Technology
jlynch | March 7, 2009A few days back I asked my loyal readers for their opinions on the Macbook Pro (thanks to all who commented). In the end, I went with the Macbook and have been spending the afternoon adjusting to things. Everything is going well so far.
The purchase at the local Apple Store went without a hitch (and thankfully without someone selling me stuff I didn't need). However when I got home the machine wouldn't boot. I guessed that it was because of bad RAM (I upgraded) and a trip back to the store proved that to be the case.
Weirdly, the staff at the store kept asking me whether this was my first…
gregladen | March 7, 2009Even "Windows" computers (laptops in particular) will be using this OpenSource minisystem.
Splashtop is preinstalled on the hard drive or in the onboard Flash memory of new PCs and motherboards by their manufacturers. Splashtop is a software-only solution that requires no additional hardware. A small component of Splashtop is embedded in the BIOS of the PC--that's the part that runs as soon as you press the power button.
Within Splashtop, you have the choice of running one of its applications, such as the Splashtop Web Browser, or booting your operating system. Splashtop is compatible…
clock | March 6, 2009*****************************************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (ICSD2009)
September 8-11, 2009 - University of Trento, Trento (ITALY)
*****************************************************************************
Digital libraries, in the central view of the term, focus on storing and organizing digital objects and providing access to these objects through professional or user-generated metadata or content-based search (full text, image content, full musical score). In an expanded view, DLs…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2009An interesting article is up at the New Atlantis by Ari Schulman, arguing that we will never be able to replicate the mind on a digital computer. Here I want briefly to argue there are other reasons for this.
Transhumanists are fond of claiming that one day we will be able to download a state vector description of our brain states onto a suitably fast and sophisticated computer, and thereafter run as an immortal being in software. I want to give two reasons why this will not happen, and neither of them rely on anything like the Chinese Room, which is just a bad argument in my opinion.
Reason…
clock | March 4, 2009From here:
Tim O'Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.
Drawing upon his real world experiences, Tim O'Reilly shares his thoughts on Open Publishing, why its a good idea, and how to make it work. This video was taken on the floor of the 2009 O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City.
For more information on Tim O'Reilly (and why he knows what he's talking about), head to oreilly.com/ or follow him at: twitter.com/timoreilly
You can read (and download) "What is Web 2.0" at:
oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/…
clock | March 3, 2009John Conyers and Open Access:
Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…
gregladen | March 3, 2009Emacs is exactly like a religion. A western religion, at least, operates by testing the faith of its participants. The god coldly allows babies to die of unexplained illnesses, violence to affect the innocent, wars to break out, natural disasters to ruin everything. That we mortals have faith that this is a loving and intelligent, all knowing god causes us to question reality itself, our selves, our church or temple, and our religious leaders. But this questioning followed by resolve, strengthens character. Or, ruins character. It could really go either way, which is why so many object…
jlynch | March 2, 2009So I set up a Twitter account but donât really know what it is useful for (if anything). Feel free to follow if you want. More importantly, comment here and let me know what Twitter is useful for.
clock | March 2, 2009Rural communities have big troubles persuading broadband (and wireless) providers to bring their services to them. Read this excellent article both for the compelling story and for the details of technical, economic and political angles on this problem.
clock | March 2, 2009Pros and cons of your audience at a conference following you live on microblogging services:
How to Present While People are Twittering
Project Management helped by MicroBlogging
Conference technology planning
Discussion on FriendFeed
purepedantry | March 2, 2009One of the impediments to the adoption of a solar alternative to fossil fuels is that solar panels are relatively expensive to make. A big benchmark to making them competitive is to get their cost of production per Watt produced comparable to energy produced by fossil fuels.
A company in Arizona, First Solar, claims to have broken the $1/Watt barrier for producing solar panels using panels made from cadmium telluride (CdTe). I am definitely impressed, particularly because the company aims to read "grid parity" with fossil fuels, meaning that they will be cost-competitive even without…
gregladen | March 2, 2009The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is a rather unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class machine on the go. We previously evaluated the standard ThinkPad W700 and praised the system for its performance and stand-out integrated features, like a Wacom Digitizer Tablet and X-Rite Color Calibrator. The ThinkPad W700ds takes all of the features offered by the W700 and ads a secondary, slide-out display, which increases monitor real-estate by 39%.
Gigs of everything too. Linux plays well with Lenovo laptops, even if…
bcohen | March 2, 2009I am an ardent critic of the unexamined claim that technology equals progress, straightforwardly, inevitably, universally. (Here are some samples: one, two, three.) So I am pleased to report new findings unearthing examples that don't fall prey to such critique:
1. Binder clips
2. Luggage with wheels
3. Netflix
That is all.
gregladen | March 1, 2009Should OpenOffice.org (OOo) writer (the text editor unit of the OpenSource office suite) have the horizontal ruler, on the top of the page, visible by default, or should it be hidden by default? This is the argument that it should be hidden by default. If you become a registered user of the OOo web site, you can actually vote on this. Let me know how that goes.
Xfce 4.6 is released (yesterday). Xfce is a gnome-ish desktop for Linux that uses very few resources (and has very few bells and whistles). "Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new sound…
clock | February 26, 2009My son had to do a homework for his Biology class, a kinda stupid long worksheet. He was given a bunch of DNA sequences (and had the codon table handy) and needed to translate that into amino acid sequences. The a.a. sequence spells out a sentence. Busy-work, if anyone asks me.
Anyway, he was too lazy to do it by hand, so he wrote a little program to do it for him: type in DNA sequence, click OK, out comes the a.a. sequence. He sent his teacher both the answers and the program....just goes to show that doing this homework does not require a brain capable of reasoning.
I know there are…
evolvingthoughts | February 26, 2009PD Magnus on the history of the philosophy of science in the last 50 years, in around 1400 words.
A short primer on the Greenhouse Effect
Mendeley, a bibliographic cloud project, has raised funding from Last.fm, Warner and Skype execs. Looks like next gen after Endnote...
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2009SCENE:
At the YMCA: they used to have perfectly serviceable water fountains in the room with the treadmills, elliptical trainers, and weight machines. They ripped them out and replaced them with water coolers that require the use of little conical paper cups - which, of course, must be used once and then thrown away. I and a few others left comments on their comment cards to the effect that this was a fucking stupid move, wasteful in the extreme, bad for the environment, blah blah. Response: we hear your concerns; we are so concerned about sanitation, water coolers are better for everyone,…
gregladen | February 26, 2009An Open Letter to All Software Developers,
I don't like changing, shifting, cutsie, idiotic date formats, and I don't like rounding off much either.
Many systems that provide information on date and time make unwrarented and embarrassingly stupid assumptions about what you want to know. In Movable Type, the system designers assume that if a post is set up for the future by a few days, that I don't care what time of day it is scheduled for. WTF is that all about??? A scheduled post for two hours from now is listed with the date/time "2 hours from now" but a post scheduled for 48 hours from…