying history and has generated recommendations and analyzed then for trends to better their business and processes, all of which could be considered Amazon's.
This won't be settled anytime soon. At the risk of bringing the libertarians down on me, I would suggest that some intelligentlycrafted legislation (note the stress - it's easy to come up with crap legislation, or let the lobbyists write it for you) should be drafted to make a clear demarkation about what rights a customer has to what data, and what companies are allowed to do with it, particularly after you sever your relationship together.
The main network printer for my workgroup is the copier down the hall. Copiers can increasingly be used for espionage. This is actually nothing new, the CIA had Xerox outfit copiers in the Soviet Embassy with cameras to photograph the documents being copied.
Nowadays, many copiers don't use traditional xerography, but are just fast scanners with printers attached. The network copier/printer down the hall can be used as a document scanner, and even spits out PDFs with searchable text. I don't think it would be too difficult, if one knew the model they were working on, to write a script to send off a PDF of every single document that's scanned, printed, or copied using that machine. In a business with lots of sensitive work, that could be as bad as letting someone rifle through your files after hours.
I think that CES 2007 debuted several devices that allow you to stream video (wirelessly, in many cases) from a PC to a set-top box, and thence to the TV. These are not widespread yet, but there are enough products that the link from PC to TV is bridged.
I couldn't agree more. I have my cable modem, wireless router, stereo, and laptop power cord all plugged into the same power strip at home. For the 18-23 hours a day when I'm not using my computer, the laptop is sleeping and the power strip is off. This simple action cuts the power usage down to nothing (other than the
All it takes is a single flick of the switch - how much easier do people need it to be?
In this case, it's "What cha gonna do when they code for you?"
MRO has only been on station a few months, since March. Imaging these four American landers were probably higher priorities than older Soviet landers. One might also ask when we'll get images of the defunct Beagle 2 lander from the ESA's Mars Express mission. It died somewhere on descent.
Give JPL enough time, I'm sure they'll locate every little man-made scap we've placed on the surface of Mars.
You don't even know IF my company exists, not to speak of WHAT we're going to produce.
I can top that with a pronoun change. I don't even know if my company exists, let alone what we're producing.
It would be even funnier to me if it weren't actually true.
Just about anyone who looks at the two devices side by side will acknowledge that the Luxpro product is a clear knockoff of the original. Since that is the case, Apple was justified in seeking the injunction - it was not an abuse of power.
The injunction was granted but later overturned. FTFA:
Luxpro appealed and won subsequent lawsuits in the Taiwan High Court and the Taiwan Supreme Court. Last month, the Shihlin District Court lifted the original injunction, saying that "the appearances of the two products are significantly dissimilar".
Now, I don't actually think they are all that dissimilar, but that's only tangentially related to this countersuit. Apple's original suit, seeking the injunction, was not a frivolous move by a monopolistic juggernaut - just a company defending its interests. Apple's shareholders could have sued if Apple hand't sought the injunction.
Had Luxpro's device pre-dated Apple's, or if the two devices really were dissimilar, that would be another thing.
Building a rotating tower is neat and all - reminds me of those roundiround restaurants that seemed so cool in the 70s and 80s - but wouldn't all that effort be better spent on:
* Building a more energy efficient living complex that uses various technologies to reduce resource consumption,
* Building a real solar farm (the vertical walls of a tower aren't well suited to solar collection, especially in Dubai),
* Creating affordable living space without an "It's solar! Far out, man!" premium?
That may be true in an area that already has plenty of electrical service wired up. But away from main roads, in the countryside, where the nearest utility pole isn't 50 feet away, but 5000, you can expect to pay on the order of $10,000/mile to bring service to your house. In some cases, this is incentive enough for people to forego the electric company and build an off-grid house - the capital investment is essentially the same, but they end up getting their electricity nearly free afterwards.
How are we supposed to believe that an advanced alien race would still be using something so mundane as concrete?
Ok the Background picture that honestly looks like.... a young oriental women being raped.
For those of you who want to see what he means, here's a screen capture of a Zune installer error from google image search - you can see the background image clearly. And, yes, I am deeply disturbed by it.
If these are the people that Microsoft is relying on to sell the Zune to the masses, they are seriously outgunned by the hordes of iPod lovers.
One thing that web access in the third world can do is to lower barriers to trade. Farmers in most third world countries don't have a buyer for their crop lined up until it is about harvest time, which is entirely the worst time to try and get a high price for it. They sell to local and traveling middlemen, who are able to turn quite a profit by selling that crop to wholesalers at real market rates.
If a farmer knew what the actual market rate for his crop is, he would be in a much better position to negotiate a fair price. Even if it is only a single computer in a village that had this access, the whole village could sell their crop as a cooperative, cut out the middleman, and have real bargaining power.
As it is, lacking this information, they are completely at the mercy of what the middleman is gracious enough to pay.
And, yes, they will have better information for fixing and upgrading their irrigation systems. You don't use the internet to learn how to fix your truck because it is a much better use of your time to take it to a garage and let a professional work on it while you go to your job and make money to pay him with. In the third world, there aren't any professionals, and people wouldn't have money to pay them with anyway, so they must do that kind fo repairwork themselves.
This discussion mirrors an article that appears in the current issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. They review the pros and cons of LCD and Plasma technologies, with a brief look at DLP, SED, LCOS.
Their take on it? It won't be settled for another couple of years, and there will be two distinct categories: screens below 50" (or 42"), and screens larger. LCD will dominate the smaller screen size market, though SED may replace that when the cost comes down (after 2010?). For larger screens, don't discount projection technology, particularly in terms of cost.
Incidentally, the cover article for this issue is on Blake Ross, whom they call the Firefox Kid.
It is very important to note that this is a treatment for reversing Type I diabetes, not Type II.
Type I diabetes comes from an autoimmune reaction against the insulin-producing cells. It is more common in children, and accounts for about 10% of all insulin cases.
Type II diabetes tends to be caused by an insulin insensitivity - the insulin receptor in cells looses its effectiveness. The complications from Type II diabetes tend to be worse, and none of them are pleasant. There are many risk factors for Type II diabetes, some of which a person can't do anything about (i.e., genetic predisposition), but the primary risk factor is obesity and inactivity. So, for the foreseeable future, doctors will no doubt continue to caution people to be vigilant about their weight and, for those under treatment for diabetes, to still be especially vigilant about monitoring their blood sugar levels.
The energy is just "stored" in the coils and when you remove the power supply the field dissipates. Now, should you short-circuit the coils - that would be interesting.
The coils are short circuited - each barrel toroid is a very large loop of superconductor. A circuit with no resistance is, almost by definition, a short circuit. But, because the coils are superconducting, the current in them flows without dissipating. You can disconnect the power supply, and the current still flows. That's the beauty of using superconductors to create large magnetic fields - once the current level is established, the magnetic field does not require additional energy input to exist (well, aside from the power to keep the coils at a superconducting temperature).