June 29th 2009
This is what you might call a surprising use of chickenfeather:
It’s the most energy-rich material we have,” says Roger Ely, an Oregon State University professor who specializes in hydrogen, “It’s three times the energy content of gasoline on a pound-for-pound basis.
The storage of hydrogen has been a problem. The positive message seems to be in the word ‘has’. It would be great news if this turns out to be practical and true!
June 25th 2009
This is a very interesting article about how prices come down for everything ‘digital’:
It is nice to see that even more mainstream magazines are catching on to this ‘new’ phenomenon. Anything that can be digitized can, and will, be copied freely. If this is not the case, the price will come down – a lot. It is really strange to see digital books on amazon being sold for $ 9,99, when the print-versions will cost you only $ 7 more. (Excluding shipping, of course…) Does it really cost that little to print a book?… Why can a digital book not cost $ 1? Or $ 2?
That’s why I started (very recently!) to download books from http://www.webscription.net/, that will let you download a lot of books – and then let you decide whether you want to pay or not. They should really do something like this for MP3’s as well. I can’t explain anymore to my daughter why she should (start) paying for music, when, in fact, she can’t…
June 18th 2009
Link
While I like the idea of ‘recycling’ energy, I doubt this is really going to help. I don’t know how much energy this it going to cost to build, for instance… I can imagine that it would take several years for this system to deliver more energy than went into building it….
June 18th 2009
June 18th 2009
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports that Iranian authorities appear to have successfully blocked all access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter Wednesday morning. Access had been intermittent since the election.
This does a bit of damage to the old saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it“. I very much hope the internet will, once again, prove defiant and can keep up the coverage of this Iranian drama….
June 18th 2009
Dr Zettl says his team’s studies suggest that these cells could be used to make a memory with a storage density as high as 1 terabit (1 trillion bits of information) per square inch (6.45 square centimetres). In tests, the stored digital information was indeed found to be remarkably stable,
The funny thing is, if you read the article, this is actually a kind of mechanical memory; almost like an abacus…
June 11th 2009
This is a very interesting part of a review from Arts Technica of the Pre:
One of the most underhyped yet important features of the Pre is its support for over-the-air backup/restore using Palm’s Profiles service. Like so many other Pre reviewers, my first review unit broke (the middle column of the keyboard stopped working). When Palm sent me a new unit, I used a built-in app to completely wipe the old one, and I did most of the setup on the new one by simply entering my Palm Profiles credentials. (Note that Palm doesn’t offer OTA wipes yet, but this would be a trivial tweak of what it already has.) Once the new Pre authenticated me with Palm, it downloaded my apps, account information, and preferences, and after a reboot I was IMing and emailing again without having to reenter any of my data.
Note that if you log into Palm Profiles online, there isn’t much there. Palm has left this section pretty bare-bones, and I suspect that this is for a reason. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that Palm can easily release an enterprise profile management server that would let corporate IT departments create and manage profiles for a mobile workforce. It might even just tie everything to your Exchange credentials, instead of having you make an extra set of mobile device credentials.
It’s likely that a future webOS enterprise scenario will look something like this:
When you’re hired, you’re issued a new or wiped Palm device along with log-in credentials for a corporate profile. On booting the device for the first time, you enter your credentials, and the device connects to the profile server and pulls down all of the apps and preferences that you’ve been assigned by IT. Your e-mail, IM, custom internal apps (CRM and the like), are all set up and ready to go as a result of that one initial log-in. And if you need access to more apps, you go to a private version of the App Catalog that has been customized for your company.
If you lose the device, IT can remote-wipe it and issue you a new one. Your profile, which has been backed up over-the-air, is still intact, and after logging into the profile server with your new device all your data is there.
I think the folks a BlackBerry are very worried… and if they are not, they will be out of new business very soon :-)
June 11th 2009
This must have cost a amazing amount of time.. beautifully done!
