This is the reason why you should patent everything.... and why innovation in the US is probably a bad idea.
Not that asking for 2 passwords is an innovative thing. How did that get patented?
Microsoft is succumbing to patent trolls today, as they’re being ordered to pay over $140 million for, get this, asking for two passwords.
A Scary Illusion - Mr. Angry and Ms. Calm
Posted by Zack Lynch
If you look at the above images from your seat in front of the computer, Mr. Angry is on the left, and Ms.Calm is on the right. Now, get up from your seat, and move back 10 or 12 feet, and PRESTO!! they switch places!! It is said this illusion was created by Phillippe G.Schyns and Aude Oliva. Hat Tip to Dan.
This explains everything...
In the enhanced photo of the first debate, Nelson says, look at the horizontal white line in middle of the president's back. You'll see a shadow. "That's telling me there's definitely a bulge," he says. "In fact, it's how we measure the depths of the craters on the moon or on Mars. We look at the angle of the light and the length of shadow they leave. In this case, that's clearly a crater that's under the horizontal line -- it's clearly a rim of a bulge protruding upward, one due to forces pushing it up from beneath."
The Time Vault: Bush wore a device during debate according to NASA
Worth a look.
Book Arts Fair
Ontario College of Art & Design10:00am to 5:00pm, Sunday December 2, 2007
Work by book artists, printmakers, papermakers, and private press printers available for purchase
Every year in December, book artists, printmakers, papermakers, and private press printers gather at OCAD to show their work and demonstrate their skills in OCAD's Central Hall and Printmaking studios. The university community and general public are welcome to come and watch artists at work making paper, printing from litho stones, screen printing, hand typesetting, book binding, wood engraving, etching and much more. Many items are available for sale, providing unique ideas for holiday gift giving. Admission is pay-what-you-can.
Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul St.
Toronto, Ontario
416-977-6000 Ext. 268
Source: OCAD - Events Calendar
I have been wanting to get an e-ink reader for the last couple of years now. Only recently have they become more mainstream, but they're still not ready yet in my opinion.
The Amazon Kindle is unique in that it downloads subscriptions and e-books using EDVO rather than USB or Wifi. EDVO is a cellular network technology, and Amazon is eating the wireless costs (for now).
With free access to Wikipedia and $9.99/book access to all the NY Times Bestsellers, and 80,000 other books, and access to Word documents, it really provides a case for buying an e-book reader, and could be a success on the level of iTunes.
The word Kindle seems to indicate that this is really the beginning of what is to come. Now if only if I could use the thing to copy directly from my PDFs or even CHMs (Help files) to the Kindle, without any conversion steps or loss of formatting.
Truly innovative products should promote either a strong need for or a strong aversion to adoption. Change both excites and frightens people, and a truly innovative product (the automobile, electricity, the computer) should provoke these reactions, and not a sense of mediocracy.
Plus it supports newspapers and blogs... and audiobooks... and photos.
And it provokes strong reactions, with over 500 reviews and a 2 1/2 star rating. But it's #1 in the Kindle Store!
What I don't understand is why a supposedly "book-loving" person like Jeff Bezos can think that digitally "improving" books will work. If he is such a book-lover, then why would he disgrace the book by creating the literary equivalent of an iPod? Now, I myself am a big fan of the iPod but it is totally different. it's ok to have all your music in one place, but books? A book is one of the most priceless things on this planet. Books shouldn't even have a price, and only should to benefit the author, who, unlike many people, took time out of their lives to create this masterpiece for people to spend hours reading it, the spine cracking as the story progresses, the sweat of the hands smeared on the cover, its edge slowly curling up. How could anybody replace this with a wireless gizmo that doesn't even allow someone to buy an actual physical book ,let alone touch it, smell its pages. Surely there is an explanation and here's mine: humans are getting more stupid each day because of pointless technology such as this, which in turn keeps us from partaking in intellectual things like reading. Books are becoming extinct, and if this is the only way to help bring them back, then God help us. This device is not a helping hand...it's an abomination.
Source: Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device
. I want touch screen.
. I want a electronic pen.
. I want audio.
. I want video.
. I want multiple language dictionary.
. I want it can store more books.
. I want it cheaper.
. I want the eBook cheaper.
. I want .....
Could Microsoft One Note & a speech PowerToys be the ultimate idea capture tool?
Some advantages of Audio from the Academic Productivity blog...
Academic Productivity » Speech to Text: timesaver or time waster?
Start with Audacity.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Hit MS for the SDKs or grab Dragon Dictate.
http://www.microsoft.com/speech
Dig up a speech to text OneNote powertoy.
http://www.mperfect.net/oneNoteToys/
And see what happens...
More info here.
Microsoft Sql Server 2008 & its ability to work with unstructured data may shine with audio and video-based applications.
There are plenty of applications for speech recognition as both an idea capture tool, and a transcription tool for things like voice mail (Skype's doing it now) & accessibility. If you don't feel too strange about talking to yourself, that is...
Of course, it's probably more fun to make Holograms in One Note...
The path to higher learning is through... reading? Do you learn better through listening, reading, or doing?
Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you're serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan - you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.
To learn more about the Personal MBA, read the manifesto.
Google takes you on a tour of the shooting locations for Ghostbusters.
http://www.ironicsans.com/2006/04/the_ultimate_interactive_googl_1.html
and others
http://www.movielocationsguide.com/movie_location_maps/New_York_Filming_Locations.php
http://googlesightseeing.com/locality/continents/north-america/states/newyork/
Uh oh. The Art Gallery of Ontario looks strangely familiar to this building...
So it has a few problems and cost over $315 million dollars. It looks cool...
The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.
Source: MIT alleges flaws in Gehry building - Yahoo! News
The AGO is estimating it will cost $500 million to redo their design. I hope it will handle the snow load!
Something tells me we need to move... *cough* *cough*
Cross-posted from Eye Daily.
1,700: The number of premature deaths in Toronto that exposure to smog pollutants contribute to each year.
6,000: The number of hospitalizations.
85, 69: The percentage of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide, respectively, that vehicles are responsible for emitting into Toronto’s air.
35: The percentage of the total greenhouse gas emission contributed by the transportation sector in Toronto.
75: The percentage increase in the number of vehicles traveling into and out of the city each morning over the past two decades.
67: The percentage of trips into Toronto made by single occupant vehicles.
20: The percentage of trips made by public transit (including GO bus, GO train, regional bus and TTC).
440: The number of premature deaths Toronto traffic pollution contributes to each year.
1,700: The number of annual hospitalizations associated with traffic pollution in Toronto.
1,200: The number of children estimated to experience acute bronchitis episodes per year as a result of traffic pollution.
67,000: The number of acute respiratory symptom days associated with traffic-related pollution.
200,000: The number of restricted activity days during which people spend days in bed or cut down on their usual activities.
30: The percentage reduction in motor vehicle emissions in Toronto that could save nearly 200 lives and result in $900 million in health benefits annually.
» Killer traffic: By the numbers • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape
Check out the demo track from Van Halen... still needs more cowbell.
http://www.audiofudge.com/content/music/dynamite_demo_1.mp3
dynamite cowbell brings you more cowbell than even Gene Frenkle can deliver
6 cowbells mapped to midi keys
5 velocity layers
close and room mic levels
damping control
5 bonus digibells
1 cow
Source: dlM plugins
The PC is not yet a utility. It is not a light that you turn on when you want to read. It is a seemingly-aware piece of machinery that likes to piss you off.
Is it the machinery, or is it the software inside the machinery that really likes to mess you up? That depends on whether you've ever had a hard drive failure, your new monitor doesn't turn on, or it does but the screen turns blue every time you click your email icon. Mostly it's just self-installing spyware, poorly installed applications, viruses, broken updates, and other software bugs that get the best of us. Usually we do it to ourselves, though it's easy to blame the PC for why we don't have a backup of our important files or haven't updated our virus definitions since 2001.
I spent 3 days trying to reinstall Office 2003 after uninstalling a trial version of Visio 2007. When I installed the trial to learn more about the software for an upcoming exam, the Windows Installer kept popping up whenever I checked my email in Outlook. Visio 2007 must have some powerful Outlook 2003 integration, because I could not get rid of that popup box for the life of me.
I uninstalled Visio 2007. Piece of cake, except that now all of my Office apps except for OneNote (my favourite app) stopped working. This wouldn't have been a problem, if I didn't need to use spreadsheets, email, and documents every once and awhile. Reinstalling Office just hung the installation package. Uninstalling office failed with an unexplainable error.
I downloaded the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, which ominously warned that it shouldn't be used to uninstall Office 2007. No problems there, Office 2007 uninstalls like a champ. :) I ran the cleanup utility, checked off the Office 2003 install, and removed it.
Removing the add/remove programs link got me one step further, since I was now able to step through the install without it taunting me with a progress bar that went back and forth endlessly. I proceeded with the custom install (deselecting Office Assistant - die clippy, select everything else) and clicked the usual Next, Next, Next. As soon as it checked for free disk space, it told me I had 0 bytes free on the highlighted drive.
Since I have something like a terabyte and a half of disk space, I was a bit concerned. I checked the highlighted drive, and, sure enough, no disk space.
It was the DVD drive.
Not sure how you free up space on a DVD drive, but I put a blank DVD in anyway. No go. Not going to happen. I was not going to free up space on that one. There's no way I could find to disable the drive letter from software either. Power down the computer, unplug the DVD, power up. Run the reinstall. Now I was getting a failure on drive I:, my DVD drive. Search the registry for I:, see a bunch of references, give up.
Give up? Not quite. If the I: drive was missing, I had 26 other drive letters to choose from. Moving D: to I: solved the issue. Halfway through the install, the PC threw up another dialog in my face - can't find SKU11.CAB or something like that. Searching the install media I found no files called SKU11.
Searching Google brought me to a page where 1000 other people had the same issue. Apparently this is something to do with the DVD drive and caching of files during the installation process. Hacking the registry some more solved the issue, and I was able to reinstall.
Email? Check. Word? Check. Excel? Check. DVD Drive? Nope.
Power down, install DVD drive, power up.
My Leopard-meter just clicked over a few notches.
Speaking of Project Gutenberg... if you're not using OneNote you need to get it.
Here's the tool I wrote to import "Project Gutenberg" (link: http://www.gutenberg.org) texts into OneNote. The first link goes to the setup files, and the second has the code if you want to see that.
http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/GutenWinSetup.zip
http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/GutenWinSource.zip
OneNote Testing : A tool to import texts from Project Gutenberg
Still have to convince me that it's worth the $400-$600... but with Project Gutenberg offering 17,000 e-books for free it shouldn't be too hard.
Amazon is believed to be planning to launch an Amazon-branded e-book reader in October.
The "Kindle" e-book reader will go head to head with the Sony Reader, a 64 MB e-book reader with a six-inch "paper-like" display that can be viewed from nearly any angle in full daylight.
The investment MS put into Facebook and the comments around Facebook turning to an OS got me thinking. This morning I thought that it would be interesting for some people to have internet applications automatically available on bootup. Things like Facebook, Flickr, Google Portal, etc. There would need to be a replacement for the URL, which is sort of like having to dial a number to call someone, instead of just picking their name and messaging them. It would also need to run fast, which would mean precaching as much as possible and thinking ahead by crawling links.
This new browser app doesn't look like a competitor to AiR or Silverlight to me, but Mozilla basically grabbed my idea.
Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.
Source: Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Prism
Really it's just a matter of hiding the toolbars and junk in the browser, and sticking with the basics. One step closer to my idea of booting up directly into Facebook. You could probably wrap it in a DOS-based browser and drop it on a bootable 5 1/4" floppy with the effect I was thinking of. (remember those?)
Unfortunately, there will also be a few problems to overcome. My favourites have become an enormous garbage pile that I rarely look in. My blog reading list became totally unmanageable really quickly. How is this tool going to handle the 2 billion or so web pages out there? Shortcuts on your desktop for every page? How do I share web pages with other people? What about sites that pretend they are what they aren't?
On the plus side, how long do you think it would take to boot if the only thing you loaded was your video card drivers, a flash ram drive for caching & hosting a bootable browser, and your internet connection?
The world really only needs 5 computers anyway... and a dumb terminal to connect to them.
So why did MSFT's stock go up so much today anyway if my DOS-based Facebook Operating System is already available?
Is this the Mutual Fund effect? Direct deposits from 401ks & RRSPs on the 15th & 30th?
October 23, 2007 The First Day of the Month
Here's a surprising stat. Since the beginning of this decade, all of the market's gain have come on the first day of the month. The rest of the time, the S&P 500 is down.
The blue line represents the first day of the month, the black line is the S&P 500. For the decade, the S&P 500 is up 2.52% and the first day is up 33%.
The last seven first days have all been up. In the decade, there have only been 94 first days out of nearly 2,000 trading days, or about 4.8% of the time.
MS bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million. My theory about Facebook becoming an Operating System is coming to fruition... FOS.
Actually FOS is taken... multiple times.. Full of Stuff eh?
"The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users' operating system on the Internet -- everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it," said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.
Source: Microsoft beats Google to Facebook stake - Yahoo! News
Well, if Facebook has 50 million users, that means my dog is worth $4.80 as an ad eyeball? woof!
And Shawn's mentor, who discusses the #1 killer of children under 5 in the developing world. What is it?
Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world.
Source: TED | Talks | Amy Smith: Simple designs that could save millions of childrens' lives (video)
A brilliant innovative concept - learning from the results of a bridge catastrophe to create wind power using kite material and stretching it.
http://www.digg.com/general_sciences/Microwind_Generator_30X_More_Efficient_and_Cheaper
These products are amazing. I really want the 3D fab printer, and if I could waive the monthly fee the Zonbu would be on my list too. How about a more expensive Zonbu with access to your own FTP server? Corporations would probably pick up on this one.
Welcome to the worry-free world of Zonbu. Included in your subscription to the Zonbu service are automatic application upgrades, continuous data back-up, a Zonbu device replacement guarantee, 30 days of free live support, unlimited Internet support, remote data access and a network storage plan that fits your needs. Breathe easy.
And of course there's the Nintendo Wii Fit, that they need to port to xBox 360 so I can play Halo with an excuse.
