Tag Archives: hardware

Cultural universal

CRN (Macpherson, “Safety first for IT executives in China,” 16 Sep ’09) quotes Mark Bregman, Symantec’s CTO: “I don’t let my IT department near my laptop.” Also noteworthy: “I was advised by people in three-letter agencies in the US Government to weigh the machine before I left and when I got back [from China].” (Q: [...]
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You’ve read about it…

…and here it is, at least according to Getty Images: WASHINGTON—FEBRUARY 24: A military aide carries the nuclear football, with the nation’s nuclear launch codes, through Statuary Hall as President Barack Obama arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009 in Washington, DC. U.S. President [...]
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Give necromancy a chance

Q: What would it take to reunite the Beatles? A: Three more OLPCs. (df)
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Roger that

Kaplan, “Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas,” theatlantic.com (Sep ’06): But the Predator, especially as it is improved, may also interfere with decision making. As one pilot told me: “No general will want to attack something without visual confirmation from a Predator. It’s the old story—by the time you have all the evidence, it’s too [...]
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“I always wished the Times was printed on plexi…

…and now my dreams have come true!” The NYT covers the hype about a new digital device, a letter-size grayscale screen, but omits key words such as “hard” or ”stiff” in lieu of the more flexible term “flexible.” Apparently unaware that the hardcopy NYT has been printed in color for over a decade (since 16 [...]
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Exporting democracy

Good news: Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:03:50 -0700 From: vim@duncan.cx Subject: States throw out costly electronic voting machines The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers. What [...]
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MS LEO

On 29 Apr ’08, the Seattle Times ran a story about Microsoft’s “COFEE,” or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, a special-purpose USB device “that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies” the previous summer and, a day before the story ran, “described … to the 350 law-enforcement experts” at an MS-sponsored conf. According [...]
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The International Standards Organisation Is an Obstacle to the Development of Appropriate Anaesthetic Equipment for the Developing World

That’s the title of a paper delivered at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries 2008 (program here) by Michael Dobson MRCP, FRCA, University of Oxford, UK, Robert Neighbour C.Eng, F.I.E.T., Diamedica Ltd, UK. Abstract: The anaesthetic standards committees of the ISO are dominated by representatives from equipment manufacturers. The standards produced are such that their [...]
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Sili Valley family tree, ’47-’77

Title: Fairchild/Silicon Valley Genealogy Chart Author: Don Hoefler, Harry Smallwood, and James E. Vincler Created: 1977 Publisher: SEMI Donated By: James E. Vincler Filename: doc-45ff3e214d9ea.pdf (Size: 656 KB) Pages: 1 Description: The first published version of the Silicon Valley Genealogy chart that traced the lineage of 66 semiconductor companies founded between 1959 and 1976 back [...]
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One botnet per child

OLPC mesh networking + Windows XP? Oh dear. Groklaw asks: “What are you doing to those children?” C|net’s Matt Asay expands: OLPC is rather about liberating developing nations from their vassal status that continually keeps them at the mercy of the pricing and licensing of Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. By building on Windows, Negroponte [...]
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