40610235
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
They've had the best of times, and now they're living through the worst of times. The Washington Post talks about the dissolution of both Kodak's and Polaroid's business models, what Kodak can learn from Polaroid's earlier mistakes, and the resurrection of some classic Polaroid tech by private entrepreneurs.
40490861
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
As mentioned on CNN, back in the 1950's the United States had plans to nuke the moon in an attempt to bring Mutually Assured Destruction to its next level. The Air Force team behind that aborted plan even included a young astronomer named Carl Sagan.
40023121
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
This quote, in an article in Pitchfork, says Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaking down the income stream (puddle?) generated by both Pandora and Spotify. He observes, "As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it's a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music-- except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture." and that he has "...simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician." In addition, he posits that they purely exist to collect speculative capital to enrich their owners.
37910673
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
The New York Times has extensively surveyed and analyzed data center power usage and patterns.
At their behest, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations. "Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants." In other words, “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.” This is the price being paid to ensure everyone has instant access to every email they've ever received, or for their instant Facebook status update. Data Center providers are finding that they can't rack servers fast enough to provide for users' needs: “It is absolutely a race between our ability to create data and our ability to store and manage data,” Mr. Burton said.
A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google’s data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook’s about 60 million watts.
Many of these solutions are readily available, but in a risk-averse industry, most companies have been reluctant to make wholesale change, according to industry experts.
36763859
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service. The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of one such hired third party service who had has been so successful planting paid fake reviews that he no longer trusts any online review. He should know. Because of him and his kind, it's estimated that one third of online reviews are fake.
36031821
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
CNN has an expose showing that in South Korea, the world's most wired country, Internet gaming breeds two extremes: elite "athletes" who earn fame and six figures, and addicts who literally play until they die and tells the stories of players on both sides of that real-life divide.
33117555
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Rick Zeman writes:
"'They set us up to fail." Thus declares a temporary worker at Amazon's Lehigh Valley, PA distribution center in an expose in the Lehigh Valley "The Morning Call" newspaper. In the article, temporary agency workers are enticed with the carrot of the elusive prospect of employment with Amazon, and punished with the stick of demerits and instant firing, and worse, within the confines of a literal 21st century sweatshop.
30382545
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Rick Zeman writes:
According to the New York Times, it's the ...end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica saying, "...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds." The last print edition will be the 32 volume 2010 edition.
24447558
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
Reading Apple's home page, it is apparent that Steve Jobs, Ex-CEO, has passed away.
11834258
submission
Rick Zeman writes:
PowerPoint goes to war as told by the New York Times, saying 'The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.'
'It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,' says one General officer, but, 'There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,' says a Captain.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. 'The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”'
