Nikola Tesla - Smarter Than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Combined

Yeah...you know who I'm talking about
Nikola Tesla
The greatest geek who ever lived

Let's just say that basically every major technical advance of the early 20th Century, from alternating current to hydroelectricity, radar to radio, came directly from Tesla.
The Oatmeal.com gives us a basic Tesla for Dummies post that is worth reading.
Is Tesla had lived longer, he surely would have invented the internet.

If I Had A Hammer

Over the last few weeks I have had multiple computers (home and office) giving me multiple problems which makes all thing bloggish and businessish take much longer than usual. Life is short so in all things computerish, I feel the need for speed.
Why have I let this go on so long...well probably because I believe in magical realism and that one day soon I will just wake up and my computer issues will spontaneously be solved....all without my being driven to the level of frustration where a hammer is necessary.  In fact I finally broke down and scheduled some quality time with my tech guy.  He will be here tomorrow bringing memory and other techish magic with him hopefully upping my hard drive's efficiency, so I can once again have tech joy and happiness back in my life.

When Reboots Go Bad

This is how I've felt for much of yesterday after spending about 6 hours trying to renew SSL certificates....thanks so much Go Daddy for making it all a seamless integration, not.
Now my home computer has issues and unlike my business, I don't have a personal 'tech guy' on call. I can either spend an hour or so solving my problems, or go to the gym. At this point I'm opting for my ipod and the treadmill.
What do you do when you have a computer glitch?
Do you have your own personal 'tech guy' to solve your computer problems for you?

So What Was Your Old Email Address?

Cute girl in a cute video linked by Instapundit.com

( I like the way that this girl is so young that she's talking about hotmail.com addresses being old....especially when she's not even old enough to remember anything as ancient as a compuserve or netscape email address.)

Skip Skyping Away

Yes, I know, when it comes to stepping up the technology I'm on the slow side.
I've had Skype on my computer for years and just never really got around to using it.
until yesterday
and, it really was the easiest thing to have a conversation, with video on the other end, with a friend in Germany
that cost nothing.
People who know me well understand that I am not a phone person, in fact I almost have a phone phobia...yeah, it's weird. I much prefer texting and email.
But I've willingly joined the cult of Skype

Technology Trouble or Internet Explorer 8 Sucks

After downloading Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 I learned that I can no longer copy and paste.

I wonder why they didn't list that on the features page....

Question: Is anyone else having this problem?

And my iPhone gets lousy reception and is slow to download email.

Question: Is this normal or am I just technologically challenged?

Note to self: Uninstall Windows Explorer 8

Not Counting On The Kindle

I'm a reader and I've always lived in a world of books.

I've got bookshelves overflowing and I've even got 51 books stacked up on the dresser next to my bed, including the the 4 books that I'm currently perusing; "Vermeer A View of Delft" by Anthony Baily, "Art and Culture" by Clement Greenberg, "The Complete Shorter Fiction" by Anthony Trollope and "Royal Blood" by Bertram Fields.

I'm used to being able to pick up a book, read a few chapters, set it down for a week... or a year, and then go back to it.

From time to time I've considered stepping into the 21st Century and actually buying a Kindle but after decades of reading I've become addicted to the weight and feel of actual books.

And now, after reading about the remote erasing of books by Amazon from Kindle, I'm happy that I'm stuck in my 20th Century reading habits.
From Jack Balken via Instapundit

With ordinary hardcover books, once your purchase a copy, you keep it, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, including marking it up, cutting it into parts or selling it to someone else. This is because of the combination of the first sale doctrine in copyright law and the fact that the book is a physical copy. Because it is a physical copy, nobody would think that the publisher of the book would have a rights to enter your house and remove the book.

But when you purchase and ebook, what you really purchase is merely a license to to store an electronic copy on the Kindle's hard drive... As a result you may not have the rights to do things to an ebook that you think you can.

For Centuries, we have understood, or rather believed that owning books came with certain rights, including the right to keep what we purchase and use it, mark it up and sell it in any way we like.

We were free to purchase books and keep them in our homes, without telling anybody what we were reading, or indeed what page we had last looked at.

Amazon's Kindle system upends all these expectations.
Amazon knows what books you have on your Kindle and in theory, it can even know what book you are currently reading, and even the last page that you read on each of the books that you own.

It can delete books, modify books or add books, all without your permission. It can change features of the Kindle at will.

In upending our assumptions about our freedoms to read books in private and use them as we see fit, Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in the physical world. If we want to preserve these freedoms we will have to reform copyright law, and privacy law to control the new intermediaries that can control us at a distance.




As the Instapundit says, there is just something creepy about all of this.
Especially when you consider the irony...
The books that were remotely erased were "1984" and "Animal Farm" by George Orwell.
Big Brother indeed.

The Dukes With News You Can Use

Here's LA fashion icon and total tech geek, Kristopher Dukes, talking about how to protect yourself online.

Watch!

To Cheap To Be Chic?

Jewelry, "It" bags, Range Rovers are these the true status signifiers?

Or is it something more basic?

Daniel Akst in his Wall Street Journal article

I once was chic but now I'm cheap explores the subject.

It's cool, for example, to spend a fortune on solar panels or hybrid SUVs that will never pay for themselves in saved energy, even though the money could do far more for the environment spent in some less ostentatious way. Shopping at Whole Foods is cool, as is obvious from the hipsters in the aisles -- and the high price of the groceries. This kind of cool disdains luxury labels like Rolex and Coach yet works just as hard to impress.

Most of the cool people I know use a Mac. My sense is that they like to think of themselves as egalitarian sorts unencumbered by snobbery -- rather than, say, brainwashed cultists obsessed with class-signaling. Yet at today's absurd prices the Mac is even less than ever "the computer for the rest of us." Instead it's a well-designed status symbol for the elite -- another way that people with money can distinguish themselves from hoi polloi.

Like eating only locally grown food or majoring in gender studies at college, Macs have become luxuries that command a premium out of all proportion to their utility -- unless their utility is simply to broadcast your own disposable income. For a long time the extra cost of a Mac wasn't outlandish and seemed justified by its great design and ease of use. Our years of bitter experience with Windows systems involved far too much hair-tearing over random glitches and security problems. To us, going Mac was the price of computer sanity.

But the affordability gap has lately yawned into a gulf. Today, with money scarce, a Mac costs roughly twice as much as a comparably equipped PC -- and in my recent experience, the PC performs impressively indeed.

The current financial crisis has many causes, but surely the death of thrift has been among them. If there is a silver lining to the grim economic news that besets us daily, it may be that cheap will once again become chic.

I can only hope so because I'm stuck with my Windows Vista system and it will be years before a home technology upgrade will be necessary.

The Wonders of Google or History in a Click

I recently came across some family photos that I had stored a decade or so ago and found a picture of a tow haired boy with the face of an angel playing in his backyard in Los Angeles. The photo was signed by the photographer and dated 1944.

Without any context this could have been any little boy playing outside with the sun shining off of his hair. But what I knew about this picture was that this boy was 6 years old and German was spoken in his home. I remembered that there was some story about the photographer but I just couldn't remember it.

And that's where Google comes in.

In a matter of a couple of clicks I found this picture of the woman who photographed the little boy.

Valeska Gert, avant guard dancer from Berlin, 1924.
She made a nice photographic subject herself, didn't she?

Right Here Right Now

A New Net From CERN

The Times Online has reported that the brainiacs at the Geneva based CERN , the European Center for Nuclear Research, who invented the world wide web have now developed "the grid" a super fast fiber optic based system.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Here's a picture of the new huge particle accelerator running under seven cities including the petit ville where I used to live.

And you thought Geneva was all about Swiss Banking and Swiss Chocolate.

Diamonds are a Geeks best Friends

And you thought that diamonds were just for showing off...

As reported by Idex. I have no idea what this means for the future of mankind but I think this is very important.
And don't you just love qubits?

Tiny Diamond Ring Helps Researchers Solve Quantum Computer Dilemma
(March 27, '08, 4:51 IDEX Online Staff Reporter)
This 300 nanometersthick and 5 micrometerswide diamond ring was made to help develop quantum computers. (Photo: P Olivero, BFairchild and S Prawer,School of Physics,University of MelbourneResearchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia have made the world’s smallest diamond ring – 5 micrometers across and 300 nanometers thick – carved from a sliver of a lab grown diamond. They hope the tiny ring will allow them to build powerful computers that use properties of quantum physics.

According to ABC Science, the researchers hope the ring will enable them to manipulate single photons – the smallest unit or ‘packet’ of light – and help them overcome some of the obstacles to building quantum computers capable of performing enormous numbers of processes at the same time.

Although scientists know in theory how this type of quantum computer could be created, they stress that, until now, there have been many logistical barriers to creating it in the real world.

But they may have discovered part of the solution in the properties of diamonds. “For quantum information processing, diamonds have some truly unique possibilities,” explained Professor Steven Prawer, whose research team recently revealed images of the ring at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

With diamonds, Prawer explained, a scientist has an ideal way to produce qubits, the equivalent in quantum physics to bits that store information on regular computers. Although like normal bits, qubits have two different values – 0 or 1 – qubits also have the ability to exist in a state of superposition – to be in both states, or two places, at once.

Microscopic impurities in diamonds – when a single nitrogen atom and a tiny gap upsets the stone’s normal carbon structure – meet the requirements of qubits very well, said Prawer. Scientists can take advantage of the gaps by shining a laser into one, producing single photons of red light, which can be easily manipulated.

“The diamond offers a fantastic platform in order to make qubits because diamonds offer us a gift from nature,” he explained.