Core Dump

Labels: technology, usability

Labels: computing, technology

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Labels: computing, technology

Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works was a revolt against the formalities of conventional industry. It was a throwback to a time when airplanes were created by small teams who all broke for lunch together. Johnson crammed a small number of capable people into close proximity, so that “engineering shall always be within a stone’s throw of the airplane.” He believed in the freewheeling inventive genius of individuals—particularly himself; he resented the intrusions of committees of government bureaucrats with their meddlesome meetings, and rebelled against their minutely detailed specifications.

He pared away procedural dross: Whatever used up time without advancing the project was banned—even visits from the customer. Finished drawings were not required; shop men were encouraged to work from sketches and when possible to develop parts directly on the airplane. Decisions, once made, would not be second-guessed; good enough was good enough. Meetings were limited to two or three essential participants. Initial flight tests would be conducted by the builders—not, as was usual at the time, by the customer’s pilots.

Labels: history, military, technology

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A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

Labels: language, technology

For example, a group of students and researchers at the University of Toronto is currently working on an iPhone application called TimbreMap. It is designed to give users audible information about their surroundings to help them differentiate between surfaces, such as park grounds or sidewalks.

“As you touch the phone's surface, different elements have different sounds,” explained Jing Su, one of the graduate students working on the project. “We try to give it a different texture and a different sound. Even though the phone's glass surface is smooth, with the right kind of sound, you can trick the brain into giving you tactile feedback.”

TimbreMap's designers also hope to give it functionality in indoor locations – where the phone can't access GPS data which rely on direct access to satellites – by checking building blueprints. If successful, an application initially designed for users with visual disabilities may well become popular with any smart-phone user who simply wants to navigate a sprawling shopping mall.

Labels: health, technology

Labels: technology

Labels: photography, science, technology

As my wife and I used the WikiReader, we considered who would best take advantage of it; besides the gadget addicts, that is.

Our conclusion? It would be a good fit in elementary and secondary school classrooms. The WikiReader probably wouldn't appeal to students at universities and colleges, where more rigorous standards for research apply. It's also great for parents who are traveling with kids and/or who are homeschooling their children.

For the average person, it's a useful and (fairly) up-to-date reference source that's more portable, and which has a much broader scope than a printed encyclopedia. And, as mentioned before, you don't need an Internet connection to use it.

Labels: reference, technology

Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

"I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship]," he writes. "It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew... The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk."

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream's propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there's no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

Labels: military, science, space, technology

Labels: technology

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Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says.

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Labels: technology

Labels: technology

When listening to Markram speculate, it's easy to forget that the Blue Brain simulation is still just a single circuit, confined within a silent supercomputer. The machine is not yet alive. And yet Markram can be persuasive when he talks about his future plans. His ambitions are grounded in concrete steps. Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain--that should happen in the next two years--Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body. He's already talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal. "The only way to really know what the model is capable of is to give it legs," he says. "If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we've got a problem."

Labels: computing, science, technology

Labels: society, technology

Sources say the delay may be due to newly discovered competition. Until recently, the wireless technology used by the Kindle was available only through Rogers. This week, however, Bell and Telus announced a new next-generation network that will go live in November, giving Amazon more options to choose from for their device. The two carriers announced this week that they will use the new network to begin offering Apple's iPhone, previously only available through Rogers.

“You'd think that Bell and Telus would jump at the chance [to partner with Amazon],” said Iain Grant, of the telecom consultancy SeaBoard Group. “You'd think that Rogers, now that they're no longer exclusive on the iPhone, might jump on the chance too.

Labels: books, technology

One nasty suspicion of mine is that Amazon were demanding discounts so ludicrous that publishers would be making a net loss on each book sold after expenses and royalties. It's in line with their established business practices, as far as I can tell. Speaking hypothetically: if this was the case, and nobody was willing to do business with the ebook monopsony from hell, might the monopsony from hell respond by using its market-leading position to punish the recalcitrant European publishers and bring them to heel? And if so, wouldn't facilitating grey market imports be one way to do that?

You might think that if this were the case, it wouldn't harm anyone but a bunch of fat-cat publishers. However, when war breaks out it's not just the combatants who get hurt. There is a convention in English language publishing called the trans-Atlantic rights split. A relic of the days when trans-Atlantic shipping was expensive and slow, it's a provision whereby English Language publication rights to a novel are usually licensed in two tranches — one for North America, and one for the UK and the rest of the world. These days you can also sell World English Language rights, in which case the acquiring publisher typically sub-licenses them to someone local to the other territory. If you're a writer, you prefer to sell separately — if you can negotiate, say, 10 gold pieces for North American rights, you can probably get 4-5 GP for UK/Commonwealth rights — but a world rights sale will only get you 12 GP. The split, in other words, persists because it's in authors' interests to maintain it.

If Amazon are trying to break the trans-Atlantic rights split, that's going to ultimately cost me 20-30% of my (English language royalties) income. Even if they don't succeed, they're going to trigger a damaging price war between my US and UK publishers, or a bout of "let's you and them fight" litigation as British publishers sue to keep US grey-market imports out of "their" Kindles. If this were to happen, nobody would benefit from it — except Amazon, who would get rich off other folks' income stream.

Labels: books, technology

Now, I travel. A lot. I want portable computing.

I've tried Netbooks. The problem with netbooks is this: they suck. Many of them have keyboards designed by folks for whom western European languages are not their first, or even second, script. I am sick and tired of keyboards where the right shift key is buried among the arrow keys, so that half the time you try and type a W or A you end up inserting a lowercase letter on the line above. I am sick and tired of keyboards too small to type on, or with missing characters. Welcome to netbook land!

If the keyboards are good (and HP have got them right), the screen resolution is low. And if they get the screen right as well, you end up battling with an asthmatic, gutless processor. The Intel Atom family CPUs have just about no cache, and they deliver piss-poor performance. The icing on the cake for me was installing OS X on an Asus Eee 1000 with an SSD. Two minutes to boot! Welcome back to the 1980s and the world of floppy disks.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

And this, dear readers, is the C8 Aileron Spyder that Spyker unveiled at Pebble Beach. It’s got a 400-horsepower 4.2-liter V8 pulled from the Audi parts bin, and for the first time you can get a Spyker with either an automatic or a six-speed manual gearbox. It does zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds and has a top speed of 187 mph. That wing-shaped red thing is an aluminum suitcase sitting on a luggage rack milled from billet aluminum. You can’t read it in this pic, but the company’s Latin motto, Nulla Tenaci Invia Est Via, is inscribed around the tonneau cover. Why? Who knows. But it looks cool.

Labels: If I had a million dollars, technology

Labels: technology

Labels: photography, space, technology

# Rap music has always been main stream.
# Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
# Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.
# The KGB has never officially existed.
# Text has always been hyper.

Labels: society, technology

What with Google, dating sites, and a slew of social networks, it's not difficult to get to know a person digitally before choosing to interact with them in a brick-and-mortar environment.

Labels: computing, technology

Labels: technology

“For more than 140 years, adjustable focus has been recognized as the Holy Grail for presbyopes,” said Dr. Kurtin, referring to the roughly one-third of the population that has lost some or all ability to focus on close objects. But there is a reason that better alternatives have not emerged: “It’s a blazingly difficult problem,” he said.

The idea of a fluid lens whose focal plane can be mechanically adjusted goes back at least to an 1866 patent awarded D. A. Woodward, a Baltimore inventor. Since then there have been a variety of attempts to commercialize the technology, but none have met all the criteria for success. The lens must be thin, light, durable and easily adjustable. Several years ago Dr. Kurtin had his epiphany. A magnetically attached removable front lens would make for a compact and durable system.

Labels: If I had a million dollars, technology

It sounds like something out of The Matrix: a giant, world-spanning electronic network where high-powered machines, some of them using GPUs to gain a speed advantage, run secret, rapidly-evolving software algorithms that battle it out for profits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, attack-counterattack, that yields some $21 billion a year for the winners and can spell ruin for the losers. Except that it's not The Matrix—it's the stock and commodities markets, and the fact that these markets mainly consist now of computers trading against one another has been brought closer to the public's attention by last month's alleged theft of Goldman Sachs' proprietary trading code.

The collection of computer-automated, high-speed trading technologies and techniques that are typically lumped under the heading of "high-frequency trading" (HFT) have been around for a while, but HFT has recently become heavily identified with the banking giant Goldman Sachs, which dominates some aspects of it on the New York Stock Exchange. And as Goldman draws more media and congressional scrutiny, so will HFT. To prepare you for the high-frequency trading media onslaught, we'll take a look at HFT and at a stock market that really isn't what you thought it was.

If you look under the hood of the markets in 2009, you'll find that the trading floor has been replaced by electronic networks; the frantic, hand-signaling traders have been replaced by computer systems; and all of moves in the trader's dance—a thousand little tricks and techniques (some legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal) for taking regular advantage of speed, location, and information to generate profits—are executed hundreds of times per second, billions of times per day. And the whole enterprise is mainly powered by the same hardware from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, that Ars readers use for gaming.

Labels: technology

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

The Langley team's success prompted some "What went right?" analysis. Erasmus Kloman, at the National Academy of Public Administration, was given the job of finding out. NASA published a redacted version of his report, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, which found that bureaucracy was kept to a minimum, while keeping sharply defined goals, and inter-agency turf wars were largely absent. Over on Apollo, 60 engineers reported directly to a senior manager.

As Wingo puts it: "The refugees from Apollo made up the middle management of every Silicon Valley hardware company - they gave it the management and technology backbone."

This was before the era of "corporate re-engineering" - where innovation came to mean reshuffling the administration, rebranding, and a high turnover of management fads. It's impossible to conceive how the EU or the US could achieve such results in a short space of time today. The modest space programs today take many years to complete.

Labels: space, technology

During the Apollo 11 Lunar Module’s descent to the Moon 40 years ago today, Garman played a direct role in preventing a mission abort. Several warning lights and computer overload alarms came on as the craft descended just above the Moon’s surface, causing worry in Mission Control, but all of Garman’s pre-flight simulation experiences told him that the alarms were not critical and the landing could continue. Without hesitating, and without panicking, the 24-year-old NASA computer engineer confidently gave the “go” to continue the mission.

Granville Paules, was a 32-year-old guidance officer for one of the Apollo 11 mission teams and remembers that moment well.

“The alarms went off on during descent,” Paules said. “It was a conflict between the on-board systems and the computer was starting to get overloaded. Garman had a simulation where a similar thing had occurred about three weeks before that, so he knew what to do. It probably would have been a lot scarier, possibly even an abort for the landing, if we had not had that simulation. I can say that the odds of aborting that lunar landing were a lot higher than people want to believe. That simulation gave everybody the confidence to turn off the alarm and ignore it.”

Labels: software, space, technology

This iPhone App takes advantage of the new video camera and GPS on the iPhone 3GS to provide a visual overlay of the NYC subway system through your video camera to show you which subway stations are closest to you.

Labels: If I had a million dollars, technology

Well, for starters: without the space program we'd probably be dead. Spy satellites are the very keystone of arms verification; without spysats the cold war would quite possibly have turned hot by the early 1960s, due to misinformation and fear permeating the chain of command on either side. Subsequently, gamma-ray detector satellites such as the American Vela constellation and its Soviet equivalents gave some reassurance to the superpowers by giving them the ability to know with a degree of confidence in whether or not nuclear explosions were taking place anywhere on the planet — a prerequisite for nuclear deterrence without a launch-on-warning policy.

Labels: space, technology

Singularity science fiction follows a Moore's Law of the future, where science improves our lives exponentially over time. Eventually human life is so radically transformed that it's unrecognizable to those of us living in the relatively crappy present.

But now we're starting to see the bleeding edges of a backlash against this kind of "everybody disappears" singularity where the human future is unimaginably awesome. Partly this backlash is coming from history-obsessed authors like Jo Walton and Robert Charles Wilson. Wilson's novel Julian Comstock imagines a 22nd century United States sapped of its energy resources and returned to 19th Century levels of technology.

But this trend is also coming from post-apocalyptic TV series like Jericho and the upcoming Day One, where people must learn to live without their Moore's Law-driven technologies.

Labels: SF, society, technology

The acceleration is so immediate you can feel your eyeballs deform under the G-forces. It's a sensation of isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you're moving faster than the world can react. Bystanders vaguely remember seeing a flash of expensive paint a few seconds after you disappear over the horizon; entire generations of insects die on your prow. Passing other motorists becomes a dangerous entitlement that has you resenting oncoming traffic for hogging your "VIP lane" -- especially when you realize that you can outrun not only the 5-0's cruisers, but their helicopters, too. If they wanna catch you, they're gonna have to dust off Airwolf and drag Jan Michael Vincent out of rehab.

Labels: If I had a million dollars, technology

Above all — and this is the mind-blowing part — D-Link is selling this very complex piece of consumer technology without a single word of instructions for the features that make it unique.

Those cool features like sharing a hard drive, sharing an iTunes library, downloading BitTorrent, connecting a U.S.B. scanner or printer that all computers can share? There’s not a single syllable about them in the user guide.

The user guide is a PDF document on the CD — you don’t get a printed book, of course — so what would it have cost D-Link to write up these features?

D-Link’s PR person suggested that the elusive instructions might be on the company’s Web site. (They weren’t.) In the end, it took a D-Link product manager a day to figure out how to work these features himself and supply me with the instructions. He says that he’ll have them posted on D-Link’s Web site by the time the 685 goes on sale. (Caution: They entail mucking around in the router’s advanced HTML-based configuration pages. Technophobes need not apply.)

Isn’t it amazing that, after all these years, it still hasn’t dawned on companies like D-Link that simplicity sells? They still don’t get it: spending a little money up front —on hardware design, streamlined software, better manuals — would save a fortune in tech-support calls and store returns.

Labels: technology

With the engines buried in the fuselage, exterior surfaces blended together, and plane constructed almost entirely out of wood (possibly to prevent radar from penetrating the skin, or possibly because Germany was facing a resource shortage), it's easy to look back on the 2-29 with hindsight and say the Horten brothers were developing a stealth fighter to subvert British radar, but we don't know for sure.

The Horten brothers had another design based on the Ho 2-29. A design for a intercontinental strategic bomber, the Ho 18.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling, thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo 004B turbojets. As the documentary shows, had the Nazis extended the war in 1946 and developed the atomic bomb as planned, the Ho 18 could have been their Enola Gay.

Labels: history, military, technology

Labels: technology

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message "Cannot be sent to selected device".

"Oh that's the problem," he said "if some of the books will download and the others won't it means that you've reached the maximum number of times you can download the book."

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren't currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it's five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here's the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

Labels: books, technology

Labels: photography, technology

But as I starting scanning Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, again for the novelty of doing it in the air, I started seeing postings from friends about the Iranian protests that CNN had also been covering since Obama's AMA speech had ended. First, a Twitter post from Brett Bullington, reblogging a post from John Perry Barlow that you could search Twitter within 15 miles of Iran. I got glued to the stream of messages there, and then hit this vein of extraordinary photos posted on Twitpic by @Iranpishi, especially this one, which I immediately posted to my blog, again amazed that I could follow all this from a plane. Just a few years ago, we got onto a plane and shut the doors, and we could land on a different planet than the one we took off from, depending on what had happened in our world in those eight hours; and just eight months ago, I spent election night flying on a plane across country, feeling cut off from the web and the rest of the world as our plane watched Obama win the presidency and change the world on our little in-seat screens (Daisy Whitney also happened to be on the flight, and wrote this TV Week column about it). This time, though, plugged in and reblogging photos coming out of Tehran and seeing people on the ground then reblogging my posts, I felt like a participant.

Labels: politics, technology

At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”

Tukwila is one of Microsoft’s smaller data centers (they number “more than 10 and fewer than 100,” Manos told me with deliberate vagueness). In 2006, the company, lured by cheap hydropower, tax incentives and a good fiber-optic network, built a 500,000-plus-square-foot data center in Quincy, Wash., a small town three hours from Tukwila known for its bean and spearmint fields. This summer, Microsoft will open a 700,000-plus-square-foot data center — one of the world’s largest — in Chicago. “We are about three to four times larger than when I joined the company” — in 2004 — “just in terms of data-center footprint,” Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, told me when I met with her at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash.

Labels: computing, technology

Labels: technology

“When you have a billion cells, you cannot uniformly control them to one electron,” Mr. Harari said. “If I want 40 electrons, plus or minus two electrons, I can do that when the device is new. But seven years out, it will start to smear.” In other words, the electron count will start to vary from one cell to the next.

SanDisk, to steal a line from a bigger Silicon Valley company, has an app for that. The controllers on each of its chips keep track of these errors and compensate for them.

There is still some more engineering to do. The company can try to make cells smaller, get more bits per cell and improve the controllers.

But at the end of the day, Mr. Harari said, it probably can double the capacity of its chips only two more times. Once the industry goes from its current 64-billion-bit chip to a 256-billion-bit chip (that’s 32 gigabytes), it will hit that brick wall.

Labels: technology

Labels: technology

The book was a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses printed in Venice and dated 1518, and had been rebound sometime in the early 19th century, from the looks of it. The sewing structure of the book was breaking down, the covers were badly worn and detached, the pages in good condition overall. In discussion with the client, we elected to rebind the book in a Limp Vellum Binding appropriate to the period and location. This would help to present the book in a more appropriate format, and would actually make reading it much easier, as it would open more completely. In keeping with the simplicity of the style, and since we had no original cover to work from, there would be no tooling or decoration of the cover.

Labels: books, technology

According to Natural Home Magazine, the coarse texture of coffee grounds makes them ideal for scrubbing hard to clean dishes. Start by packing the grounds into a square sized cloth, then gather its ends and secure with a rubber band. This tip also works on tea bags.

If you've been chopping garlic or other fragrant foods, rub the grounds on your hands to eliminate the smell. Dropping some in your plants will help keep out garden pests.

Labels: technology

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.

Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.

Labels: technology

Labels: space, technology

There are many reasons why passenger rail is the unwanted stepchild of transport policy in the USA; a lack of suitable track signaling, priority given to freight over passenger services, routes laid out in the 1930s and earlier rather than between current centres of population and commerce, and so on. But despite understanding why, I find it really strange that in this day and age, a critical chunk of the USA's infrastructure barely rises to the level of third world quality.

Labels: society, technology

We can confidently predict that by then, computer games will have been around for nearly sixty years; anyone under eighty will have grown up with them. The median age of players may well be the same as the median age of the general population. And this will bring its own challenges to game designers. Sixty year olds have different needs and interests from twitchy-fingered adolescents. For one thing, their eyesight and hand-eye coordination isn't what it used to be. For another, their socialization is better, and they're a lot more experienced.

Oh, and they have lots more money.

If I was speccing out a business plan for a new MMO in 2025, I'd want to make it appeal to these folks — call them codgergamers. They may be initially attracted by cute intro movies, but jerky camera angles are going to hurt their aging eyes. Their hand/eye coordination isn't what it used to be. And like sixty-somethings in the current and other cohorts they have a low tolerance for being expected to jump through arbitrary hoops for no reward. When you can feel grandfather time breathing down your neck, you tend to focus on the important stuff.

But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners.

Labels: computing, technology

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

Labels: history, technology

Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market--even though they haven't been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products that are available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they're obsolete--long after the rest of the world has moved on.

For this story--which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose "Whatever Became of . . .?" books I loved as a kid--I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; and some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant--if "extant" means that they remain for sale, in one way or another--and didn't address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you're like me, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that some of these products are still with us at all--and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Labels: computing, technology

ot

It's about time, but what a lame execution: "To view an MP's record, head to the website and click on the Members of Parliament link to find your member of the House of Commons. Your MP's site will will have a tab for votes that takes you to a list showing whether they voted yea, nea, or didn't vote at all on any given bill."

It's time for some civic-minded Canadian hackers to slurp out all that data and reformat in a way that gives you real insight into what your elected representative is up to and how she compares to all the other politicos on the Hill.

Commons technical staff began working on the design, and the chamber's board of internal economy agreed at a meeting last month to launch the feature.

Starting next week, the website will also include a search engine that allows people to see how MPs have voted since October 2004.

Labels: politics, technology

Labels: space, technology

Labels: space, technology

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, history, science, space, technology

Lifehacker: How do you plan out a season of MythBusters? How much can you plan ahead, and how much space do you leave yourself to explore stuff you hadn't anticipated?

Adam Savage: The flow of the season happens very much like the flow of an episode. We'll plot out a straight line through an episode, or a season, then it changes radically, constantly. The story list for the next full season, for example, had 60 stories. That came from a master list of about 130, 140 items, from which we'll choose 60. As we film that season, we'll end up following maybe 40 of those, but then 20 new items come up during shooting. All it takes is one more news story for me to realize how I could dig into something.

... There's also room for totally randoms stuff. Jamie came up with this idea of proving you could build a working ship out of wood pulp and water, during the Alaska episode. What we built was stupendous, and what we built wasn't on anybody's list. It normally takes about 9 or 10 days to finish a story, but we try to be flexible. We find a story sometimes we just don't want to sink our teeth into or, more often, need to give more juice to. We had one thing, duct tape, slotted as a three-day story, but we realized that is not a small story. We can turn on the idea that duct tape can do almost anything. So we turned out this episode that takes duct tape to the absolute edge of its performance capabilities.

Labels: movies and television, science, technology

For the past 13 years, the Internet Archive has been growing rapidly, most recently by about 100TB of data per month. Until last year, the site had been using a more traditional data center filled with 800 standard Linux servers, each with four hard drives. The new Sun Modular Datacenter that powers it now is on Sun's campus in Santa Clara, Calif., and houses eight racks filled with 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers with dual- or quad-core x86 processors running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each Sun server is combined with an array of 48 1TB hard drives. The server unit is referred to as a "Thumper."

The Sun Modular Datacenter houses 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each server has 48TB of capacity.

"The only thing needed besides [the shipping container] are the network connections, a chilled water supply and electricity," said Dave Douglas, Sun's chief sustainability officer. "Customers using this tend to be people running out of data center space and need something quickly or need a data center in remote area where mobility is key."

Labels: Internet, technology

Labels: places, technology

Labels: technology

Labels: politics, technology

Labels: Another thing to worry about, places, technology

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about -- it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

Labels: computing, technology

The nearly 400-year history of mechanized calculation was created by men and women with varying and diverse talents, temperaments, backgrounds and education, working in such fields as mathematics, the sciences, government, business and commerce. It is a history not just of singular inspiration and genius but also the continuing, collective discovery of new materials, skills, technologies and techniques to implement and enhance the plans and dreams of individual inventors and scientists.

Down through the years, beginning largely in the 1930s, IBM has helped to chronicle and contribute to this history by collecting a number of significant counting and reckoning tools and devices -- including abacuses, slide rules, calculators, arithmometers and tabulators -- and by preserving some of its own and other pioneering products.

Labels: computing, history, technology

Driving or walking to the video store to bring home less than a gig of data — data that may or may not even be in stock — just doesn't make much sense anymore.

At least not when compared to Netflix's easy ordering system, its recommendation engine, lack of late fees, deeper inventory and clever use of the Postal Service to have movies delivered quickly.

Blockbuster tried to keep up, with an innovative mail rental plan that let people trade in movies at the store as well, but the plan turned out to be too complicated and too late.

But even the notion of even leaving the room to get a movie, doesn't make sense if you have a fat internet connection and the willingness to explore some legal and less-legal ways to download movies to a computer.

Labels: movies and television, technology

My iPod is my atlas, calendar, cookbook, dictionary, encyclopedia, newspaper, shopping list, translator, and TV guide. I can find all the how-to and instructional media I want online. Better yet, I don't even have to read most of it. YouTube and similar sites are filled with videos on everything from folding your clothes more efficiently to off-pan VW restorations.

The information is constantly updated and spans an international audience (try finding books in Mandarin at your local Barnes and Noble). It doesn't take up extra space on my book shelf or coffee table and it reduces the amount of paper I throw away.

Labels: technology

Resonance: What was the most advanced computer used during Apollo? How does it compare with today's PCs?

Crenshaw: Most of our work was done on the IBM 70x series, from 702 through 7094. Later in the Apollo era, we had Univac 1108’s and 1110’s, and the CDC 6600. None of them, of course, could hold a candle to the modern PC with Pentium processor. I think their cycles times were all around a microsecond, which is equivalent to a 1 MHz clock speed; not even up to the smallest microprocessor of today. Memory was via magnetic cores, which were even slower. The IBM’s had a maximum of 32K RAM (but 36-bit words, not bytes). Nevertheless, the later processors, notably the Univacs and CDCs, were no slouch. Both had hardware floating point and long word lengths (CDC’s words were 60 bits long), so one could do some serious number crunching.

Despite their low performance, on paper, we got a lot of work out of those old machines. For those used to waiting 15 seconds for a Windows spreadsheet to even load, it’s difficult to imagine how much work a 1MHz computer can do when it’s running full tilt in machine language, not encumbered by bloated software, interpreted languages, and a GUI interface. I’m old enough to remember, and look back on those days wistfully.

Labels: SF, space, technology

Which display tech will win out is may prove to be more economic than aesthetic, but ebook readers are here to stay. The presumption that everyone will eventually read books on an electronic display of some sort in the future is so fundamental I haven't bothered to question it, mostly because nobody else does either. (Even if you love books, ebook reading makes sense.)

If you believe there's a future for a dedicated device that exists solely to display books and newspapers and whatever other forms of the printed word you want to read, then E-Ink and similar tech makes sense, as long as it eventually can cost less and refresh faster. The battery-life advantage is huge. But if you think that a reader will be just one function of, say, a multitouch tablet that's also your netbook, PDA and video display—and it's a device you charge every night—it's pretty clear that a multi-talented LCD display is the future.

Labels: technology

Of the half a dozen engineers and producers interviewed for this story, none could remember a pop recording session in the past few years when Auto-Tune didn't make a cameo--and none could think of a singer who would want that fact known. "There's no shame in fixing a note or two," says Jim Anderson, professor of the Clive Davis department of recorded music at New York University and president of the Audio Engineering Society. "But we've gone far beyond that."

Some Auto-Tuning is almost unavoidable. Most contemporary music is composed on Pro Tools, a program that lets musicians and engineers record into a computer and map out songs on a visual grid. You can cut at one point on the grid and paste at another, just as in word-processing, but making sure the cuts match up requires the even pitch that Auto-Tune provides. "It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

Labels: music, software, technology

Labels: science, technology

The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: "We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years." Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million -- a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And here's the thing: a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we're so low in our estimate of the Times's printing costs that we're not even in the ballpark.

Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues and also, not everyone loves the Kindle.

What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

Labels: technology

Labels: movies and television, technology

Even triumphs like Obama's 2006 Google for Government bill, cosponsored with Republican senator Tom Coburn, have been caught up in red tape. The bill led to the creation of FedSpending.org, a site allowing the public to track federal contracts and grants. Instead of building it in-house, the Office of Management and Budget decided to license something similar from a nonprofit watchdog group, OMB Watch—for just 4 percent of what the government had expected to spend. It was a striking victory for government efficiency, but the process behind the scenes "was extremely difficult," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. After floating the idea of donating the system to OMB ("the government can't take things for free," Bass quickly learned), the nonprofit had to sign on as a subcontractor and undergo three rounds, and six wasted months, of bidding before the deal was complete.

Changes to what is effectively the president's homepage, WhiteHouse.gov, will encounter similar obstacles. David Almacy, a PR executive and new media consultant at Waggener Edstrom who served as the Bush administration's White House Internet director from 2005 to 2007, recalls that following Hurricane Katrina, he posted the transcript of a speech to the site. In the text, where Bush had directed people to Redcross.org, Almacy helpfully inserted a hyperlink. "Within a few hours," Almacy says, "I got a call from the White House general counsel's office saying I needed to take out the link." Some federal government Web pages, it turns out, are virtually barred from linking to nongovernmental sites to avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another.

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can't be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

Labels: politics, technology

Labels: technology

Mr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify the latest technological gadget that he says could make life easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.

“What Raman does is amazing,” said Paul Schroeder, vice president for programs and policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology that can help visually impaired people. “He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his capacity to design and alter technology to meet his needs is unique.”

Some of Mr. Raman’s innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, “How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?”

Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could benefit from eyes-free access to a phone. They could also appeal to aging baby boomers with fading vision who wantto keep using technology they’ve come to depend on.

Labels: computing, technology, usability

I first came across Coster-Mullen’s name in January of 2004, after I attended an exhibit by the artist Jim Sanborn, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. The show, called “Critical Assembly,” included what appeared to be spookily exact replicas of the interior mechanism of the first atomic bomb, which Sanborn had manufactured according to Coster-Mullen’s specifications. A year later, I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that mentioned a six-hundred-mile trip Coster-Mullen had taken across the Midwest with a full-scale model of the Hiroshima bomb in the back of a Penske rental truck. He had built the replica with the help of his son, Jason, in his garage, basing it, in part, on his analysis of sixty-year-old screws, bolts, and fragments of machined steel that had been stored in rural basements and attics.

Labels: history, technology

"No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything," says Frederick Pohl, whose work includes the classic The Space Merchants (written with Cyril M. Kornbluth), MAN PLUS, and most recently The Last Theorem, co-authored with the late Arthur C. Clarke. "Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil."

Labels: SF, technology

He'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons — with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat — 0.2 grams — per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons — the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion.

Today Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars.

Labels: technology