Technology
revere | January 1, 2008Yesterday I indulged myself and took a personal look backward. It was New Year's Eve, after all, the end of a year. Today is New Year's Day, the day we look to the year ahead. Is this the Year of The Big One (pandemically speaking)? Or another year of Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop? If we can't figure out what will happen over the next year (who will be President-elect?), how about the next hundred years? That will average out the inconsequentialities and get down to The Big Things. The New York Times did a story the other day where they interviewed a bunch of alleged experts about what…
jlynch | December 29, 2007
Netscape has finally been taken off life-support. Born in October 1994, yet stunted in its growth since the late 90’s, the browser is set to finally expire on February 1st. It spawned Mozilla and thus ultimately Firefox. Please observe a moment of silence.
Apologies for the BLINK tag in the title. It seemed apt. Sayeth The Book of Mozilla (12:10):
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
gregladen | December 28, 2007Well, actually, you are supposed to try this at home. I was wondering what I was going to do with that extra 150 ohm resister I had laying around...
Blu-Ray Laser Phaser! - video powered by Metacafe
drorzel | December 26, 2007I love getting toys for Christmas:
Chateau Steelypips is now GPS-enabled. That's from our drive home last night (GIMPed to within an inch of its life, because the light level was really low)-- bonus points for anyone who can identify where it was taken. It's a Garmin c340, for those who want specs with their gadget photos.
So, how does it work? Well, we've used it on exactly one drive, from my parents' house to here, and there's really only one way to go. At one point, the display said "Turn in 87 miles," which tells you just how hard it had to work on that trip...
The directions it gave…
revere | December 25, 2007Forty years ago I was the only doc in a bioengineering lab in a famous technical university. We had our own computer -- it took up a giant room -- and had attached to it a rare device in those days, a scanner for converting transparencies to computer readable form. It was really a cathode ray tube with a sensor on the other side of the transparency. The CRT scanned and the sensor sensed and an analog to digital converter converted. About that time I got interested, along with an engineering colleague, in taking two-dimensional x-ray images, which were really projections or shadows of the…
revere | December 24, 2007There are computers on a chip and labs on a chip and now explosives on a chip. Explosives on a chip? WTF?
This wonderful tech breakthrough is brought to us by Georgia Tech Research Institute and reported, straight-faced, by the Press Release service, Science Daily:
Developed by a team of scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the highly-uniform copper structures will be incorporated into integrated circuits -- then chemically converted to millimeter-diameter explosives. Because they can be integrated into…
clock | December 23, 2007On Friday morning, there was a bang on the door and the UPS guy shoved a little cardboard box into our hands. Yeay! Our first XO laptop arrived. It is my wife's, and she named it Svetlana, after the character played by the commediane extraordinaire Iris Bahr. I took the opportunity to try out my present, the Pentax Optio T30, to take pictures of the grand opening. Then, in the evening, there was another knock on the door and my daughter's XO also arrived, so I had to take a few pictures of that as well (all under the fold).
The two of them have been chatting between each other and…
gregladen | December 23, 2007In just over one year from now, there is a good chance that your television will stop working. Like in that old TV show, The Outer Limits. But for real. And the frustrating thing is that nobody seems to believe it. Like how nobody believed that the earth was being taken over by pod people in that movie about the pod people.
We are speaking, of course, about the coming of Digital Television.
In a telephone survey in November of 1,017 people, only 48 percent said they had heard about the switch to digital television. And only 17 percent correctly identified 2009 as the year that analog…
omnibrain | December 23, 2007The answer is a resounding sorta. Scientists at Harvard have done that calculations and found that "the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid" ... should make it "possible to make one that will stay aloft in air." However,
No such carpet is going to ferry people around, though. The researchers say that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with an amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres. Making a heavier carpet 'fly' is not forbidden by the laws of physics. But the…
gregladen | December 22, 2007
Felon Became COO of Wikipedia Foundation from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- The foundation that runs and accepts donations for - the online encyclopedia Wikipedia neglected to do a basic background check before hiring a chief operating officer who had been convicted of theft, drunken driving and fleeing a car accident.
[...]
clock | December 21, 2007And the next generation cannot think in any other way. Because it is a natural way to think. We need to re-think our own outdated notions of intellectual property:
The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality
Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I'd ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.
In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example,…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Firefox 3 Beta is released...
From Mozilla:
Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download.
New features and changes ... include:
Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins.
Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable…
gregladen | December 20, 2007Or, even, one of these...
It does require a prescription (rats!) but all you need is a special barcode and out comes your meds.
[source]
gregladen | December 20, 2007Red Hat Profitable; Solar-powered laptop for Tanzania; Happy Birthday Perl; NetBSD 4.0 released
Red Hat 3Q Profit Up 12 Percent from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Open-source software provider Red Hat Inc. said Thursday that its third quarter profit rose 12 percent as a surge in subscriptions helped offset increased spending on marketing and research.
[...]
Penn State student team develops solar-powered laptop for Tanzanian students
University Park, Pa. -- For a team of Penn State engineering students, the challenge wasn't getting laptops to Tanzanian students, but how to power those machines.…
revere | December 20, 2007One of the enduring mysteries is what causes traffic jams. Sometimes it's obvious -- sort of. I remember having to make a daily trip from New York to Bellevue Hospitals in New York down FDR Drive. At one spot the three southbound lanes suddenly widened into five lanes because of some construction and then, after about 100 yards, narrowed again to three lanes. If you didn't know better you'd think the extra capacity of the roadway wouldn't be a problem but in your mind's eye you can see exactly what happened. All those cars that filled up the extra space had to reconverge to three lanes. The…
drorzel | December 20, 2007As previously mentioned, I plan to end the book with a chapter on quantum flim-flam. As research for this, I've been looking at kook sites on the web, and Googled "quantum healing," which turns up all manner of gibberish from Deepak Chopra. It also includes a helpful little item at the bottom of the page:
Searches related to: quantum healing
maurice chevalier hugh grant deepak chopra ectomorphic
The Chopra search makes sense, and "ectomorphic" is a gibberish word that shows up in that sort of stuff. But Maurice Chevalier? And Hugh Grant?
If I could just figure out the connection between…
pontiff | December 19, 2007More from Johnny Chung Lee on hacking the wiimote system to produce a very cool multitouch display:
Update 12/22/07: More Johnny Chung Lee creations:
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…
clock | December 19, 2007Attila had the idea for a contest for a best designed, prettiest and most functional laboratory website. I picked up on it and posted about it on my blog.
The idea took off and the contest was hosted by The Scientist. And again, I blogged about it. Anton saw my post, and told Karl about it. Karl went on and nominated the website of the Purves lab.
Attila was one of the judges, of course. The results are now in and the winners have been announced - the Purves lab won the Editor's Choice award and one of the Judges' award. Nyborg Lab won the Readers' award. Attila gave his award to the…
clock | December 19, 2007Attila and Anna got their XO laptop in the mail yesterday and recorded the first day: unwrapping and getting it started:
Ours should be getting here soon....