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How Useful are the new Airport Scanners?

August 6, 2011 10:34:49.358

Not Very, it seems. Amazing what happens when an independent source takes an unbiased look. Watch the TSA utterly ignore this; they wouldn't know what a real threat looked like if it blew up 3 feet from them.

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Bad Karma

July 5, 2011 18:49:48.224

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What's the Roaming Charge For That?

June 11, 2011 10:59:05.804

The iPhone goes to space:

Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to complete its final voyage with a pair of space-ready iPhone 4's aboard. After docking with the International Space Station, astronauts use the phones, not to become Foursquare's Mayor of Space, it seems, but to run an app called SpaceLab for iOS.

Maybe AT&T needs to launch a satellite specifically to provide ISS based roaming :)

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It'll be Easier to Carry Your Books

May 20, 2011 14:10:17.806

Speaking of ebooks (something I posted on earlier today) - Florida is jumping in with both feet in the schools:

The proposal (SB 2120) requires Florida public schools to adopt digital-only textbooks by the 2015-16 school year, and spend at least 50 percent of their textbook budget on digital materials by that time.

The first thing I thought of is the backpack full of books my daughter has been carrying for years. I guess kids will finally stop risking a back injury while taking their books back and forth :)

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E-Books - The Next Disintermediation

May 20, 2011 10:40:18.379

Looks like E-Books are headed in the same direction that MP3's did a long while ago - dominance over the dead tree format. Amazon just released this:

By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books - hardcover and paperback - combined.

The publishing houses are about to go all RIAA on us, I expect.

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Simpler Might Be Better

May 18, 2011 17:35:40.000

Lots of websites go in for complex designs that make use of Ajax, CSS, and things like Flash to animate content, hide it behind expanding sections, and otherwise "prettify" things. Om Malik points out that there's still a place for simple and to the point - witness the Drudge Report, which drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook and Twitter combined:

He also set a paradigm for web design that still stands to this day. Critics who call his site ugly miss the point. It’s easy to navigate, doesn’t hide important information under sub-sections, and has a minimalist approach to layout. It’s also data-driven. Visit the Drudge Report several times in a day and you’ll see how he tweaks headlines and moves articles around to get the optimal configuration.

Another site that does something similar - Real Clear Politics (and their associated sites that cover other topics). Pretty is fine, but if people can't find your content, then you've made a very basic mistake. Food for thought...

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Irony is Not Dead

May 11, 2011 22:39:06.837

Go and make your own one liners for this headline:

WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty

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Breaking News Lives on Twitter

May 2, 2011 6:37:38.696

I missed the whole bleeding edge of the announcement thing last night - I was busy playing a video game. However, as I look around this morning, in the aftermath of the tracking down and killing of Bin Laden, there's been an interesting technical wrinkle: Twitter seem to have been where the news broke.

If cable news is where the news used to get announced, social media, with Twitter in the lead, is where it gets broken now.

Another interesting tech aspect to all this - Danny Sullivan notes the difference in how Google worked, now and in the aftermath of 9/11.

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Turn on the Lights

March 26, 2011 16:25:11.398

To celebrate Earth Hour, I intend to turn on my lights - because celebrating the emergence from darkness makes a lot more sense than the idea behind it does.

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The Long Arm of Legacy Systems

March 18, 2011 8:48:23.295

Sometimes, a seemingly inocuous decision has long shadows. Consider the rolling blackouts in Japan - which are exacerbated by choices made well over a century ago:

The AEG equipment produced electricity at Europe's 50Hz (hertz, or cycles per second) standard while the General Electric gear matched the U.S. 60Hz standard. That probably didn't seem important at the time -- after all, light bulbs are happy on either frequency -- but the impact of those decisions is being seen today. All of eastern Japan, including Tokyo and the disaster-struck region to the north, is standardized on 50Hz supply while the rest of the country uses 60Hz.

Without enough changing stations (they only have enough to handle 1 GW), they can't share power across that divide. Makes you wonder how many "we really ought to update this" meetings took place over the last century that ended with "nah, we have other priorities right now". Now relate that sort of thing to wherever you work and the legacy systems you have lying around. Less critical to be sure, but still....

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