Technology
jlynch | December 27, 2006June 2006:
Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point.
December 2006:
About a month after the business release of Windows Vista, and a month before its consumer release, hackers and security researchers have uncovered at least six major security flaws in Microsoft's brand new operating system, the New York Times is reporting.
Considering this,…
jlynch | December 16, 2006A few days back I posted a picture of the recent shuttle launch. Here's another view:
This is a four minute time exposure of the exhaust plume along Discovery's path against the background of the starry sky. As APOD notes:
At the upper left, the end of the drifting plume is punctuated by Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka in a vertical line, the belt stars of Orion. To the right of the belt stars, the pinkish jewel in Orion's sword is not a star at all, but the great Orion Nebula. Still farther to the right, at the foot of the hunter, lies Rigel, the brightest star in view. Rigel is a hot…
jlynch | December 11, 2006
Photo of this weekend's night launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. [Source: National Geographic]
jlynch | December 8, 2006Way back in 1994, the Internet was a much much smaller place. Only three years old, the World Wide Web really hadn't expanded much beyond academia. I have distinct memories of using NCSA Mosaic in 1993 and there wasn't much to see. Trust me. (Hell, I remember gopher, WAIS, Archie & Veronica ...)
In March 1994 (two months after I arrived in the US), the following were the Top 10 linked sites among the 5738 that were available. How different this is from what todays Top 10 list would look like.
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/…
purepedantry | November 28, 2006This is super interesting. Acephalous is trying to measure the speed of a meme -- an infectious idea -- as it spreads through the blogosphere. More importantly, he is trying to figure out whether they spread from the bottom up through low-traffic blogs or from the top-down through high traffic or both.
Here is his description:
What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it…
hrynyshyn | November 22, 2006The good news is the world's technological powerhouses have finally agreed to get off their collective butts and start building ITER, the big fusion power experiment. The bad news is they're only planning on spending $12.8 billion on it. That's it?
I mean, come on. $12.8 paltry billion? The U.S., which is a junior partner in the international consortium and only recently rejoined after balking at the cost a few years ago, is spending that much fighting a war in Iraq every two or three months!
Sure, fusion is going to be expensive. It almost certainly won't be feasible until half way through…
jlynch | November 10, 2006Outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin thinks that the upcoming Microsoft Vista "is the most secure system that's available, and it's certainly the most secure system that we've shipped." The latter, of course, is likely to be true, but the former ... not so much. As proof, Allchin offers the following:
"My son, seven years old, runs Windows Vista, and, honestly, he doesn't have an antivirus system on his machine. His machine is locked down with parental controls, he can't download things unless it's to the places that I've said that he could do, and I'm feeling totally confident about…
drorzel | October 24, 2006I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB tabs open, but I've seen it with some other frequently-visited sites. It works fine for a while, but after a day or two, hitting "Reload" to, say, update comment counts, does nothing. It says that it's loading, and maybe even that it's transferred some trivial number of bytes, but then it just sits…
cevans | October 19, 2006
A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to computational power, too, is unorthodox. Built on a 30-acre plot of land bordering the Columbia River gorge -- a place, up until now, known solely for its excellent windsurfing -- it kicks back 10 million watts of power yearly and hooks into the largest direct DC current in the world, a backbone of fiber…
cevans | September 26, 2006Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.
In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "…
revere | September 13, 2006September 13, 1956 was an important date in computer history. That's when IBM shipped its first hard drive. As Steven Levy tells us in Newsweek, it was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. Lot figurately. Literally. Leasing cost $250,000 a year (2006 dollars). But it was considered a wonder:
"It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims…
purepedantry | August 20, 2006The Clocky Alarm Clock is an alarm clock designed to flee the scene when it wakes you up so that you have to go search for it to turn it off:
Clocky (patent pending) is an alarm clock that runs away and hides if you don't get out of bed on time. The alarm sounds, you press the snooze, and Clocky will roll off of the bedside table, jump to the floor, and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects until he finds a spot to rest. When the alarm sounds again, you must awaken to search for him. Clocky will find new spots everyday, kind of like a hide-and-seek game.
Clocky alarm clocks were…
revere | August 11, 2006In many cities we are out of parking spaces. We could restrict cars, but that would be un-American. So we find ways to cram more and more cars into the same space. That's what a new breed of robotic parking garage does. Cars are stored on top of each other on automated lifts that can move the cars along three independent directions, shuffling them up, down and sideways. It can even learn the usual times of drop off and pck up and shuffle the cars dynamically so they are closer to an easy pick up level. Twice as many cars can be accommodated in the same space and pickups take on average 30…
purepedantry | August 8, 2006Look, an Israeli inventor has patented the McDonald's playland as a way to escape fires:
A specialised emergency truck would carry an extendible boom that could be raised to a window in a burning building. Jaws at the top of the boom would then expand to clamp a small platform inside the window frame, while a spiralling tube would be dropped from the frame down to the ground.
OK, so maybe it isn't McDonald's playland, but it sure as hell looks like it.
cevans | August 4, 2006
The Internet has long been a playground for deluded sociopaths. This is why the wise among us roundly deny Myspace.com friend requests from strangers, why paranoid parents install content filters on their children's computers, and why I just trashed an email with the subject heading "Will you be my foreign business associate?"
We all know that, like the actual world, the digital world can be the "site" of plenty of dubious activity. There are no spatial limitations, nor standardized restrictions of content, to impede your standard misinformed lunatic from carving out their own hazardous…
purepedantry | August 2, 2006Some students at UCSD have too much time on their hands:
A group of grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are in the process of creating what one of the students calls the "most over-designed soda machine in the world."
Right now, the machine has attached to it a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. Want a Coke? Stick your thumb on the reader so the machine recognizes you as having an account, take out the drink, then walk way, never having had to reach into your pocket for change.
The project, called SodaVision (sodavision.com…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006When I first read this it summoned immediate images of the robot from Lost in Space. Fortunately, these X-ray wielding robots seem decidedly less sinister. Instead, it is a better way to deliver X-rays to lung tumors, accounting for motion of the lungs during breathing:
Super-intense radiation delivered by a robotic arm eradicated lung tumors in some human patients just 3-4 months after treatment, medical physicist Cihat Ozhasoglu, Ph.D. of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (ozhasogluc@upmc.edu) will report in early August at the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Association of…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006That's quite clever:
Instead of using expensive photovoltaic cells to convert solar radiation to electricity directly, Matteran's solution uses far-cheaper thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point (around 58°F), creating enough steam to drive a specially designed turbine. And although a fluid-circuit system converting heat into electricity is nothing new, Matteran's innovative solution increases the system's efficiency to a point where small-scale applications make economic sense...
So far, Matteran has created only small amounts of refrigeration…
purepedantry | July 19, 2006Nifty:
Astronauts travelling beyond the Earth's orbit would be at risk of cancer and other illnesses due to their long term exposure to cosmic rays. Some of these energetic particles are spewed forth during outbursts from the Sun. Others come from outside our solar system and are more mysterious in origin.
Slough says the problem could be solved with just a few grams of hydrogen in the form of a plasma surrounding the spacecraft. NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) recently awarded Slough's team $75,000 to explore the feasibility of the idea.
The details still need to be worked out…
purepedantry | July 15, 2006If you go in for a mammogram and they see something that looks suspicious, odds are you are going to have to undergo a procedure called ductal lavage. Ductal lavage uses a fine needle to rinse the ducts of the breast with saline, and then has a pathologist look at the cells that come off to see if they are abnormal -- thus helping to detect breast cancer. One of the reasons that we do this is because mammography does not always detect cancers, and we would like to make sure that you do not have cancer. Ductal lavage is also less invasive than the alternative -- which is breast biopsy…