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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 55 declined, 19 accepted (74 total, 25.68% accepted)

Patents

Submission + - Startup Seeks to Preempt Patent Trolls (wsj.com)

anaesthetica writes: The WSJ reports that a San Francisco startup is buying up patents with the promise never to assert them in order to help large corporations hedge against patent trolling firms. The company, RPX Corp, receives an annual fee in exchange for licensing the patents it has purchased. Cisco and IBM have already signed up for this service of 'defense patent aggregation.'
Power

Submission + - Hydrogen Won't Save Our Economy

anaesthetica writes: Physorg.com is featuring a story asserting that hydrogen is economically infeasible as a replacement for our current energy sources. The premise is that isolating and converting hydrogen into a usable energy source takes up a great deal of energy to begin with, and that subsequently that hydrogen fuel is only useful in about 25% of our economy. Apparently, the increasing scarcity of water is going to make hydrogen too costly and just as politicized as oil. From the article:
[Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel's] overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense. The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."
Google

Submission + - The Math behind PageRank

anaesthetica writes: The American Mathematical Society is featuring an article with an in-depth explanation of the type of mathematical operations that power PageRank. Because about 95% of the text on the 25 billion pages indexed by Google consist of the same 10,000 words, determining relevance requires an extremely sophisticated set of methods. And because the links constituting the web are constantly changing and updating, the relevance of pages needs to be recalculated on a continuous basis.
User Journal

Submission + - Apple Developing iPhone and "Smart" Phone

anaesthetica writes: According to AppleInsider, Apple is not only working on a cellphone + mp3 player iPhone, but is working on a second model designed to be a smart phone, highly integrated with Mac OS and .Mac. The smart phone has gone through several iterations, as the notoriously demanding Mr. Jobs ordered the elite team working on the phone to redesign and re-engineer their prototypes. Capabilities are reported to include Front Row interface, syncing contacts and iCal with .Mac, "call ahead", iChat video conferencing integration, WiFi, and a slide-out keyboard. Too good to be true?
Games

Submission + - Third Place is Fine by Nintendo

anaesthetica writes: The New Yorker writes that Nintendo is fine with third place. Between Sony and Microsoft both trying to build the most comprehensively next-generation console, and barely breaking even in their efforts, Nintendo decided to go a different route. Wii doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it focuses on simple fun playing games--a strategy which turns out to be much better for Nintendo's bottom line and stock prices. From the article:
A recent survey of the evidence on market share ... found that companies that adopt what they call "competitor-oriented objectives" actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focuses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do.

This sounds like the strategy that Apple adopted out of necessity a few years back.

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