Category Archives: Internet

Why I love my homepage

For the last few years my homepage has been Google News. It provides a quick, simple, unbiased look at the most important news issues. It scours news sites from all over the country and world, from small town newspapers to major news groups like the Associated Press and the New York Times. They’ve recently updated their site to decrease redundancy by linking to original stories from the source. So, “instead of 20 ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), [Google News will show] the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist.” By removing the duplicate articles, more space on Google News will be taken up with original stories and viewpoints from around the world.
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Should Google Go Nuclear?

Google Tech Talks November 9, 2006

ABSTRACT This is not your father’s fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional … all » thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that’s been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal… until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google’s annual electricity bill? Come see what’s possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.

Source (link to video): Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)

Message board thread: Interesting fusion talk at google with space related aspects

I haven’t finished watching the video yet (it’s over 1 hour 30 mins) but what I’ve seen looks very interesting. This is not some creating energy from nothing free energy technology, but actual science. I’d love to see his further research get funded.

Google is Amazing

Google Blogoscoped has a post about “Google’s Internal Company Goals.”

Some of the most amazing stuff is how Google wants to have “the world’s top AI research laboratory. They are also focusing on getting rid of spam in the top 20 user languages.” Also, Google wants to be carbon neutral. To that extent, Google recently announced a corporate policy to go solar. I hope that more companies follow Google’s lead. (Google partnered with El Solutions for this venture.)

Companies that have sold my email address to spammers

I have a unique method of signing up for online services that allows me to monitor usage of my email address. I’ll use the domain example.com to explain. I set up a redirect through my domain registrar giving me the ability to forward email sent to my example.com domain to an alias of my main Gmail address (email+alias@gmail.com). Then, instead of using my main email address to sign up for online services, I just create a new alias on the fly. For example, my amazon account uses amazon@example.com, my ebay account uses ebay@example.com, and so on. So, if one of my aliased emails starts receiving spam, then I know that either a spammer guessed this address by random chance or the company sold my address or mishandled my address.

I have two high profile examples. Recently, both netbank@example.com and ibd@example.com have started receiving spam. NetBank is an Internet bank that I used for about 5 years. They offered very good interest rates, but, ultimately, I closed my account because I wanted quick access to a bank’s local branch location to make deposits. The spam started before my account was closed. I contacted technical support through their secure bank mail and was told that I should close my account and start open a new one if I suspected fraud. I had specifically explained that I was not emailing them about fraud, but they apparently didn’t understand. I had directly asked them why they were giving away my email address…

My ibd@example.com alias email address just started receiving spam on October 17th. I used this address for my online trial account for Investor’s Business Daily, a very well-respected investing guide. It looks like this company either sold my address or accidentally gave it away. However, as you can tell by the subjects, at least the spam is related to stocks: “Finance.co m Watch out for this one,” “Alerts.co m Don’t waste this opportunity,” and “Quotes.co m – It will explode tomorrow.” In particular, all these stocks advertise “TAJ Systems,” (symbol TJSS), an online gaming company that “may very well be the next PartyPoker.com.” (yeah, right…)

So, as you can see, I am left to assume that both NetBank and Investor’s Business Daily mishandled or sold my email address and thereby violated their privacy policy. Mishandled or sold, the result is the same…illegal spam in my inbox (or actually spam folder because Gmail’s filtering works very well).

Sketch Monster — The Open Art Gallery

My brother just created a really cool online sketching site called Sketch Monster

Sketch Monster is a place for all different skill-levels of drawers, sketchers, and illustrators to show their work, learn, and be inspired. To participate, simply create an image for the current subject. Its simple, its free, and you don’t have to sign up for anything!

The subject of the sketch changes every 10 days or so. The current topic is ‘monster sketches.’

Microsoft Virtual Earth???

Nice try Microsoft.

The only thing they “copied” was the dragability.

Um, they copied a lot more than that. They copied resizing the map window to fill up the browser window.They copied the general color scheme. They copied the ability to switch between street maps and aerial photos. They copied DHTML layering to show point data on top of the maps. They copied the entire design for searching, navigating, and finding points-of-interest. And they copied it so closely, they made it cross-browser functional (you can damn well bet if Google Maps didn’t exist as a cross-browser functional product, MSN VE would only work on IE).

And they copied the most innovative part of Google maps – tile-based pre-built raster images to assemble dynamic maps. As someone who has developed GIS applications, I can tell you, while this may sound trivial, it is not. Google thought outside the box. The GIS community for years has used vector data to produce one raster image on-the-fly at runtime (like Mapquest). Instead, Google creates small tiled images at every zoom-level they offer and stores them on the server, and thus can produce a map at any location and any zoom-level, and offer it with “dragability”. This is a completely new paradigm for interactive GIS apps. The old way does offer some advantages over the new way, but for web-based interactive GIS, the new way is pretty phenominal.

While the rest of the GIS community was happily working to make incremental improvements to the old paradigm, Google innovated a new paradigm. MSN just copied it. There’s nothing wrong with copying (well, until the USPTO grants software patents), but don’t mistake it for anything other than what it is.

Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156854&cid=13150014

Is it just me or does it seem like all MS is doing these days is just copy catting google? Google made a better search, MS tries to make a better search. Google makes a map, MS makes a map.

I think it’s rather obvious that the creative type who comes up with the ideas usually prevails over those trying to play catch up. When MS makes something new and Google has to copy it, that’s when you know the tables have turned.

Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156854&cid=13149282

Microsoft doesn’t create markets, it attempts to take over young markets through agressive (and sometimes illegal) marketing. It aims to achieve a monopoly, which it can then use to lock its customers in, creating a long-lasting cash-cow.

This is the technique used for Microsoft Windows, Word and Internet Explorer. It isn’t always successful, but it is successful often enough to make a lot of money and annoy a lot of people.

Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156854&cid=13149386

I feel that competition is good when it breeds the creation of new, more innovative, and better products. Yahoo, I feel, is doing a good job at innovating, though they did copy Google’s simple search layout… Microsoft is just see what products consumers like and then stealing those ideas and attempting to release them as a new, great thing from the creative minds at Microsoft. You have to wonder how many truly creative minds are left at Microsoft when everyone is leaving to work for Apple, Google, or Yahoo.