Eclectic Views

    
O brave new world that has such technologies in it..
  

    
http://www.voltaicsystems.com/index.shtml
  

    

  Finally

After years of complaints that the US Patent Office was approving software
patents without adequate prior-art review, it sat down with representatives
of the open-source movement to develop tools to improve a process whose
laxity has "loosed an avalanche of intellectual-property litigation".
According to the statement at  http://www.uspto.gov

"The group agreed to improve prior art resources available to the USPTO; to
develop a system to alert the public when USPTO publishes certain software-
related applications so that interested parties can submit related prior art
in accordance with relevant rules and law; and to explore developing
additional criteria for measuring the quality of software patents."
  

    
That Voltaic backpack is not only perfect for travelers on the go, but
also for those of us oftenn without power due to hurricanes. Pretty
cool. Too bad it doesn't charge a laptop.
  

    
yet ... 
  

    

   New Apple Core

Apple has apparently surprised people yet again, this time by introducing an
Intel-based computer well before it was expected.  Seven months ago it said
it was dropping the IBM Power PC chip after fourteen years. Curiously, Intel
seems to be losing ground to AMD in the multiple-processor speed race today,
but those numbers can change almost without notice.  Speaking of numbers,
Apple's financials for the last quarter of 2005 look pretty good: revenue up
63 percent from 4Q2004 to $5.7 billion; iPods sold in the period rose from
4.5 million to 14 M; and Macs were up to 1.25 M from 1.05 M despite the
Osborne effect of the anticipated move to Intel.  But the most interesting
paragraph in the whole article was this, on the new Intel-based Macs:

"Mr. Jobs said he fully expected some users to run Windows on the new Macs
eventually, which could make Apple's computers an attractive alternative to
PC's that run only Windows. 'I'm not going to do anything to preclude that',
he said."
  

    
this time, they win
  

    

   Poor Old Europe

Hal Varian, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, has an interesting column
in today's paper.  To summarize, he observes that annualized US productivity
growth (as measured in "output per hour") was ~1.4 percent during 1974-1995,
2.5% in 1995-2000, at a 3% average since then (3.5% since 2003) and in
3Q2005 was a remarkable 5.4%. But Europe (which for this purpose includes
Britain) has not seen a surge; how come?  He refers for an answer to a
series of studies at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic
Performance, available at  http://cep.lse.ac.uk/research/innovation/ict.asp
In a nutshell, he says "American companies make much more effective use of
information technology than European companies", and says in a rare in-line

   Quote of the Day

"Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers' desks is
unlikely to contribute to productivity."

As has been widely noted elsewhere, the electric motor had little effect as
a productivity tool until automakers introduced the mechanized assembly line
and others followed suit.  The benefits to this generation of workers do not
come from Minesweeper and Doom, awesome though they may be, but from
optimizing the flow of information just as Henry Ford optimized the flow of
materials; and US companies are much farther up the learning curve than
European businesses. An LSE-CEP study of 7500 businesses in Britain showed
(to simplify a bit) that American multinational companies were 23% more
productive than the average, non-American multinationals about 16% more, and
British companies about 11% below the average, with information technology
seen as the most significant reason.  Why?  I'm glad you asked. "Part of the
answer seems to be managerial practices. ... American companies are more
likely than European companies to adopt merit-based promotion and pay, lean
manufacturing techniques, performance management and [get this] employee
autonomy."
  

    

   Bet You Didn't Know This

Nielsen researchers have determined that "users of iTunes are 80 percent
more likely than the average Internet user to drink microbrews", and they
"are twice as likely to drive Audis and drink hard cider" though perhaps not
at the same time, since it might dribble on the cell phone they're blabbing
into as they careen down the highway. And scientists at Nagasaki University,
no doubt operating on a generous grant from some biotech firm, have isolated
a gene that determines whether people have wet or dry earwax. They also
report that people with wet earwax (predominantly Europeans and Africans)
sweat more and have more armpit odor, while those with dry earwax (mostly
East Asians) have smaller nostrils; to block out the smell of that other
drippy bunch, maybe.  Science marches on.
  

    

   Wireless Cable Round II

That oxymoron has returned with the announcement by IBM that it expects to
offer soon a new short-range high speed through-the-air technology
(described as "Bluetooth on steroids") based on silicon germanium. Earlier
versions required more expensive materials like gallium arsenide. Signals
use an unlicensed part of the RF spectrum at around 60 gigahertz, have ten
times the capacity of Wi-Fi, don't penetrate walls, and the antenna can be
incorporated into the chipset.  Speculation is that future connections
between say a cable box and the monitor may use it to avoid the need for
physical wiring between them.
  

    

   The Body Game

IBM says it will offer a supercomputer for medical, geological, hydraulic
and other demanding uses based on chips used in the Sony Playstation 3. The
"IBM Cell Server" will run Linux and is targeted at "applications that now
require processing huge amounts of data and presenting the results visually
on a screen."  One example of such an application is the display of 3-D body
scans based on multiple inputs (X-rays, PET, MRI, CAT, etc.).  Besides
questions like what happens if you run out of quarters, it demonstrates a
crossover from the world of high-performance gaming to industrial purposes
that is expected to accelerate over time.
  

    

   Net Love Lags in US, Blooms Abroad

This just in for Valentine's Day: According to Jupiter Research, the 2005
online dating market in Europe rose 43 percent from the previous year, but
the US numbers actually declined 1% compared with 2004. Even Europe may be
slowing down in that department: 2004 showed a sizzling 80% growth.
High price was cited by many who visited matchmaking sites but declined to
subscribe; presumably this refers not to heartache, but you know financial
outlays. Flowers, chocolates, DSL service, that sort of thing, and the
dating service itself. Jupiter (I wonder if there is a Venus Research?)
reports that only about a third of those who went to the sites stayed to
become paying customers after ogling I mean reviewing what they had to
offer, and suggests "targeted discounting strategies" might ensnare more.
It also noted there was a "marked difference" in interest levels between
northern Europe on one hand and the southern tier such as Spain and Italy,
but without mentioning whether the latter was more torrid or torpid. And
Jupiter says Europe too is likely to lose interest in love within 3 years,
when it expects growth to fall to single digits.  Curiously the research
does not find "social networks" like MySpace a competitive threat to dating
services, saying "they don't have the tools or the right audience to help
people to find a date." So there.
  

    

   Indians On The Horizon; Not

The Association for Computing Machinery is to release today an extensive
report, the result of a yearlong study on the current and future
implications of off-shore job migration in the information systems field.
Based on advance notices, it appears to sum up roughly to three aphorisms.

Don't Worry, Be Happy: it finds Bombay is not eating our chapattis after
all, and that "dire predictions of job losses ... were greatly exaggerated".
Rather, it anticipates that only "2 to 3 percent of jobs in information
technology would go offshore annually in the next decade or so."

Get Smart: US workers will actually gain job opportunities, if they attain
the ability to do "higher-level work" such as applying IT to medical and
business needs.  The study finds domestic IT employment higher today than
"at the peak of the dot-com bubble".  According to the study's co-chair,
"The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster. But
the notion that IT jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don't
bear that out."

The Only Thing To Fear Is Fear Itself; or Mothers, Don't Let Your Kids Grow
Up To Be Programmers: the common belief that IT jobs are drying up may
become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as computer science plummets in
popularity among college students. The study reports only 1 in 75 of those
entering college now would consider it, compared with 1 in 30 six years ago.
Young people may be deterred from pursuing careers in the area, which can
"erode the skills in a field crucial to the nation's competitiveness".  At
present the report says Federal job retraining programs are "focused on the
manufacturing industry", so workers forced out of one IT area are left on
their own to make the transition to a newer one.
  

    
 Lucrative opportunities taken away on a political whim; the danger of
being locked up by an over-mighty government agency; the brick wall of
protectionism - the business community expects to do battle with all
these things in an emerging market.

Yet this suddenly seems to be a description of doing business in that
most developed of all markets, the United States of America.

In the UK, in the cash-rich Gulf states and in fast-growing India,
different incidents in the past week have made people ask the same
question: is it worth doing business with the US?

<http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article347680.ece>
  

    

   The Beginning is Near

http://www.origamiproject.com is presently an obscure object of speculation
on and about the Web, something like the advertised "undertaking of great
advantage but nobody to know what it is" featured in _Extraordinary Popular
Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds_.  According to news reports the site
belongs to Microsoft though the company's name does not appear anyplace. The
promised thing, which may be unveiled this Thursday, "will change your life"
according to the impressionistic Flash movie that is about the sole content
today.  Will it be a "hand-held wireless touch-screen computer", a new Apple
Newton (hmm) whose development has gone totally unnoticed by the high-tech
rumor mills?  Perhaps a rival to the MIT Media Labs' proposed universal
self-powered laptop for Third World countries? A steam-driven potato peeler?
The eager world awaits...
  

    

   A La Mode

Megapixel capacity has ceased to be a competitive factor for mass-market
cameras, according to a recent article; manufacturers are turning instead to
other features like anti-shake and wireless connectivity. And to modes:
besides old favorites like "portrait" and "landscape" they have added

 - underwater (removes plankton, adds red)
 - foliage
 - snow
 - beach
 - text
 - museum
 - fireworks
 - eBay
 - wrinkle removal
 - food
 - slimming (see "food")

Canon's marketing director sums it up with "The idea is not as much to make
an accurate image as a pleasing one." Their PowerShot 80 has 21 modes, but
the champ seems to be the Casio Exilim with 33.
  

    
Per the story, "Casio's new eBay mode ... resizes an image and ... lowers
the resolution to 2 megapixels so it can appear on the auction site. The
mode includes an additional setting for capturing fine detail."

Curiously, there is another article on the next page of the paper with a
similar if diametrically opposite theme. The Learning Channel is to
broadcast a show on children's nutrition with images of cute 7-year-olds
morphing into fat ugly 40-somethings due to poor diets.  One imagines this
mode will not be incorporated into cameras any time soon; there's enough of
that in real life already.
  

    
!!!
  

    

   Flesh-Eating Fastraks?

Well not really, but these days to compete for attention one has to hustle.
The question mark at the end acts as a sort of journalistic fig leaf.
Anyway, a group at the Dutch Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is publishing a
paper at the IEEE on viruses communicated via RFID tags. It is shamelessly
titled "Is Your Cat Infected With A Computer Virus?" Some people will do
anything.. The issue, while not a present threat so far as anyone knows, may
potentially be significant in the future, partly because it has been ignored
for the most part. With as little as 128 bytes of data in the tags their
vulnerability has appeared negligible, but the clever Dutch say they can do
bad stuff with only a fraction of that amount. (Historical note: a colleague
of mine from back in the days of 80-column punch cards was able to fit an
entire bootable program on one.) More details are available at
[http://www.rfidvirus.org]. Authors of the paper include Andrew Tanenbaum,
described as the creator of Minix, the precursor of Linux. Examples using
good old buffer overflow include planting an infected luggage tag on an
airport conveyor belt, where it is picked up by the scanner and spread to
other suitcases and other airports, conceivably aiding a smuggler to avoid
security or misidentify animals passing through Customs.  ("Why no, officer,
that's not a mad cow, the tag clearly says it's a dugong.") Altering the
prices of tagged products as they pass through checkout is another one.
More generally Peter Neumann at SRI says "existing RFID systems [are] a
disaster waiting to happen", and "it shouldn't surprise you that a system
designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no
security constraints". While he says he did not look into viruses in a study
he did of the US passport-tracking system, he found "inadequate
identification for users, the potential for counterfeiting or disabling
tags, and the problem of weak encryption".
  

    

Oh that new passport system will be something!  Can't wait.

Infecting and changing prices is something I've never heard about.  That's
wild.
  

    
And if you think RFID is scary (or even if you don't) check out

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/4816520.stm

"Hackers have managed to get Microsoft's Windows XP operating system running
on an Apple Mac computer. ... The hackers who won the contest are keen to
keep their anonymity [one can hardly blame them] ... According to reports,
their feat has been independently confirmed and XP has been made to run on
an iMac, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro."
  

    
I'm much more excited about the day when Mac OS X is
running on a Windows PC.  You can bet some bright boy
is working on it.
  

    

   The Laser Monks of Sparta

I am not making this up. Go to  http://lasermonks.com  to get your printer
refills from a Cistercian abbey in Wisconsin. Time was when monasteries sold
hand-made cheeses and bread, but to attain the abbey's reported $2.5 million
of annual rendering unto, evidently something more contemporary was needed.
  

    

   Bigger, Heavier, Slower

According to a story today, the recently-delayed Windows Vista contains 50
million lines of code, up from XP's 35 million, Win 98's 18 M, and Win 95's
15 M.  In other words, by that rough measure the increase from the last
release about equals the entire size of Windows 95. (Which as I recall just
barely lived up to its name, coming out in late December.) The article
ascribes the delay - past the Christmas season for consumers - to three main
causes.  One is the antitrust settlement, in which Microsoft promised to
"treat PC makers even-handedly". A practical problem with that fine
sentiment is that it can have the effect of slowing everything down to the
pace of the slowest participant; reportedly Hewlett-Packard, which sells its
products through retailers who must physically stock their shelves,
"informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August,
H-P would be at a competitive disadvantage in the year-end sales season".
Another cause of the delay was starting over, at least partially, when "two
years worth of work was scrapped" in the summer of 2004 after parts of Vista
could not be made to work right, such as the WinFS file storage system.

But the largest problem Windows faces now and into the foreseeable future
according to the article is the combination of bundling everything but the
kitchen sink into the operating system (said to be a legacy of Jim Allchin,
now poised to retire) and Windows' immense success, which acts like a drag
anchor on innovation. It's ironic to those who remember the days when then-
dominant IBM was hindered by its responsibility to provide compatibility
with older releases for its government and corporate user base, while new
young nimble Microsoft danced circles around the dinosaur.  The more things
change,...  Windows now runs on "330 million personal computers" and
provides many features like audio, video, and Internet connectivity that
might have been sold separately; making sure those features and their plug-
ins work without interruption adds little value to new users but is as
unavoidable as it is costly.  According to Harvard b-school professor David
Yoffie, "Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code
base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the
legacy hardware and software that it just slows everything down. That's why
a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."  The contrast
is with Steve Jobs' OS X, which "essentially walked away from Apple's
previous operating system, OS 9" and applications written for it. Of course
if OS 9 ran on 330 million computers, he might not have had that option.
  

    

   Sony Music Unveils New DRM Technology

Embedded in each new CD is a vial of epoxy resin which bonds to the drive
when first played, ensuring that it cannot be removed and passed on to
someone who has not paid for it.  The company says it chose this approach in
preference to the "thermite option" which incinerates the PC to prevent
copying but burned down several buildings during beta tests.


  Apple Debuts New All-In-One Product

The Apple Delicious is a portable computer, MP3 music player, cell phone,
GPS sensor, video camera, game machine and water purifier, all in a system
the size of a pea.  Two battery options are offered: one which fits inside
the unit and will run without recharging approximately three milliseconds,
and an external battery that lasts 2 hours and fits in a pair of suitcases.


   Solaris Servers Implemented

Scott McNealy says the Niman Ranch has converted its business to use his
company's products and will be renamed the Focus Ranch, since it is where
the Suns raise meat.


   Baby's First Words

Pediatricians report infants are increasingly using terms like "Google" and
"iPodNano" in the crib; they say there is no cause for alarm in this.
However, repeated occurrence of phrases such as "802.11n-provisional" should
be treated without delay.


   New Automobile Power Source

Researchers at the University of Kansas School of Intelligent Design and
Flat-Earth Science have proposed using hydro power in cars.  The vehicles
would be made water-tight and simply float downstream to their destination.
Questions regarding travel upstream were referred to the Department of
Rapture Studies; a recorded message indicated the entire faculty there was
up on the roof developing a new airplane power source.


   Google's China Site Policy Revealed

CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledges that bowing to government requirements, it
stores fortune cookies on users' systems there.


   Oracle Buys Delphi

Why a database software company wants a bankrupt auto parts manufacturer is
not entirely clear, but it does make for a snappy headline.


   GoogleMD Due Soon

The search firm has finished scanning in the complete medical records of
everyone on the planet and will shortly make them publicly available. The
company's CEO says they expect to derive revenue in roughly equal amounts
from advertising, from a pay-per-view Premium service for searches like
"Paris Hilton skin", and from blackmailing selected subjects.


   Extinct Languages Preserved

Linguistic anthropologists were saddened last week to hear that the last
ALGOL speaker had passed away in Sunnyvale; but they were encouraged by the
recent ceremonial gathering (or "compilation") of the dwindling tribe of
COBOL speakers. Participants received T-shirts with sayings in their native
language such as "I am Not Numeric but I can still Perform" and recited
traditional legends like the COBOL creation myth or "Big Boot".
  

    
and April Fools to you, too!