Technology Category
Independent news, views, opinions and reviews on the latest gadgets, games, science, technology and research from Apple and more. It’s about the technologies that change the way we live, work, love and behave.
Steve Jobs Biopic Stars Danny Boyle and Leo DiCaprio
Personal computer pioneer Steve Jobs of NeXT Computer Inc., shows off his NeXTstation color computer to the press at the NeXT facility in Redwood City, Calif., on April 4, 1991. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
EVER looked at Steve Jobs and thought: “There’s a guy I’d like to watch a film about!” Imagine the thrills and spills as Jobs goes to the bank to get a loan! Gasp as Jobs does some soldering on a motherboard! Swoon as he buys 30,000 black turtle neck sweaters!
Good news! Danny Boyle and Leonardo DiCaprio could well be working together on a biopic of the Apple Honcho.
The film will be based on the biography by Walter Isaacson about Jobs, which was released in 2011. It follows on from the film ‘Jobs’, which starred Ashton Kutcher, which no-one watched.
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Posted: 22nd, April 2014 | In: Celebrities, Technology | Comment
Google, Apple, Intel – All Getting Sued For Screwing The Workers
YOU may or may not worry very much about some of the richest workers on the planet getting screwed over by the companies they work for. We tend to worry more about the poor getting so screwed. But Google, Apple, Intel and a number of other big Silicon Valley firms are getting sued by their engineers for the way in which they’ve screwed them over in recent years.
But next month, Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe will be in the dock to face the same opponent.
A group of technology executives is suing the companies for alleged collusion to suppress their wages, after they signed a series of “no-poach” pacts barring them from recruiting each other’s staff.
The companies, whose collective value tops $890bn (£530bn), could be forced to pay handsomely to compensate them for the losses, but they are likely to be far more worried about the details the case will expose.
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Posted: 22nd, April 2014 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Yahoo! Is Now Officially Worth Less Than Nothing, Say Matt Yglesias and Matt Levine
In this March 3, 1997 file photo, Yahoo co-founders David Filo, left, and Jerry Yang, right, hold up a fish prop at Yahoo headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif.
AS two different people have now noted, Matt Yglesias and Matt Levine, Yahoo is now officially valued at less than nothing. Which, for a company that has a $40 billion price tag on the markets is a pretty strange thing to try and say. But it also happens to be true.
The conundrum is explained by the fact that there are really two different things here. One is the business that makes up Yahoo, the other the company that owns that business. And that company owns not just the business Yahoo but also good sized chunks of two other businesses, Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, a Chinese internet company (not unlike Amazon). If we take the value of Yahoo the company and subtract from it the value of the stake in Alibaba then we get a negative number. Take away the value of that stake in Yahoo Japan and it becomes even larger.
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Posted: 19th, April 2014 | In: Money, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Doctors Successfully Create And Implant Working Lab-Grown Vaginas For Women (And Men)
PSST! Want to buy a vagina? Four women born with an underdeveloped or absent vagina have been living with artificial ones for the past four years. The women suffer from Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH).
* Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome is a disorder that occurs in females and mainly affects the reproductive system. This condition causes the vagina and uterus to be underdeveloped or absent. Affected women usually do not have menstrual periods due to the absent uterus. Often, the first noticeable sign of MRKH syndrome is that menstruation does not begin by age 16…
Posted: 15th, April 2014 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
The Evinrude Fishing Saucer Concept Boat Of 1957
THE Evinrude Fishing Saucer concept boat designed by Brooks Stevens and made for the 1957 New York Boat Show.
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Posted: 12th, April 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment (1)
Paleotechnology: A Curious Glimpse Into An 80s Computer Book
THERE”S always a good time to be had touring through old computer books, especially if there’s lots to point at and laugh condescendingly. Technology has advanced so exponentially that a 1980s computer textbook may as well be ancient Sanskrit written on palm leaves. Suffice it to say, things have come a long way in just a short amount of time, and it’s a lot of fun to look back. So, let’s jump into Living With Computers by Patrick G. McKeown (1986).
“A complete computer system – user, software, CPU, internal memory, secondary storage, keyboard, monitor, and printer – is shown here.”
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Posted: 10th, April 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Technology | Comments (5)
Langton’s Ant: Creating Endless Order From Chaos
LANGTON’S Ant is a story of habit. Scientist Chris Langton discovered the phenomenon in 1986.
Chris Langton
If you were to put an ant down on a grid of squares and ask the ant to follow two rules something odd would happen.
The rules:
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Posted: 8th, April 2014 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Surgeon Stuart Meloy Finds It Tough Raising Money For The Orgasm Button
Liz Paul, from Shipley in West Yorkshire, displays her trademarked invention known as Vielle, which is, it is claimed, the first clitoral stimulator that is clinically proven to improve the chances of orgasm, at an awards ceremony at The Cafe Royal in central London. * The reception is held to celebrate the success and breadth of female inventors across the country. Date: 25/04/2003
STUART Meloy is the surgeon at Piedmont Anesthesia and Pain Consultants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who when experimenting with pain relief discovered the orgasm pill. He recalled the Eureka moment:
“I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically. I asked her what was up and she said, `You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that.'”
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Posted: 7th, April 2014 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
How Many People Do You Need To Colonize The Next Star System – 150 or 40,000?
THIS is an interesting little calculation that’s been made about how many people you would need on your spaceship if you were to set off and try to colonise the next star system over. Well, OK, it’s interesting to me as someone who imbibed so much SF and Fantasy stuff when in my long ago youth at least. And the answer is a very much larger number of people than you might think.
Here’s what the problem is:
Entire generations of people would be born, live, and die before the ship reached its destination. This brings up the question of how many people you need to send on a hypothetical interstellar mission to sustain sufficient genetic diversity. And a new study sets the bar much higher than Moore’s 150 people.
According to Portland State University anthropologist Cameron Smith, any such starship would have to carry a minimum of 10,000 people to secure the success of the endeavor. And a starting population of 40,000 would be even better, in case a large percentage of the population died during during the journey.
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Posted: 7th, April 2014 | In: Money, Reviews, Technology | Comments (2)
1492: Wound Man Was The Luckiest Man Alive In The Middle Ages
THE Wound Man is a compendium of all the injuries that a body in the Middle Ages might sustain.
The Wellcome Library advises:
Captions beside the stoic figure describe the injuries and sometimes give prognoses: often precise distinctions are drawn between types of injuries, such as whether an arrow has embedded itself in a muscle or shot right through. (The latter is better – the arrowhead can be cut away and the shaft withdrawn smoothly, whilst the embedded arrow will tear the muscle with its barbs when pulled out.)
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Posted: 7th, April 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Vintage Sexism: The A.C. Gilbert ‘Lab Technician Set For Girls’ (1958)
IN 1958 New Haven-based toymaker A.C. Gilbert Company turned youngsters onto science with a new kit. The LAB TECHNICIAN SET was a “CAREER BUILDING SCIENCE” kit.
And it was got Girls.
Posted: 6th, April 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology, The Consumer | Comment (1)
Miracle Appliances And The Desperate 1970s Women That Loved Them
WHEN mankind emerged from the primordial ooze that was that was the 1940s, homes began a rapid upgrade. The Western nations’ economies grew in tandem with technology, and the benefits began to enter the home in the form of appliances that promised to transform the household. Now you could own a toaster – oh, the possibilities!
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Posted: 31st, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Technology, The Consumer | Comment (1)
This 17th century Chinese Abacus Ring Is The World’s Oldest Smart Ring
Forget Google Glass, Android Wear, Smartwatches or contact lenses that give you night vision. Instead let’s talk about the awesomeness that is this 17th century Chinese abacus ring. It’s wearable tech from the Qing Dynasty, perhaps the world’s oldest smart ring.
Measuring a mere 1.2 centimeter-long by 0.7 centimeter-wide, the miniature abacus is a fully functional counting tool, but it’s so tiny that using it requires an equally dainty tool, such as a pin, to manipulate the beads, which are each less than one millimeter long.
“However, this is no problem for this abacus’s primary user—the ancient Chinese lady, for she only needs to pick one from her many hairpins.”
Spotter: Endless Geyser of Awesome
Posted: 25th, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
The 1983 Atari 2600 Bible Game Moses ‘Red Sea Crossing’ Let Christian Kids Play God
FLASHBACK to 1983: The Atari 2600 machine feature the Moses ‘Red Sea Crossing’ Bible story video game.
If you saved hard to buy this gem, then the good news is that the thing is worth a bomb. In 2012, one copy was sold for $10,400.
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Posted: 22nd, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Retro Gadgets: The 1951 Morale Raiser For Henpecked Men
FLASHBACK to 1951:
The electronic Morale Raiser was invented in 1951 to boost men’s confidence. For reasons unknown it never really took off.
Posted: 22nd, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Idiotic Turkish Prime Minster Bans Twitter And Twitter Use In Turkey Rises
A man photograph a placard with the name of Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul during a rally against a bill which would allow Turkey’s authorities to block web pages for privacy violations without a prior court decision, in Istanbul, Turkey, late Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014. Police in Istanbul have clashed with hundreds of protesters denouncing a new law that increases government controls over the Internet. About 90,000 people have stopped following Gul on Twitter after he signed a controversial bill increasing government controls over the Internet into law on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
YOU’D think that people would have worked out about these internet things by now but apparently there are none so dumb as politicians:
Shortly after the Twitter ban came into effect around midnight, the micro-blogging company tweeted instructions to users in Turkey on how to circumvent it using text messaging services in Turkish and English. Turkish tweeters were quick to share other methods of tiptoeing around the ban, using “virtual private networks” (VPN) – which allow internet users to connect to the web undetected – or changing the domain name settings on computers and mobile devices to conceal their geographic whereabouts.
Some large Turkish news websites also published step-by-step instructions on how to change DNS settings.
On Friday morning, Turkey woke up to lively birdsong: according to the alternative online news site Zete.com, almost 2.5m tweets – or 17,000 tweets a minute – have been posted from Turkey since the Twitter ban went into effect, thus setting new records for Twitter use in the country.
The ban came from the Prime Minister, pissed off that people were disagreeing with him in public. One of the first people to breach the ban on using Twitter was the Turkish President.
We might have to start saying that there’s a Turkish variant of the Streisand Effect.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
Yep.
Posted: 21st, March 2014 | In: Money, Politicians, Technology | Comment
Apple’s Only 10% Of The Phone Market But They Make 60% Of The Profits
THE smartphone is really only just under 7 years old: that’s right, we’re just coming up to hte 7 th anniversary of the release of the Apple iPhone. And this smartphone is now the fastest adopted technology of all time: there were a billion of the damn things made and sold last year. But the truly remarkable thing is that while Apple only has around 10% of this market they have been able to capture 60% of all of the profits of the entire sector.
Which is, when you think about it, pretty remarkable:
Indeed, since the launch of the iPhone[3] the net profits earned by the collection of protagonists shown was $215 billion[4]. 60% has been earned by Apple, a newcomer to the market. That figure is also consistent on an ongoing basis, having reached 60% as early as 2011 and remained in a band around that figure since.
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Posted: 19th, March 2014 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Listen To Aldous Huxley’s Talks On The Visionary Experience’ And Read His Advice To Albert Hofmann On Taking LSD
ON February 29 1962, Aldous Huxley wrote of psychedelic drugs in a letter to Albert Hofmann.
Hofmann had invented LSD, first synthesising lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938. He experienced the world’s first acid trip” on April 19 1943 as he cycled home from his Swiss laboratory. That was Bicycle Day.
He tells of his discovery in the book LSD, My Problem Child (1979):
Time and again I hear or read that LSD was discovered by accident. This is only partly true. LSD came into being within a systematic research program, and the “accident” did not occur until much later: when LSD was already five years old, I happened to experience its unforeseeable effects in my own body—or rather, in my own mind
Looking back over my professional career to trace the influential events and decisions that eventually steered my work toward the synthesis of LSD, I realize that the most decisive step was my choice of employment upon completion of my chemistry studies. If that decision had been different, then this substance, which has become known the world over, might never have been created.
An artwork paying tribute to Albert Hofmann, the recently deceased inventor of LSD, on display at the ‘Cans festival’ in a road tunnel in Leake Street, Lambeth, London. Issue date: Friday May 2, 2008.
Hofmann took a measure of the drug and made his way home:
“On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly.”
A volunteer undergoing LSD research project at an honor camp in Viejas, California, Sept. 6, 1966.
Did the drug have a use? Could LSD have a medicinal purpose? Maybe.
Author Aldous Huxley is seen on Oct. 23, 1928.
Even after LSD was banned in 1966, Hofmann maintained his belief that it had the power to solve psychological problems induced by “materialism, alienation from nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanised, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in wealthy, saturated society, and lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life”.
British novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley is photographed in Feb. 1938 at an unknown location.
He spoke with Huxley, who had in the 1950s written The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, books dealing with states of mind and body produced by hallucinogenic drugs. Hofmann was impressed, writing:
The alterations of sensory perceptions and consciousness, which the author experienced in a self-experiment with mescaline, are skillfully described in these books. The mescaline experiment was a visionary experience for Huxley. He saw objects in a new light; they disclosed their inherent, deep, timeless existence, which remains hidden from everyday sight
These two books contained fundamental observations on the essence of visionary experience and about the significance of this manner of comprehending the world—in cultural history, in the creation of myths, in the origin of religions, and in the creative process out of which works of art arise. Huxley saw the value of hallucinogenic drugs in that they give people who lack the gift of spontaneous visionary perception belonging to mystics, saints, and great artists, the potential to experience this extraordinary state of consciousness, and thereby to attain insight into the spiritual world of these great creators. Hallucinogens could lead to a deepened understanding of religious and mystical content, and to a new and fresh experience of the great works of art. For Huxley these drugs were keys capable of opening new doors of perception; chemical keys, in addition to other proven but laborious ” door openers” to the visionary world like meditation, isolation, and fasting, or like certain yoga practices…
In The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Huxley’s newly-published works, I found a meaningful exposition of the experience induced by hallucinogenic drugs, and I thereby gained a deepened insight into my own LSD experiments.
Poet Allen Ginsberg, creative writer of the “Beat” generation, praises the effects of LSD and discounts its alleged dangers during testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in Washington D.C. on June 14, 1966.
Huxley called. They would meet in Zurich:
He considered experiments under laboratory conditions to be insignificant, since in the extraordinarily intensified susceptibility and sensitivity to external impressions, the surroundings are of decisive importance. He recommended to my wife, when we spoke of her native place in the mountains, that she take LSD in an alpine meadow and then look into the blue cup of a gentian flower, to behold the wonder of creation.
As we parted, Aldous Huxley gave me, as a remembrance of this meeting, a tape recording of his lecture “Visionary Experience,” which he had delivered the week before at an international congress on applied psychology in Copenhagen. In this lecture, Aldous Huxley spoke about the meaning and essence of visionary experience and compared this type of world view to the verbal and intellectual comprehension of reality as its essential complement.
You can hear Visionary Experience here:
In one letter Huxley wrote to Hofmann:
. . . I have good hopes that this and similar work will result in the development of a real Natural History of visionary experience, in all its variations, determined by differences of physique, temperament and profession, and at the same time of a technique of Applied Mysticism—a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the “Other World” in the affairs of “This World.” Meister Eckhart wrote that “what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.” Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe….
You don’t have to endorse the use of drugs to see that they can be useful to some people.
Posted: 17th, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Technology | Comment (1)
