Technology related news.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here, as I’ve been sacrificing public output in favour of off-line advice to TechInvest and organising the coming year in India and China.
In the meantime, I’ve scanned and uploaded a low-res video of a speech I gave on being a Serial Entrepreneur in Sydney at the June [...]
CT2 points out that in the near future someone with a gazillion cycles of computing power is going to use all the tourist photos on Flickr to synthesize a 3D model of every large photogenic city.
There are more than 2 million photos on Flickr tagged with Rome. They capture almost every nook and [...]
Great essay on entropy, energy and confusing coincidental access to a resource endowment with economic, institutional or racial superiority.
The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of [...]
Lots of buzz about a potential Apple tablet coming soon. Gizmodo reviews the current digital books.
I’m pretty eagerly awaiting the CrunchPad – a stripped down wireless flat screen running nothing but a web-brower. The system was crowd-source designed by the founder of TechCrunch.
… we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm… case [...]
A programmer writing trojans for the Swiss government has published his code to open source.
Ruben Unteregger has worked for a long time as a software-engineer for the Swiss company ERA IT Solutions. His job there was to code malware that would invade PCs of private users, and allow the wiretapping of VoIP calls [...]
Schneier looks at swine flu from a security standpoint.
…it takes about 25 kilobits — 3.2 kbytes — of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes… It’s humbling [...]
Engineers at the German Fraunhofer Institute have designed a water collector that can extract water from desert air, just like on Dune!
The principle of the process… hygroscopic brine – saline solution which absorbs moisture – runs down a tower-shaped unit and absorbs water from the air. It is then sucked into a tank [...]
Augmented reality is getting more attention, and the Google phones seem to be the platform of choice. Christchurch’s HITLab has done a lot of work like this.
People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available [...]
I saw this one coming late one night a few decades ago… Flourescent green monkeys. Please, just say no to flourescent green people.
Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring… The researchers modified a lentivirus to carry a jellyfish gene known as GFP [...]
Gartner is lowering its IT industry forecast.
Hit by the economic downturn and fluctuating exchange rates, worldwide IT spending is expected to drop 6 percent this year, according to a new Gartner report… Spending will likely settle in at $3.2 trillion for 2009, compared with $3.4 trillion in 2008. Last year, IT spending had [...]