ST. FRANCIS: You’d better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle, As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.
GOD: No. What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter and to keep the soil moist and loose?
ST. FRANCIS: After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.
ST. FRANCIS They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.
Category: Technology
EFF: Don’t Install Google Desktop
The Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The EFF is asking users not to use the new version of Google Desktop that has a ‘search across computers’ option. The option will store copies of documents on you hard drive on Google servers, where the goverment or anyone who wants to may subpoena (i.e. no search warrents) the information. Google says it is not yet scanning the files for advertising, but it hasn’t ruled out the possibility.”
slashdot discussion. John Paczkowski has more.
Fossett Flying Farther
Steve Fossett is aloft, again in the Global Flyer. This time, flying farther. Follow the flight here.
Search Engine Math or Simplified Boolean Searching
Now, if you find Boolean operators too intimidating, there is an easier way. This is called simplified search syntax, pseudo-Boolean searching, implied Boolean or (according to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch) “search engine math”.
15 Tech Concepts for 2006
Scientific and technological breakthroughs can take years to develop, but when they leave the lab and enter the world at large, word spreads quickly. Here’s a look at the advances you’ll be hearing about in the coming year.
The Last Telegram
AP:
For more than 150 years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past.
What is a Torrent?
Developed by Bram Cohen as a solution to large-file download bottlenecks—not to mention the problem of “leeches,” people who download files but then don’t share them as uploads—BitTorrent is a very effective tool for distributing big files online. And with good reason: BitTorrent works amazingly well to spread out the burden of creating thousands of copies of a file across the clients, or peers, that are downloading the file. That means there’s no large central server to keep running, or massive bandwidth bills to pay for. It also means we can download, say, a 600MB Linux distro in a few short minutes.
Turbocharging
The turbocharger recently turned 100 and the supercharger is even older. And despite their long histories, neither seems a clear winner.
Which is best suited to a vehicle depends on the intended use. With both alternatives at their disposal, engineers consider cost, driving characteristics and the space available under the hood to determine which system belongs where. Even on the same basic engine, the choice may change depending on the vehicle in which it will be used.
iPod Personal Trainer
But that was before she tried MP3 workouts. Taking advantage of sale prices last January at www.cardiocoach.com, she downloaded the first three volumes of a five-part series. Cardio Coach audios are designed to be used during any kind of cardiovascular exercise: running, stair climbing, even walking. For 30 to 60 minutes Sean O’Malley, the personal trainer who created the programs, offers encouragement as he guides the listener through a series of sprints – and for those exercising on machines, hills – that alternate with easier periods. Original music accompanies the ebb and flow of the intervals.
It’s Not The Technology That Raises Productivity, But How it’s Used
Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers’ desks is unlikely to contribute to productivity. A company has to rethink how business processes are handled to get significant cost savings.
As the Stanford economic historian Paul A. David has pointed out, the productivity effects from the electric motor did not really show up until Henry Ford and other industrialists figured out how to use it effectively to create the assembly line. The same is true for computers: just as the early industrialists had to learn how to use manufacturing technology to optimize the flow of materials on the factory floor, companies today must learn how to use information technology to optimize the flow of information in their organizations.