Innovation Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right - NYTimes.com

Innovation Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right - NYTimes.com: "In my research, I analyzed 300 of the most influential innovations in science, commerce and technology — from the discovery of vacuums to the vacuum tube to the vacuum cleaner — and put the innovators of each breakthrough into one of four quadrants. First, there is the classic solo entrepreneur, protecting innovations in order to benefit from them financially; then the amateur individual, exploring and inventing for the love of it. Then there are the private corporations collaborating on ideas while simultaneously competing with one another. And then there is what I call the “fourth quadrant”: the space of collaborative, nonproprietary innovation, exemplified in recent years by the Internet and the Web, two groundbreaking innovations not owned by anyone.

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Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted | ZDNet

Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted | ZDNet: "“But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.

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Chinese Supercomputer Tianhe-1A Bumps U.S. Out of the Lead - NYTimes.com

Chinese Supercomputer Tianhe-1A Bumps U.S. Out of the Lead - NYTimes.com: "The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.

“That technology was built by them,” Mr. Dongarra said. “They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.”

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Ksplice » Hosting backdoors in hardware - System administration and software blog

Ksplice » Hosting backdoors in hardware - System administration and software blog: "The PCI specification defines a “expansion ROM” mechanism whereby a PCI card can include a bit of code for the BIOS to execute during the boot procedure. This is intended to give the hardware a chance to initialize itself, but we can also use it for our own purposes.

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Ten Years To Save the Touchscreen

Ten Years To Save the Touchscreen: "Today's mobile touchscreen gadgets, along with all liquid crystal displays, rely on the unusual properties of a single material - a metallic crossbreed whose sources could be exhausted within the decade. It is not just our displays that are under threat. Solar cells and low-power LEDs, both central planks of a low-carbon energy strategy, could feel the squeeze too. No surprise, then, that companies and laboratories across the world are scrambling to find a replacement.
If this is all news to you, chances are you have never heard of the material causing all the fuss. A mixture of two metallic oxides called indium tin oxide (ITO), it is the material electronic engineers love to hate. Its principal component, indium, is a by-product of lead and zinc mining; it is difficult to come by and expensive. Once through the factory gates, ITO's brittleness and inflexibility make it a pain to work with.
And yet it has qualities that make us forgive its defects. Specifically, it is a rare example of a material that is both electrically conducting and optically transparent, which means it does not absorb photons of light."

Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

We’ve got so far to go before we even scratch the surface of what’s now possible. All these new services will be cloud-centric ‘continuous services’ built in a way that we can all rely upon. As such, cloud computing will become pervasive for developers and IT – a shift that’ll catalyze the transformation of infrastructure, systems & business processes across all major organizations worldwide. And all these new services will work hand-in-hand with an unimaginably fascinating world of devices-to-come. Today’s PC’s, phones & pads are just the very beginning; we’ll see decades to come of incredible innovation from which will emerge all sorts of ‘connected companions’ that we’ll wear, we’ll carry, we’ll use on our desks & walls and the environment all around us. Service-connected devices going far beyond just the ‘screen, keyboard and mouse’: humanly-natural ‘conscious’ devices that’ll see, recognize, hear & listen to you and what’s around you, that’ll feel your touch and gestures and movement, that’ll detect your proximity to others; that’ll sense your location, direction, altitude, temperature, heartbeat & health.

Let there be no doubt that the big shifts occurring over the next five years ensure that this will absolutely be a time of great opportunity for those who put past technologies & successes into perspective, and envision all the transformational value that can be offered moving forward to individuals, businesses, governments and society. It’s the dawn of a new day – the sun having now arisen on a world of continuous services and connected devices.

[1010.3279] The Wet-Dog Shake

[1010.3279] The Wet-Dog Shake: "The Wet-Dog Shake
Authors: Andrew Dickerson, Grant Mills, Jay Bauman, Young-Hui Chang, David Hu
(Submitted on 15 Oct 2010)

Abstract: The drying of wet fur is a critical to mammalian heat regulation. In this fluid dynamics video, we show a sequence of films demonstrating how hirsute animals to rapidly oscillate their bodies to shed water droplets, nature's analogy to the spin cycle of a washing machine. High-speed videography and fur-particle tracking is employed to determine the angular position of the animal's shoulder skin as a function of time. X-ray cinematography is used to track the motion of the skeleton. We determine conditions for drop ejection by considering the balance of surface tension and centripetal forces on drops adhering to the animal. Particular attention is paid to rationalizing the relationship between animal size and oscillation frequency required to self-dry.

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Don't Roundtrip Ciphertext Via a String Encoding - .NET Security Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Don't Roundtrip Ciphertext Via a String Encoding - .NET Security Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs: "Instead if you want to convert the ciphertext into a string, use Base64 encoding. Replacing the two conversion lines with:

byte[] encrypted = memoryStream.ToArray();
return Convert.ToBase64String(encrypted);


byte[] rawData = Convert.FromBase64String(data);

Results in code that works every time, since base 64 encoding is guaranteed to be able to accurately represent any input byte sequence.

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Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs

Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs: "Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

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Oracle and IBM join together on OpenJDK - Computerworld Blogs

Oracle and IBM join together on OpenJDK - Computerworld Blogs

. It became clear to us that first Sun and then Oracle were never planning to make the important test and certification tests for Java, the Java SE TCK [Technology Compatibility Kit], available to Apache. We disagreed with this choice, but it was not ours to make. So rather than continue to drive Harmony as an unofficial and uncertified Java effort, we decided to shift direction and put our efforts into OpenJDK. Our involvement will not be casual as we plan to hold leadership positions and, with the other members of the community, fully expect to have a strong say in how the project is managed and in which technical direction it goes."

Managed Virtualization Services Opportunity Knocks | Channel Tech Center

Managed Virtualization Services Opportunity Knocks Channel Tech Center: "It turns out that while everybody got excited about saving capital dollars by consolidating physical servers, the ability to create virtual servers almost on a whim is sending operational costs spiraling."

Against the Day - Books - Review - New York Times

Against the Day - Books - Review - New York Times: "Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex

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Lou Brooks: 'Twimericks': The Most Tongue-Twisting Limericks For Kids

Lou Brooks: 'Twimericks': The Most Tongue-Twisting Limericks For Kids: "Did Woody do what he did? What he did, did he do?
Could Woody, how could he, not do what he knew?
Woody does what he wasn't,
If he wasn't, then he doesn't,
If he isn't, was what Woody didn't maybe done by you?

You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance | codahale.com

You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance | codahale.com: "As a thought experiment, imagine a distributed system which keeps track of a single piece of data using three nodes—A, B, and C—and which claims to be both consistent and available in the face of network partitions. Misfortune strikes, and that system is partitioned into two components: {A,B} and {C}. In this state, a write request arrives at node C to update the single piece of data.

That node only has two options:

1. Accept the write, knowing that neither A nor B will know about this new data until the partition heals.
2. Refuse the write, knowing that the client might not be able to contact A or B until the partition heals.

You either choose availability (Door #1) or you choose consistency (Door #2). You cannot choose both.

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Topic of Cancer | Culture | Vanity Fair

Topic of Cancer | Culture | Vanity Fair: ". In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

mental_floss Blog » 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend to Understand

mental_floss Blog » 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend to Understand: "5. E Pluribus Unum
(EE PLUR-uh-buhs OOH-nuhm): “Out of many, one”Less unique than it sounds, America’s original national motto, e pluribus unum, was plagiarized from an ancient recipe for salad dressing. In the 18th century, haughty intellectuals were fond of this phrase. It was the kind of thing gentlemen’s magazines would use to describe their year-end editions. But the term made its first appearance in Virgil’s poem “Moretum” to describe salad dressing. The ingredients, he wrote, would surrender their individual aesthetic when mixed with others to form one unique, homogenous, harmonious, and tasty concoction. As a slogan, it really nailed that whole cultural melting pot thing we were going for. And while it continues to appear on U.S. coins, “In God We Trust” came along later (officially in 1956) to share the motto spotlight."

Nvidia CEO: Netbooks and Tablets to Meld, Hints at Tegra-Powered webOS Devices

Nvidia CEO: Netbooks and Tablets to Meld, Hints at Tegra-Powered webOS Devices: "What’s your take on Intel’s Z6 Moorestown chip? Will they be competitive?
No. It’s not possible. You could give an elephant a diet but it’s still an elephant."

Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' - Derek Thompson - Technology - The Atlantic

Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' - Derek Thompson - Technology - The Atlantic:

'The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists' to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. 'It's shocking how the system actually works.'