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Corvus Crow
The Fireraven
Friday, 10. September 2010, 17:36
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Sunday, 05 September 2010
Researchers have demonstrated tiny solar cells just billionths of a metre across that can repair themselves, extending their useful lifetime.The cells simply assemble themselves from a mixture of the proteins, minute tubes of carbon and other materials. That's pretty amazing, but it would be even better to see a widespread use of traditional solar cells. The technology does not only need to advance, but it needs to get way cheaper.
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Sunday, 01 August 2010
The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they're routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP.Paget's system costs only about $1,500, as opposed to several hundreds of thousands for professional products. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system. Encrypted calls are not protected from interception because the rogue tower can simply turn it off. But Paget said he could also capture phones using 3G by sending out jamming noise to block 3G. Phones would then switch to 2G and hook up with his rogue tower. Paget had his jammer and an amplifier on stage but declined to turn them on saying they would "probably knock out all Las Vegas cell phone systems." I'm not sure if it's more interesting that for just a few dollars you can disable encryption without a notification and listen to phone calls, or that a simple jammer can have such a large effect on a phone network.
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Saturday, 31 July 2010
Cars powered by electricity are going to be cheaper to run per mile than gasoline cars, which provides some comfort to electric vehicle buyers.The key question for the auto industry is what happens in a few years after the early adopters, the people willing to pay more for new technology and a greener ride, already have their EVs. Here, the economics of fueling and daily driving patterns loom much larger in the decision. Rarely mentioned is the fact that, without paying attention to how the electricity is generated, EVs aren't much more environment friendly than common gasoline-based cars. It merely soothes your conscience; but you still pollute the nature by getting energy from coal fired power plants.
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Friday, 25 June 2010
The card is designed for long-time preservation of crucial data like legal documents, medical files and forensic evidence, SanDisk said.SanDisk determined the media's 100-year data-retention lifespan based on internal tests conducted at normal room temperatures. Wait, now where have I heard this story before? Oh right, when the CD-R was hyped as the perfect storage medium. After a few years CD's were unreadable. Nothing but a PR stunt; completely useless in the real world. Even if the SD card doesn't suffer from anything like bitrot, there will be other problems. If you pick a random 30 year old file, it's most likely that today's computers can't handle the fileformat. That aside, even if the files stay intact and would be readable, chances are good that you cannot connect the device to future computers. Sony killed the 3.5" floppy disks after 29 years of existance; and many other interfaces have the same fate: ISA, PCI, IDE, COM, Centronics and so on. The data will be completely useless if you cannot access it. To avoid that, you need to move it onto a new medium and modern fileformat at least every decade, making a 100 year lifetime bascially useless.
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Saturday, 12 June 2010
The iPad manufacturer has come under media scrutiny in recent months after a wave of suicides at its huge Shenzhen plant.According to a report on MIC Gadget, Foxconn CEO Guo Tai-ming has said workers commit suicide for the money, and the company will no longer compensate the families of Foxconn workers who take their own lives. First they create a growing market, then they pull out. Granted that this idea to make money is rather short sighted and a one-time chance only.
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Random quote from Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available for storage
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