Random Ramblings

Wow, I haven't posted in almost a year ... it's been a busy year, but not THAT busy : )

To harp on a topic I've mentioned before: the US has the most subscribers to high-speed internet services ("broadband" services), but we're 20th or 24th in the world in terms of percentage of our population that has such access. And we're not doing very good at increasing that percentage -- although we are consistently increasing the number of people with fast access.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0607/ -- says we're 20th
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2102304,00.html -- says we're 24th

Neither report seems to talk about the cost of access, which, as far as I can tell, the US is not doing so well. Come on, $40 per month for a cable modem?? With more and more users getting on-line, I've noticed a decrease in bandwidth to my home computer.

We need serious telecom reform (and fast) if we want to remain competitive.

From Ed Nisley at Dr. Dobbs Journal:

"Here's a useful number: with electricity priced at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, an always-on device dissipating 1 watt costs $1 per year. That wall-wart cell-phone charger that you leave plugged in under your desk costs $5 per year and your fancy LCD panel burns $8 a year when it's turned off."

Note that the main issue is if the power transformer is "before" or "after" the power-off switch. Many flat panels have external power supplies (the big black box that is in-line with the power cord), as do many other devices. These consume some amount of power whenever they are plugged in ... Need proof? Touch one. If it's warm or hot to the touch, then electricity must be going through it.

One more science post for the day ... one that I've been meaning to get around to for a while now. This image comes from Scientific Computing magazine, it is the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider (atom smasher) at CERN.

This project is expected to cost nearly $8 BILLION (US$) ... although costs are spread across 34 countries.

I'm all for the progress of science, and I realize we need to do the "out-there" research in order to learn new things and do new science ... but $8B to find out the next smallest sub-atomic particle? That's more than $1 for every man, woman, and child on the entire planet! I don't even want to think about how many people that could feed, how many jobs that could create. At what point do scientists have some obligation to say, "This is good research, but it doesn't need to be done now" ???

FYI: the image comes from http://scientificcomputing.com/

I'm almost embarrassed to mention this, but I hadn't seen this before ... but they have photos of Mars weather! In particular, "dust devils" or mini-tornadoes. This photo is from the Tau Beta Pi link (see previous post), the original is at NASA's site:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/PIADetQuery.html and search for 'dust devils'

From the Bent of Tau Beta Pi (http://www.tbp.org/pages/publications/BENTFeatures/Su06Bell.pdf) ... did you know that dust is one of NASA's top concerns with a permanent presence on the Moon (or Mars)??!?!?!

Seems kinda strange, but it turns out that moon-dust isn't the stuff that poets and songwriters would have us believe. Whereas dust on Earth tends to be organic (and hence soft), moon-dust tends to be shards of rock and powdered glass with lots of jagged edges and sharp points ... a very effective abrasive! They say wiping one's visor is enough to scratch the protective gold layer.

Here's one that just trolling for some controversy ...

In the IEEE Spectrum, columnist Robert W. Lucky comments that "The trouble with digital photograpy begins with the mind-set that it's free, prompting us to take a multitude of thoughtless pictures ... and the few good pictures that should be left to posterity are lost in a glut of trivia."

What do you think? On the one hand, cheap and easy-to-use digital photos are great for capturing those candids ... but how do you sort out the good from the bad? How many of you delete the bad photos right away? How often do you just keep them all since hard-disk space is so cheap? Do you have any suggestions for indexing photos or otherwise selecting the "good" from the "bad"?

Enquiring minds want to know!!

From IEEE Spectrum: due to deregulation in the French telephone market, many new companies are starting to offer very cheap voice+internet packages ... free.fr offers 15Mbps with 112 digital TV channels and unlimited voice-over-IP phone calls for around $36 per month. In the US, you can get 10-15Mbps with 170 digital TV channels and unlimited phone calls for around $100 per month.

An interesting comparison in the article: the French version of the FCC has 7 members with 3 graduates of Ecole Polytechnique (equivalent to MIT), and a fourth who taught at Ecole; other gov't telecomm officials include a president of a engineering college, an "engineer in chief" of a telecomm company, another "general engineer" in telecomm, and a doctor of mathematics and economics. By comparison, the US' FCC has four members: two are lawyers and two are historians.

The article also notes that the French company, Alcatel, recently "merged" with Lucent (former Bell Labs) -- but everyone now assumes Alcatel will be the dominant partner. This effectively means that the French now control the venerable Bell Labs, what used to be one of the world's premier research organizations.

It's just kinda sad.

From an article in IT Architect ... "Sanswire Networks has successfully flown its first two 'stratellites' over the California desert. These high-altitude airships transmit wireless communications the way satellites do, but less expensively." Instead of having to talk to a satellite (hundreds or thousands of miles high), your wireless device needs to only communicate with one of these stratellites (their own name) around 13 miles high.

Just seems kind of weird to have your ultra-high-tech wireless cellphone/pda/music player talking to ... a blimp!!

Words of wisdom from Ian Pearson:

"Realistically, by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine -- so when you die, it's not a major career problem."

Ooooooh kaaaaaaaay.

From Matt Asay, http://infoworld.com/3597:

"Seriously, Google piggybacks on content owners. Red Hat piggybacks on Linux kernel hackers (though it is now actively leading that development). ESPN(Mobile) piggybacks on Sprint's cellular network. I could go on. Doesn't anyone actually build things anymore? What will happen if we all turn into marketing machines? Will this leave us in a world devoid of substance or, in the case of open source, of software?"

Amazon.com has launched a service called "The Mechanical Turk" ... a reference to an old chess-playing "robot" that was actually a hidden person (from Turkey, presumably). Anyway, there are some tasks that are easier for humans to do than computers such as pattern recognition in images -- e.g. reading a word on a billboard in a photo, or the name of a band on an image of an album cover. See http://mturk.com or http://amazon.com/mturk/

They'll pay you around $0.03 for each album cover image you view and identify. I'm not sure of the details, but one article I saw suggested you could make maybe $3.60 an hour. That's not even minimum wage, but if you have a job like a receptionist (with lots of down-time), that could get some you Xmas cash!!

"In theory, you could push fiber (-optic networks) up to 150 trillion bits per second - a rate that would deliver the text of all the books in the U.S. Library of Congress in about a second." -- unfortunately, the U.S. greatly lags behind the entire rest of the world in fast network access:

Broadband lines per person in 2004: South Korea - 25; U.S. - 12

Annualized rate of broadband growth, 1Q2005: Turkey - 263%; U.S. - 34%

Cheapest sign-up DSL monthly rate (March 2005): Taiwan - $11.32; U.S. - $26.95 ... The Taiwan service is at 512Kbps; the U.S. service is at 384Kbps

DSL's share of broadband (end of 2000): World - 57%; U.S. - 34%

DSL's share of broadband (1Q2005): World - 65%; U.S. - 41%

I got the quote and data from the October 2005 IEEE Spectrum magazine ... they got some of it from http://www.point-topic.com and http://www.cabledatacomnews.com