Friday, October 31, 2003

Street sensation! - The liveliest streets in London

Street sensation! - The liveliest streets in London: "London's favourite streets. Entire streetscapes showing over 2,750 shops, bars and restaurants in the liveliest areas of London - Oxford Street and Regent Street; Portobello Road and Notting Hill; the King's Road in Chelsea; Carnaby Street; Covent Garden, Bond Street; Knightsbridge; Soho and Chinatown; Islington and Camden"

CADALYST - Speed x 2: Xi MTower 2P64



CADALYST - Speed x 2: Xi MTower 2P64:

"Anyone with lingering doubts about using AMD microprocessors in the engineering workplace need look no further than the AutoCAD 2004 performance scores of the Xi MTower 2P64, which is based on dual AMD Opteron 64-bit 246 processors. The Cadalyst C2001 AutoCAD scores are not only the highest we’ve ever obtained, they’re 11.63 points (about 10%) ahead of the nearest competitor, the Polywell PolyStation 940X4. It is this kind of performance that gives the Xi MTower 2P64 a Highly Recommended rating—all to itself this time. However, the Maxbench 4 benchmarks were only marginally faster than other scores. The ViewPerf proe-01 test results were marginally, though not significantly, slower than those of other systems in this roundup.


Opteron delivers workstation performance leadership: "It should be pointed out that the winning Opteron system was somewhat hobbled. It currently isn't the best Opteron workstation system available. The victorious system was configured with an Arima HDAMB motherboard (4 DIMM slots), which only had one of its two processors directly connected to memory. The other processor connects to memory via its twin sibling. This is called a 4 0 setup, as the second processor doesn't have its own dedicated memory. So that not only cuts the memory bandwidth in half, it also adds undesired memory latency that the second processor has to live with. But even with those handicaps, which many have criticized on message boards, it was still the best performing workstation."

CADALYST - Speed x 2: Dual Processors Deliver Design Power

CADALYST - Speed x 2: Dual Processors Deliver Design Power:

This is not only the largest workstation roundup that Cadalyst has done in some time, it’s also one of the most varied. We evaluate one system based on an AMD Athlon 28001, several systems based on variants of the Intel Xeon chips—one even has a 3.2GHz microprocessor—and several systems based on dual AMD Opteron microprocessors, including the new Opteron 246 microprocessor. The graphics cards included in the systems were also more varied than expected, although only NVIDIA was represented.

Friday, October 24, 2003

'Civil disobedience' campaign targets Diebold

'Civil disobedience' campaign targets Diebold:

"By Paul Hales: Wednesday 22 October 2003, 01:25



STUDENTS at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania have got the right raving hump with Diebold, a maker of electronic voting systems.

So much so that they have initiated what they call a 'campaign of civil disobedience' to maintain the right to link to memos leaked from Diebold that seem to highlight weaknesses in their electoral counting systems.

The students formed the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC), which vents its spleen on the why-war.com website, and today announced that they are 'rejecting Diebold Elections Systems' cease and desist orders and are initiating an electronic civil disobedience campaign that will ensure permanent public access to the controversial leaked memos.'

The memos they refer to originate from Diebold and seem to indicate certain irregularities with their vote-counting equipment. Why War? member Micah explains: 'These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection.'

Diebold had earlier initiated its own campaign in which it attempted to stop anyone linking to the memos, by threatening their ISP. Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared it would defend the right of Online Privacy Group, the Internet service provider for San Francisco Indymedia, to host links to the controversial memos.

Why War? and SCDC members say they 'are the first to publicly refuse to comply with Diebold's cease and desist order by continually providing access to the documents, which you can find here, by the way.

In a statement issued moments ago, the two groups maintain that 'the public availability of these documents must be protected at any cost"

Monday, October 20, 2003

The Lair of Thastygliax

The Lair of Thastygliax

Rare

Rare: "Way, way back in the olden days, several tape chains of rare and unavaliable 4AD material circulated amongst the members of the 4ad-l mailing list. This web page documents the contents of those tapes, one track a week.

No repository of these rare tracks will be made available from this site. The tracks will be available from this page for one week only. Each Friday night at 22:00 CET, a new track will become available.

The sound quality of these mp3 files varies wildly. Some of these tracks come from fourth-generation tapes, some come straight from cd, and most fall somewhere in-between."

Dungeons & Dragons - history, versions, and revisions

Dungeons & Dragons - history, versions, and revisions

Sunday, October 19, 2003

AMD Opteron Reviews

Review From Cnet
Review From Firingsquad
Review From Sharkyextreme
Review From Amdmb
Review From Amdzone
Review From anandtech
Review From Digit-life
Review From Extremetech
Review From hardocp
Review From Hardwarezone
Review From Hothardware
Review From Legitreviews
Review From Motherboards
Review From Overclockers
Review From Techtv
Review From Tomshardware
Review From xbitlabs
 

Why War? All the President's Votes?

Why War? All the President's Votes?: "Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of 'angry white men' punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old confederate symbol from the state flag.

But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black women.

There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier."

Diebold Internal Memos

Diebold Internal Memos: "Because Diebold is stealing our democracy.

Diebold Internal Memos


Because Diebold is stealing our democracy.


"A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over,
the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations." (source)



Why War? will continue to mirror the entire collection of Diebold memos as an act of civil disobedience.

View the Memos here


You can download all the memos here.


Here are excerpts from the memos.


Gore got negative 16022 votes from a Diebold machine and Diebold employee refers to the "boogie man" reading their email.


[html]


Diebold's
internal discussion of how that error could occur

[html]


Read
the book by the reporter who discovered this all.





Chapter 1: A Call to Engage

Chapter 2: Documentation of Miscounted Elections

Chapter 3: Solutions

Chapter 4: Can These Things Be Rigged?

Chapter 5: Certification system is broken


Chapter 6: Chuck Hagel: Poster boy for conflict of interest

Chapter 7: The first - ever - look inside a secret voting system

Chapter 8: Who's minding the store?

Chapter 9: Who - or What - is "rob-georgia?" ROB
steps forward



Please
learn more about this issue by visiting one of these excellent websites below:

http://www.blackboxvoting.com

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_harris/index.html

http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=usacoup

http://www.tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9



 


Support Why War?


 


 

Boston.com / Business / In open source gain, Bay State locks horns with Microsoft

Boston.com / Business / In open source gain, Bay State locks horns with Microsoft:


By Justin Pope, Associated Press, 10/19/2003


"In a memo sent last month, Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss instructed the state's chief technology officer to adopt a policy of 'open standards, open source' for all future spending on information technology.

The directive likely wouldn't completely cut out Microsoft from the state's $80 million technology budget.

But it may have been the clearest example yet of a state government taking sides -- against Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft -- in the most important struggle in the software industry.

Microsoft's software generally uses 'proprietary' code that the company closely guards. Its biggest threat is from 'open source' operating systems led by Linux, whose core components are public, and which users are free to pass around and customize as they like.

Governments are a huge market, accounting for about 10 percent of global information technology spending, according to research firm IDC. Federal, state and local governments in the United States spent $34 billion last year on huge systems to track everything from tax collection to fishing licenses."

Scientific American: Candle in the Dark -- Instead of cursing the darkness of pseudoscience on television, light a candle with Cable Science Network

Scientific American: Candle in the Dark -- Instead of cursing the darkness of pseudoscience on television, light a candle with Cable Science Network:
By Michael Shermer

Cable Science Network would be science 24/7--all science, all the time--freeing us from "the tyranny of the sound bite."


"Ever since Galileo began the tradition of communicating science in the vernacular so that all might share in its fruits, a tension has existed between those--call them 'excluders'--who think science is for professionals only and regard its dissemination to wider audiences as infra dig and those--call them 'includers'--who understand that all levels of science require clear composition and public understanding of process and product.

Throughout much of the 20th century the excluders have ruled the roost, punishing those in their flock who dared to write for those paying the bills. Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, whose PBS television series Cosmos was viewed by more than half a billion people, was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences primarily (his biographers have demonstrated through interviews with insiders) because he invested too much time in science popularization."

Chase Harper B-Bags

Chase Harper B-Bags

Friday, October 17, 2003

Is IBM set to dump Windows, inside?

Is IBM set to dump Windows, inside?: "RUMOURS AND FEVERED SPECULATION AMONGST delegates here at the Etre conference in Berlin is that IBM is seriously considering dumping Windows as a standard within its organization."

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Web Blog Directory - Root Blog - Aggregating the PoweR of Blogs!

Web Blog Directory - Root Blog - Aggregating the PoweR of Blogs!

KCRW's A Sounds Eclectic Evening, Los Angeles

Yahoo! LAUNCH - Concert Review: KCRW's A Sounds Eclectic Evening, Los Angeles: "By Lyndsey Parker

In an era far removed from the days of tastemaking, trendsetting disc jockeys like Alan Freed, when radio DJs are nothing more than babbling puppets and official station playlists are limited to about 10 overplayed hit songs, Los Angeles's KCRW 89.9FM, the biggest public radio station in the U.S., is a true godsend for diehard music fans. Playing a dizzyingly diverse mix of everything from trip-hop to hot jazz and introducing artists like Coldplay and David Gray to national audiences (via streaming Internet broadcasts) months or even years before bigger stations and MTV jumped on board, KCRW is one of the few stations left in America that seems driven by artistic rather than commercial concerns. Hence, the need for a fundraiser, of course. So, on November 9, KCRW took over L.A.'s posh art deco Wiltern Theatre with 'A Sounds Eclectic Evening,' its first benefit concert. And local music lovers (including a few celebrities, like Meg Ryan, Tracey Ullman, Fiona Apple, Keri Russell, and Minnie Driver) showed up in droves to support this worthy cause--after all, God forbid KCRW go off the air and they be forced to start listening to Howard Stern in the morning again."

AMD Loss Narrows, Beats Expectations

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage: "Thu October 16, 2003 04:42 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N on Thursday surpassed analyst expectations in posting a sharply narrower third-quarter net loss on increased demand for microprocessors and for flash-memory used in cell phones and other consumer devices.

The company posted a net loss of $31 million, or 9 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $254.2 million, or 74 cents a share a year earlier.

Sales were $954 million, compared with $508.2 million a year ago, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said.

Analysts, on average, expected the company to post sales of $866.9 million and a net loss of 36 cents a share, according to Reuters Research, a unit of Reuters Group Plc.

AMD had said it expected sales to rise from the $645 million in the second quarter.

Shares of AMD closed at $13.96, up 2 percent on the New York Stock Exchange."

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science: "The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."

Friday, October 10, 2003

What's wrong with the electric grid? - The Industrial Physicist

What's wrong with the electric grid? - The Industrial Physicist: "Eric J. Lerner
What's wrong with the electric grid?

The warnings were certainly there. In 1998, former utility executive John Casazza predicted that "

So it could not have been a great surprise to the electric-power industry when, on August 14, a blackout that covered much of the Northeast United States dramatically confirmed these warnings. Experts widely agree that such failures of the power-transmission system are a nearly unavoidable product of a collision between the physics of the system and the economic rules that now regulate it. To avoid future incidents, the nation must either physically transform the system to accommodate the new rules, or change the rules to better mesh with the power grid’s physical behavior.

GROKLAW

GROKLAW: "There has been quite a lot of activity in the Red Hat case.

SCO filed a Motion to Dismiss the action in its entirety, as you know, and Red Hat filed its answering brief. But since we last reported on this case, Red Hat initiated discovery. They asked SCO for documents and for answers to some pointed questions. IBM is forcing SCO into a corner in Utah, and Red Hat is forcefully and aggressively trying to do the same in Delaware. You'll see, I think, that we haven't been wasting our time telling the world the details of this story. The big picture is that Red Hat is telling SCO to prove their allegations with specificity. They also want all their source code, and I'm sure you can figure out what they want to do with it, when I tell you that they asked for the complete Linux Kernel Personality source code, among the other products for which they have requested source code.

They also want to hear some details about the relationship between Canopy and SCO, including any stock or intellectual property transfers. They want SCO to 'identify by title, version, module(s) and line(s)' what they think is misappropriated in any way or in violation of any of its rights. They ask for the details of Microsoft and Sun's licensing arrangement with SCO. They want to know who those 1500 companies were that got the letter, and what happened next. They want to know exactly what SCO has filed a copyright on. They want all the details of SCOsource, including all the folks who have seen the code SCO has been showing under the NDA and what they saw, and any other contact with any Linux users about supposed liability. They want to know how they compared the UNIX and Linux code to determine infringement. They want to know if they've done any comparisons of the two and what the results were. They want to know all the stock or industry analysts SCO has met with or talked to and what was said. In short, it's like the kind of fantasy a guy might have about a bully getting his at last, because they asked them everything we wanted somebody to finally ask SCO and make them answer.

SCO responded to Red Hat's discovery requests by filing a new motion, and it has told the judge, in a Motion to Stay Discovery Pending Resolution of Motion to Dismiss, it would like a delay until after the first motion, the Motion to Dismiss, is ruled on. They surely don't seem in any hurry to get this matter resolved. They argue that because they are simultaneously providing discovery to IBM (of course IBM says they aren't seeing anything, as I recall), they can't possibly do both, and anyway, if they win their motion, it'd be moot. In short, they would very much like not to have to do this, presumably so that if they win the Motion to Dismiss they can continue to refuse to give any particulars about their case. If the judge doesn't grant their Motion to Dismiss, they'd like the judge to give them 30 days to provide all the discovery items."

NASA Successfully Flies First Laser-powered Aircraft | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

NASA Successfully Flies First Laser-powered Aircraft | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference: "But a team of researchers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, Calif., and the University of Alabama in Huntsville is trying to change that.

They have now chalked up a major accomplishment... and a 'first.' The team has developed and demonstrated a small-scale aircraft that flies solely by means of propulsive power delivered by an invisible, ground-based laser. The laser tracks the aircraft in flight, directing its energy beam at specially designed photovoltaic cells carried onboard to power the plane's propeller."

PhysicsWeb - Darmstadt gets credit for new elements

PhysicsWeb - Darmstadt gets credit for new elements: "The discovery of element 111 has been officially credited to the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, by a joint working party set up by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the sister union for physics (IUPAP). IUPAC has also officially approved a proposal from GSI that element 110 - which was also discovered at the German lab - should be known as darmstadtium (Ds).

Sigurd Hofmann and co-workers first created element 111 in December 1994 by colliding a beam of nickel-64 nuclei with a target made of bismuth-209. The GSI team observed three chains of events that signalled the production and decay of nuclei that contained 111 protons and 161 neutrons."

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource: "Posted 10/10/2003 @ 3:07 PM, by Fred 'zAmboni' Locklear
Just a day after SunnComm Technologies announced it would file DMCA lawsuit against John Halderman for revealing weaknesses in their CD copy protection scheme, they have done an about face and now will not sue. In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, SunnComm president and CEO Peter Jacobs is surprisingly somber while explaining why the company will forego litigation. "

Software company to sue student over using shift key

Software company to sue student over using shift key: "A STORY on forbes that we read with some disbelief makes us think that maybe someone has slipped mescalin into our morning coffee.

A student that pointed out copy protection software could be blocked if people used the SHIFT key when they inserted a CD, will be sued by SunnComm, company motto 'Light years beyond encryption'.

After piling your way through lots of light and noise, further reinforcing the mescalin poisoning theory, you can find the statement here.

The firm made a 'statement' claiming that Alex Halderman 'came to false conclusions' about the robustness of the firm's Media Max software.

It claims it has lost over $10 million in market value after the student published his report.

SunnComm is alleging that Halderman has breached criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by revealing that a particular driver could be disabled.

But Halderman says he's unfazed by the legal threat, and doesn't think pressing the SHIFT key violates the act."

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Alien Dice - It's JUST a game,.. really.

Alien Dice - It's JUST a game,.. really.

Small Times: News about MEMS, Nanotechnology and Microsystems: "May 23, 2003 - Evident Technologies, Inc., Troy, N.Y., has launched production in its new nanotechnology manufacturing site in Watervliet, N.Y, a facility capable of producing semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, in kilogram quantities per week"

Quantum Dots may be an energy efficient alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights.



Small Times: News about MEMS, Nanotechnology and Microsystems: "By Candace Stuart Small Times Features Editor "

Oct. 9, 2003 - Quantum dots have been shining light on cell biology for years. Now scientists at Sandia National Laboratories want them to shine on us as an energy-efficient alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights.

Lauren Rohwer and her colleagues in Albuquerque, N.M., developed encapsulated nanocrystals that can be integrated onto commercially available light-emitting diode (LED) chips to produce white light. Dubbed quantum dots, the nanocrystals absorb invisible light from the LED and emit it as white light.

“It’s the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of a real solid-state source that uses quantum dots,” said Rohwer, the lead investigator. “White is the biggest accomplishment.”

Tantalising evidence hints Universe is finite



19:00 08 October 03

"Whether space is finite is something people have been asking since ancient times, and probably before that," says mathematician Jeffrey Weeks from Canton, New York. "If we resolved this and confirmed that space is finite, this would be an enormous step forward in our understanding of nature."

At the centre of the debate are observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001. The probe measures temperature ripples in the "cosmic microwave background", the afterglow radiation from the big bang fireball...."

Knowledge@Wharton -

Knowledge@Wharton -: "The recording industry has a pricing problem. People do not want to pay $15-20 for a compact disc when they can download the same music for free over the Internet. The industry"

Monday, October 06, 2003

Sequitur 2.1

Sequitur 2.1: "Sequitur is a BeOS-native MIDI sequencer. It allows you to record, compose, store, and play back music from your computer. It does this by providing you with tools to manipulate MIDI, a protocol that defines standard musical events, such as playing a note or selecting an instrument.

Careful attention has been paid to the interface. It has been designed to be both comfortable for experienced electronic musicians and easy for beginners. Sequitur provides extensive features for manipulating performance data --it allows destructive, non-destructive and even interactive processing. Extreme flexibility is provided through a series of layers. At the top layer, a Sequitur user makes use of tools and MIDI processing facilities provided by the system. As users become more experienced, they can dig deeper into the capabilities, writing their own tools, constructing their own MIDI processing filters, or even writing their own C add-ons."

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage: "Japan's top auto maker as it aims to offer the hybrid option on most of its models in the not-too-distant future. Toyota is hoping to sell 300,000 of the fuel-efficient vehicles a year starting mid-decade.

Hybrids use electric motors and battery packs to improve fuel efficiency, adding power during acceleration and reclaiming energy when braking and coasting. Toyota says the Prius gets 35.5 km per liter of gasoline, which is over 80 miles per gallon."

Eddie Izzard is to be the new Dr Who

BBC NEWS Thursday, 2 October, 2003, 12:54 GMT 13:54 UK Comic Izzard tipped as new Dr Who

Home - Entropy 0.5.6 Build 339

Home - Entropy 0.5.6 Build 339: "ENTROPY stands for Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield and as such describes the main goal of the project.

* ENTROPY is developed as a response to increasing censorship and surveillance in the internet. The program connects your computer to a network of machines which all run this software. The ENTROPY network is running parallel to the WWW and also other internet services like FTP, email, ICQ. etc.
* For the user the ENTROPY network looks like a collection of WWW pages. The difference to the WWW however is that there are no accesses to central servers. And this is why there is no site operator who could log who downloaded what and when. Every computer taking part in the ENTROPY network (every node) is at the same time server, router for other nodes, caching proxy and client for the user: that is You.
* After you gained some experience with the ENTROPY network, there are command line tools for you to insert whole directory trees into the network as a ENTROPY site. So ENTROPY does for you what a webspace provider does for you in the WWW - but without the storage and bandwidth costs and without any regulation or policy as to what kind of content you are allowed to publish. Everyone can contribute his own ENTROPY site for everybody else to browse through. The contents is stored in a distributed manner across all available and reachable nodes and no one can find out about who put up what contents into the network [1]. Even if your node is not actively running, your contents can be retrieved by others -- without knowing that it was actually you who published the files. Of course this is only true if you do not publish your name (or leave your name or other personal data in the files you publish)

Have fun,
Juergen"

GNUnet

GNUnet: "GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services. A first service implemented on top of the networking layer allows anonymous censorship-resistant file-sharing. GNUnet uses a simple, excess-based economic model to allocate resources. Peers in GNUnet monitor each others behavior with respect to resource usage; peers that contribute to the network are rewarded with better service."

Friday, October 03, 2003

BESERVED - SOMETHING I'D LOVE TO LOVE :: Le BUZZ :: BeOS audio site, with daily BeOS audio news for BeOS pro audio, broadcast, MIDI, and hobbyists.

BESERVED - SOMETHING I'D LOVE TO LOVE :: Le BUZZ :: BeOS audio site, with daily BeOS audio news for BeOS pro audio, broadcast, MIDI, and hobbyists.

СообщеÑ?тво пользователей BeOS / qube.ru

СообщеÑ?тво пользователей BeOS / qube.ruThis is a Russian Zeta Site.

ZetaNews - The Power of the community

ZetaNews - The Power of the community

"For system 2, we decide to use a more modern machine. The system contains an Athlon XP2600 cpu, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card, AC97 sound chipset, a 80Gb 7200 rpm HD and 512Mb DDR RAM. The installation setup we chose was the default set, approximately 500Mb of software. We booted the CD and started the installation.

In less than 10 minutes, all was installed and the system rebooted. And as we were recovering from the amazing fast speed of installation for a fully workable OS, we were overwhelmed with a boot time of 6 seconds on this machine! "

Globetechnology

Globetechnology

: "SAN CARLOS, Calif. "

Call it Ted's excellent adventure, with a high-tech twist:

A cat with an ID microchip implanted under his skin was returned to his owner 10 years after he jumped out a window and vanished.

Chris Inglis' sleek, black feline, Ted, was fitted with the chip back when the technology was still new in the early 1990s. But he was gone without a trace for a full decade before someone found him this week.

Ted — named for Keanu Reeves' character in the film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure — was brought to the Peninsula Humane Society's animal shelter, which tracked down Mr. Inglis despite outdated information on the chip. The cat was found about 13 miles south of where Mr. Inglis used to live in Burlingame.

When the pair reunited Wednesday, the cat "rubbed his face on my hand, climbed right up and started purring," Mr. Inglis said. "It's pretty monumental. It's almost surreal."

Where Ted spent all those years remains a mystery, but it appeared someone had been taking care of him.

Mr. Inglis remembers that one of the things he and Ted liked to do was cruise around in his car. On their way home from the shelter, Mr. Inglis said Ted "put his front paws on the dashboard," just like in the old days.

Wavefront LASIK advances refractive surgery

Wavefront LASIK advances refractive surgery

Wavefront LASIK advances refractive surgery
SAN FRANCISCO – Millions of people have reduced their dependence on eyeglasses and contact lenses over the past several years with the refractive surgery procedure known as LASIK. LASIK can correct refractive errors such as nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. Now an enhanced version of LASIK, known as wavefront LASIK, is available. This improved system allows eye surgeons to customize the procedure for each eye, providing the possibility of even better vision.

Adapted from technology used to fix the distorted images from the Hubble Space Telescope, wavefront LASIK consists of a sensor and a laser. A wave of light from a laser beam is sent through the eye to the retina. This light is reflected back through the vitreous, the lens and the pupil. The sensor measures the irregularities at the front of the wave of light as it emerges from the eye. This produces a precise three-dimensional map of the eye's visual system, including the cornea's imperfections or aberrations.

The wavefront data is translated into a mathematical formula that the surgeon uses to program corrections into the laser, which vaporizes tissue to reshape the cornea to correct refractive errors. This new technology also corrects the higher-order aberrations that cause glare, haloes and blurry images. Higher-order aberrations are distortions in the visual system that can only be detected with wavefront analysis and corrected with wavefront LASIK. This is the assessment of refractive surgeons who have begun to use wavefront LASIK systems approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"This is a major advance in LASIK technology," said Roy Rubinfeld, MD, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and an Eye M.D. at Washington Eye Physicians and Surgeons in Chevy Chase, Md. "With wavefront LASIK the visual results are more predictable than with traditional LASIK."

So far, three different wavefront LASIK systems have been approved by the FDA. Alcon's LADARWave Customized Ablation system was approved in October 2002, the VISX Custom Vue system was approved in May of this year and Bausch & Lomb's Zyoptix system recently received preliminary approval by the FDA's Advisory Panel.

Studies comparing results of wavefront LASIK with conventional LASIK found that 90 to 94 percent of patients receiving wavefront LASIK achieved visual acuity of 20/20 or better, whereas up to 80 percent of those receiving conventional LASIK achieved 20/20 or better.

However, wavefront LASIK may not be for everyone. Because wavefront LASIK removes more corneal tissue than conventional LASIK, patients with thin corneas may not be good candidates. Patients with high degrees of aberration, severely dry eyes, or conditions that affect the lens or vitreous fluid inside the eye also may not be good candidates. However, these patients may still be good candidates for conventional LASIK.

Academy spokesperson Daniel Durrie, MD, of Durrie Vision in Overland Park, Kan., said, "It is important that patients get a thorough eye examination by a reputable eye surgeon before undergoing any surgery. They need to understand the potential risks as well as benefits of the procedure."

In addition to refractive surgery, wavefront technology is also being used in the design of contact and intraocular lenses and to diagnose retinal conditions.

###

The American Academy of Ophthalmology is the world's largest association of eye physicians and surgeons--Eye M.D.s--with more than 27,000 members worldwide. For more information about eye health care, visit the Academy's partner Web site, the Medem Network, at www.medem.com/eyemd. To find an Eye M.D. in your area, visit the Academy's news release at www.aao.org.

EFF: Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk

EFF: Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk: "Computer security is undeniably important, and as new vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, the perceived need for new security solutions grows. 'Trusted computing' initiatives propose to solve some of today's security problems through hardware changes to the personal computer. Changing hardware design isn't inherently suspicious, but the leading trusted computing proposals have a high cost: they provide security to users while giving third parties the power to enforce policies on users' computers against the users' wishes -- they let others pressure you to hand some control over your PC to someone else. This is a 'feature' ready-made for abuse by software authors who want to anticompetitively choke off rival software.

It needn't be this way: a straightforward change to the plans of trusted computing vendors could leave the security benefits intact while ensuring that a PC owner's will always trumps the wishes of those who've loaded software or data onto the PC."

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Security Expert Geer Sounds Off on Dismissal

Security Expert Geer Sounds Off on Dismissal: "A security researcher and scientist with more than 30 years of experience, including work on some groundbreaking projects, Geer was let go just a day after the publication of a paper he co-authored that was sharply critical of Microsoft Corp."

David Dvorkin and George W. Bush

David Dvorkin and George W. Bush: "Both men know that the Clinton presidency was the country's longest and most profound sustained era of growing optimism, wealth, opportunity, and hope! Even the poor were getting a bit richer! Various previously excluded groups were entering the political process! The sinister hold of religion over the minds of Americans was diminishing! Fat cats were growing uneasy!
(One of the two men felt that all of that had to be stopped.)"

Edward A. Villarreal. Powered by Blogger.

Labels

Total Pageviews