Hot damn...Apple makes an iCheap!

...and an iPod cheap too

And they're starting to encroach on MS Office's turf more too.. Last year it was a PowerPoint replacement (done better) and an Explorer replacement (done better). This year it's a Word replacement (done better). Anyone want to be there's an Excel replacement waiting? And of course, they already have an Access replacement (sort of) in FileMaker. I think this is Steve Jobs saying to Bill Gates "don't thing you can hold Office over our head...we've got a replacement for your crappy Office stuff now."

And Windows Server's turn

Hell, and Cray's turf with all the K's of Xserve's being clustered these days!

Steve's doing a stealth-end-run around Microsoft in the business market. Cheap servers and cheap clients. Cheap server OS's. And if all else fails, an Intel version of OS X is a few compiler-switch settings away, remember. If MS does ever kill Apple (not likely) then all Steve has to do is open source the REST of OS X (the part other than Darwin, i.e. the GUI) and make it available for Intel hardware....and watch all of Microsoft's market share (and Linux too) run (not walk) to OS X!

Heh.

Paintable solar cell material discovered!

Scientists have discovered a more efficient solar cell material that converts up to 30% of light (including infrared) to electricty; two to five times more than current solar cells do.

And you can paint it on, incorporate it into clothing, whatever. Your clothes could recharge your cellphone or PDA. Your walls could power your house. Your car's paint job could charge your battery, crack water into hydrogen to run you car....you get the drift.

Another interesting link.

I wonder what happened to the flexible/moldable plastic solar cell material that someone at a university here in Iowa was working on?

I've always thought Windows computer were junk, but I had no idea how much...

eBay has started an e-waste program to recycle or resell or donate old electronic equipment, notably computers. The figures on the number of computers alone to be recycled in the next few years is staggering. And the amount of heavy metals it will put into the environment is staggering too. Over 400 million computers in the next 3 years. [And since Apple only sells about 4 million Macs a year, I can guarantee you that most of those are Windows computers, as Apple will sell only about 12 million at present rates in the same time period.]

Most cell phones are replaced every 18 months (and last I heard there are more cell phones sold every year than computers!). I've been thinking about a new phone, but frankly, they are starting to get so overloaded with features that I think I'll just hold off a while until they finish "converging" cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and digicams together. And then wait a bit more until they work the kinks out. Or until Apple makes one (which may happen sooner than you think) as they are the only ones likely to do the job write. Microsoft certainly won't (despite repeated attempts so far.)

Even more interesting is the fact that over 75% of all computers ever sold remain stockpiled in storage rooms, basements etc. (I've got most of my old ones!)

It's time and past time to pull them out, put Linux on 'em and use 'em for servers, to processes SETI or other science data, grid computing, whatever. Donate 'em to old folks/kids/schools/low-income folks who need simple 'Net access, too. Or maybe my local school for use by younger kids. The big problem is finding the older software they'll need.

I've been trying to think how I could redeploy some of my old computers for my own use, too. I'm going to put one of my old Newtons with it's speech generation software in my bedroom so that it can wake me up and make sure I drag my butt into work for important meeting (I'm not a morning person and the alarm is just too easy for me to ignore...both of them I have). Pity that the company that made that software the Newton had for downloading a TV guide went out of business....now that there is wireless WiFi access available for the Newton, I could have left a couple more old Newtons by the TVs in my house, and have them pick up the schedule automatically and wirelessly. Not so needed anymore with my satellite dish, which has a searchable guide, but not all my rooms have been wired for satellite; the rest are wired for cable tv, and the local bare-bones non-digital cable I have with my broadband access doesn't have a program guide (certainly not a searchable one). Newtons also make better (wider/taller) web browsers than most pocket-sized PDAs do. Yep, I really need to revive those old newtons and revisit them for portable web browsing, They're not color, but that's ok. With the use of the wifi drivers now available and www.skweezer.net to strip all the extraneous graphics out, they should make pretty good portable 'Net padds!

Other initiatives on the 'Net like FreeCycle or R.O.C.K. (recycle old computer kindly) are good ways to give new life to old equipment. If they don't get too "picky" for their own good. Our local R.O.C.K does just Windows PCs, for gawd's sake. They also want fairly new ones, and functional ones. Ridiculous! And they don't do Macs...which seems senseless to me since the give a lot of computers to schools....and most local schools use Macs (I just saw a picture of a computer class room at an Urbandale school recently, full of current eMacs and some older original iMacs. You'd think that R.O.C.K. would be interested in stockpiling any sort of computer part they could find. Or software. Maybe they got too many donations to store or something, but still.....they seemed awfully picky! And giving a PC to a school seems counter productive...it's widely known and proven that schools don't have the resources to keep PC's running and virus/worm free....and Macs don't have to worry about that.

I've also heard of an organization that ships old computers over to poor/developing nations in Africa and Asia.

I keep my previous computer as a "backup" for my current one; so should everyone. it's easier for me, since I use laptops exclusively. But of course, by the time I buy yet another new one (typically 4 or 5 years with Macs) the old one isn't worth much if you tried to sell it. I've given a few to relatives who have far less powerful computing needs than I have, but that only goes so far. Some friends of mine asked me recently to help them reformat and sell their old Mac laptops (an Duo 230 and a 1400 and a G3/230. The 230 is probably worthless, and the 1400 not worth much of anything...and the 230 they should keep as a backup for the new iBook G4 they got.)

I use laptops mostly, since about 1990, so I've thought about putting my old ones around the house since they are convenient for a quick web-lookup, and take up little space or power. I recently put my most recently replaced laptop in my bedroom as a CD/DVD player, too...and since I have a wireless network, it's also a good way to access the 'Net quickly without having to go downstairs. I'm debating whether I want to leave it in sleep mode, as I don't really use it all that much. I'll have to find figures on how much power it uses in sleep...but it's certainly going to be much more practical if it starts up immediately than if I have to wait a minute or two for a boot.

I'm also thinking about pulling the old Duo 2300 laptop I had before that out of mothballs; When I bought my PowerBook G3, I had set it up as a web/ftp/mail/news/dns server to run my old Info-Newt web site about the Apple Newton Messagepad. I had to take it down when I moved to my new place because about that time the Code Red virus hit and the new broadband provider I switched to when Qwest repeatedly dropped the ball moving my DSL account to the new place (at two weeks intervals for almost a month!) had closed all the ports I needed to run the servers, to prevent Code Red from spreading, and the server wouldn't work anymore. I think they've opening things back up now.

I used a laptop as a server because I can easily set it to spin down the hard drive and turn off the backlight and even slow down the processor when it's not busy....perfect for a low volume personal server. Most new computer that are Energy Star certified may allow this as well, laptop or not.

Now I just have to figure out how to let data reach the system past my firewall without having to pay my provider extra $$$ for a second IP address. Should be loads of fun, since the concept of "user friendly" has yet to really reach the halls of network router hardware makers...

Anyway....dust off that old computer equipment and put it too good use! Don't put it in the landfill. Either way, putting the old computer in the closet or the landfull is a WASTE. Try to keep all the old manuals and disks for your computer in one place too...a computer isn't much use without OS and application software manuals and disks...and you often get new or upgraded apps when you get a new computer. I'm sure your old apps and software can be of use to someone somewhere. FIND THEM! Even if they are in your own household or family or neighborhood. Even if they don't use them much (like the computer I gave to my Mom). You don't use a rake or a snowshovel every day either....but we still have them around when we need 'em. That's why I'm so glad to see laptops pushing 50% of all computers sold or more (at Apple anyway). They take up a whole heck of a lot less room, and for most folks are perfect. Most folks except gamers and computer hobbyists don't need huge boxes full of card slots or huge screens. A laptop is what they need, and more and more of them are realizing it.

Cool SF artist site

Just found the web site of an interesting science fiction and fantasy artist, Stefan Martiniere. Never heard of him before, despite having a long-time interest in SF/F artists such as Michael Whelan, and it turns out I have been seeing his work a lot. He's worked on books, animation, films (such as the recent I, Robot and The Fifth Element, theme parks and rides, and more. Busy fellow, according to his résumé

Feeling overstressed? I resemble this remark

If you feel overstressed, overworked, and wonder why the wonders of modern technology haven't made the world a utopia, you're not alone.

Technology is good....but can be used badly.

Examples are everywhere (and no, i don't just mean Mac vs Windows ;-)

One big reason why I use MacOS and PalmOS

An article in the BBC points out today one big reason why I prefer Macintosh computers and PalmOS PDAs to Windows PCs and WindowsMobile/PocketPC PDAs:

The number of viruses. Which doubled in 2004, and exceed 100,000.

"The last 12 months have seen a dramatic growth in almost every security threat that plague Windows PCs.

The count of known viruses broke the 100,000 barrier and the number of new viruses grew by more than 50%. "

The current virus tally for the MacOS? Zero (OS X, that is. OS 9 and before had a few wimpy-ass virii that never did much.) Sure, the Mac has only a few % of the market (installed base is far larger though) but with 4 million new Macs sold every year, and older ones kept running and passed on to friends and family instead of being pitched like most Wintel PCs seem to be, there's a LOT f Macs out there (50 million maybe, I'd estimate) and that's GOT to be a big enough target for the virii writers. THere have been proof of concept works and virii for the Mac...but it's still next to impossible for them to spread, due to the inherent security of the OS compared to Windows....which has always been and still is a sieve, despite Microsoft's so-called best efforts.

And the success of the iPod is encouraging more switchers than Apple's "Switch" ads ever did. Not to mention constant, repeated press coverage of such switchers and articles by PC pundits who've tried the Mac...and liked it, some even staying switched or at least going cross-platform (often with a Mac-laptop, widely knows as among the best along with the IBM Thinkpads)

Here's to a kick-ass 2005, Apple. (Palm, you'd better start doing some ass-kicking yourself...or just rename yourself to "Treo"...or Microsoft's going to do to you what they did to Apple in the 80's and 90's.)

John Young retires

Just read that astronaut John Young is retiring from NASA. The amazing thing is that he's been an astronaut as long as I have been alive (he joined in 1962), and flew six missions in four different spacecraft (the article in the link doesn't explicitly state it, but from the fact that he flew two Gemini missions (including the first), two Apollo missions, and two shuttle missions (including the first), I make that the Gemini, Apollo, LEM, and Shuttle. He's 74 this year.

Hats off to such a pioneer spirit. Would that the world, the USA, and NASA had many, many more like him.

I'm not a big reader of biographies, but if he has written one I'd like to. I'll have to check out the Biography channel to see if they do a bio program of him. They should.

UPDATE: Here's the NASA biography of John W. Young.

Maybe there really WERE Hobbits!

Interesting story about the discovery of a group of hobbit-sized hominids down in the South Pacific (ironically the The Lord Of The Rings movies were filmed in New Zealand, also in the South Pascific).

And apparently (Komodo) dragons and oliphaunts (although dwarf ones) were present too.

When someone tells you it's impossible...ignore them and do it!

A group of high school students with a shoestring budget have made a totally self-sustaining hydrogen powered car (truck, actually). It uses sunlight and water to produce it's own fuel. It's a bit ungainly, but it works. Hey, they weren't concentrating on pretty, they were concentrating on functional. All the "experts" figured it'd take 20 years.

Looks to me like all it needs now is a little polish and miniaturization. We can dang sure do that (and if we can't, the Japanese or the Taiwanese can). Heck, the PDA in my pocket is so far in advance of the first room-size digital computers it's not funny. (Say, does that make PDAs "bonsai computers". You know what bonsai trees are; trees that are miniaturized and trained and shaped to be tiny versions of real trees many hundreds of times larger.)

Anyway...If I were the oil industry, or the Arabs, I'd be quaking in my boots right now. Sell your oil stocks now!

I've always thought that with the research I saw on solar cells that are much more flexible and conformable (almost like plastic) that you could use it as some or all of the car body (hell, make the sunroof be a solar cell!). Your car sits outside 8-10 hours a day at least....use that time to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use the solar cell to power a condenser to get pure water out of the air, and a compressor to store the hydrogen. It doesn't have to TOTALLY fill your car yet....we have to let the oil industry down easy, so let them switch to selling hydrogen. Oh, and use a bit of that electricity to put a blasted low power fan in your car to exhaust the hot air that builds up, so that you don't have to fry in the summer when you get in your car to to go lunch. And perhaps use the heat/cool differential to condense water. There are electrical devices that COOL (Pilzer effect or something like that). What happens with cool surfaces in an otherwise hot humid environment (like Iowa in summer?) Condensation! Water (and nice clean water too). And the rest of the year? Shovel some of that good old Iowa snow into a hopper and let the sun melt it. Make hay (or hydrogen) while the sun shines. Hell, design the car right and you could have the snow melt into channels to fill up your water tank for cracking. Take a look at the neat little heating elements on your rear window sometime. Get the idea? Put those on your roof, trunk, whatever, and let them drain into the water tank.

Hell, with a little good ol American ingenuity, we could even make an engine that works on either gas or ethanol or hydrogen. Don't tell me it can't be done. You're wrong. As someone will prove presently, if you're silly enough to say ANYTHING can't be done.

Ain't science wunnerful?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and people are starting to ANTICIPATE necessity now. Hot damn, the world's not entirely going down the crapper (despite Bush and Cheney Inc.'s attempts) now is it?

I wonder if the GOP (Greed Oil Power) will change their acronym to GHP?

Dang, maybe those rumors of a car that ran on water WERE true.

Now maybe that space drive (the Dean Drive) that was rumored, or those anti-grav devices that you hear about from time to time will turn out to be true, too. Or cold fusion? (Hot fusion sure isn't going anywhere...fa$t!)

Oh well, if they aren't, true, I'm sure we'll invent them presently.

And private companies like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites are making private spaceplanes and winning the $10million X-Prize, and Bigelow is working private space stations and funding a $50 Million prize for the first private orbital craft (the next step for Mr. Rutan, I hope.....he's certainly someone who can get the job done right and without gorging at the public trough, too). And Johns Hopkins Univeristy appears to be creating the first private deep space probe, with a mission to Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt. And about time too...NASA seems to have lost the Right Stuff. (Even more so this week, as "Gordo" Cooper passed away...on the same day that Spaceship One won the X-Prize no less. I think Gordo's spirit might be looking after SpaceShip One!)

Ad astra per aspera! Illegitimi non carborundum!

My, Robot?

Lots of what appear to be practical developments in consumer robotics these days. And now, I'm not talking about the Sony Aibo robotic cat and dog, or the Honda Asimo (named for robotic-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, one of whose famous works was the (apparently very loose) basic for the current Will Smith flick "I,Robot".

These are robotic lawnmowers and floor sweepers. Things more in line with what Robert Heinlein's character Dan Davis came up with in "The Door into Summer".

• Electrolux's Automower lawnmower


• Electrolux's Trilobite floor sweeper (cute name)


• Roomba's floor sweeper.
  

And on the not-quite-"practical"-but-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-fun front, check out the movie of this Korean humanoid kit robot. It dances, it does karate, it does calisthenics. Nifty.

Personally, I'm kind of fond of the toy R2-D2 robot from Hasbro I've got that can respond to voice command, etc. (Especially the "easter eggs" it has - if you have one, tell it to "follow me"!)

The X-Prize starts to pay off

As noted on Slashdot, it looks like the folks competing for the X-Prize to develop private, commerical space travel and launch vehicles are starting to have an effect. Now someone's starting to take the NASA project for inflatable space stations (which were surprisingly safe and cheap...even better than metal ones, as I recall) and apply it to low-cost space stations.

Reminds me of the novel Waldo, by Robert Heinlein, where the eponymous character lived in his own space station due to suffering from myasthenia gravis.

Of course, we'll have to have some standards on docking, etc. Affordable ones. I know the US and Russians have some standards on this (at least I hope so, otherwise how could the Soyuz and Progress capsules and the Shuttle all dock at the International Space Station? I think work on this started with the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the 1970's).

And we'll need some autonavigation/autodocking. 'Taint easy to dock with a big balloon in space! The Russians use autonav/autodock on their unmanned Progress resupply capsule to ISS and to their old Mir station (and perhaps older Salyuts?) So sounds like a way for the cash-strapped Russian economy to make some coin.

We may get the government pork barrel off the back of the space industry/program sooner than we think.

Why does Star Trek matter so much to some people?

Don't understand what we geeks see in Star Trek? Read this.

Because it, more than anything else I can think of (including the Bible), speaks to children and people of all ages about hope for the future. I've heard people (including an ex-President who died recently) say that without religion, there are no morals, etc.

To that I say - bull. I'm not a religious person, never have been. Oh, I attended Sunday School when I was small. But since then, not so much.

Although for some sad individuals, Star Trek (or the Bible, the Koran, or whatever) is the be-all and end-all and answer to every question (usually for folks incapable or afraid to use their minds and think), the rest of us see it as fiction, have fun with it, and recognize that it, too, speaks to us of important truths....without being nearly as divisive as religions have been in past centuries and millenium. Because it speaks to the FUTURE instead of the past, maybe.

Oh, the geeks "war" about whether Star Trek (or which particular Star Trek series), or Babylon 5 or Stargate or Farscape or whatever is the BETTER series, me I just enjoy 'em all. Farscape and Stargate don't get overly preachy about any sort of message (although they do show good moral tone). B5 and Star Treks are more overt about it. But these are wars of words. Of thought. Of Ideas and Ideals. Religion is examined by Stargate and B5 and Star Trek too, at times. Respectfully, but without bias. (I love the bit in a B5 episode where all the ambassadors of the various races are showing each other their religious or spiritual convictions.....the final scene is when the representative of Earth startrs to tell about ours...by introducing representatives of ALL the Earth religions he could find. The were all lined up in a row. It was a LONG line.)

Live long and prosper, y'all.

They Paved Paradise and Put In A Parking Lot, indeed

NASA and NOAA have determined that the amount of concrete-paved surface (and I assume this means asphalt and such too) in the USA is approximately the size of the state of Ohio.

That's more than the amount of wetlands in the USA. And still growing by 10,000 miles of road and one million new homes a year. And that's not counting other countries, either.

Wow. That's a lot of green plants lost. I wonder if they have information about the rate of growth.....because I'd kinda like to know how long it it going to be before the Earth looks like Coruscant from Star Wars, or Trantor from Isaac Asimov'e Foundation novels.

This brought to mind a new cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", I've recently been listening too, by Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton. This is the song everyone probably remembers as "They Paved Paradise And Put In A Parking Lot"
Hey, the hippies and environmentalists warned us. We just haven't been listening...

The truth hurts, doesn't it?

Here's a good article about the problems Microsoft faces in continuing "business as usual" and why they may not continue to succeed

Mac fans have been pointing this out for years. Interesting to see that viewpoint in someone who worked for MS for a decade, and recently got so frustrated with Windows that he gave up and switched to a Mac (and has been living happily ever after).

The truth is out there!
The truth will set you free!

What goes around comes around

Well, the bean-counters and MBA-drones were quick to jump all over outsourcing USA programmer's jobs to India.

But like all (ahem) "good things", it can't last.

Just hope that people are willing to come back to fill the jobs you can no longer fill so cheaply in India.....and don't be surprised if you end up paying more when they do.

That'll teach 'em.

Standard, standards, who's got the standards

God knows I love new tech and new gadgets. But sometimes I wonder if things move too damn fast. Now they've developed PAPER DVD's and other new larger-capacity DVD formats.

Besides the above, I read today they're already looking to replace the DVD....and the DVD is supposedly going to replace the CD. It's moving towards replacing it for CD-R uses on computers.

Hell, I haven't finished replacing all my LP's and VHS tapes with DVD yet. Cut it out, guys!

Thanks heavens they are making DVD drives that are able to read and write the old formats. Oh yeah.....there's a ton of different DVD formats out there (DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and these new things.)

Unix and Linux have this problem too. There's eleventy-one different flavors of Unix and even of Linux. Hell, there's a half dozen Linuxii for the MACINTOSH for crissakes....And Mac OS X is a BSD Unix variant. I wonder if this hurts or help Unix/Linux. I'm betting it hurts.

COOL new tech makes for much more efficient motors and quieter fans

A Japanese inventor has come up with a new idea to make electric motors 80% more efficient. This will also help fans run more quietly and use less power.

Dandy!

Novel cell phone service helps you figger out what song that is on the radio!

John C. Dvorak posited in one of his columns a while back that killing Napster (the free version) was the worst thing the music industry ever did, because it killed the major way to sample new music. You can't do it on the radio anymore, because they play songs for 20 minutes and don't tell you who the heck played that song you liked. (I've never understood this.....you'd think they'd be doing MORE commercial breaks these days, not less. It's all about advertising after all...)

Well, AT&T has solved this problem with a new cell phone service.

Reminds me of a widget I saw some years back that you could buy and push a button on to "bookmark" music you were listening to at a particular time and then use it with your computer later to find out what the song was. Never heard about it again (not surprised, are you?)

So I dunno if this AT&T service will go anywhere either. I only sort of agree with Dvorak, too. After all, even though Napster has gone commercial, there's always KaZaa, Gneutella, OpenNap, Usenet newsgroups, etc, etc. But then, I've long since stopped paying attention to Mr. Duh Whore Hack. Him and Dennis Miller used to be great....but they've gone down the tubes the last few years.

First steps towards Replicators?

Hmmm....what with nanontech and such things as these small logic blocks, are we on the way to making "Replicator" robots, ala the TV show Stargate SG-1?

Anyone got the Asgard's address?

My next job may be in the auto industry....

Looks like cars are becoming so hight tech, computerized, and hard to repair that they are looking for people with IT and electronics backgrounds to diagnose and fix 'em

I've never been one to work on my own car.....but hmmmmmmmm....

Methinks it's time to rethink the auto industry AND the computer industry....