Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, November 10, 2003

Coolest Inventions 2003: New Black -- Comment()
TIME Magazine awards New Black: "If you thought brown was the proverbial new black, think again. Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in Britain have developed a nickel-phosphorus compound called NPL Super Black that absorbs 99.65% of visible light. Black paint absorbs only about 97.5% of visible light - positively shiny by comparison. Not just cool, the new black is useful too. Precision optical instruments depend on eliminating any and all stray reflected light to get their readings. The blacker the black, the less reflected light, the better the data. That makes NPL Super Black a pretty bright idea."

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A computer superpower is born: "In a squat cement building at the outskirts of Virginia Tech's campus, 1,100 Macintosh PCs are stacked like library books on metal racks that students helped arrange in return for football tickets and pizza. [...] The cluster of off-the-shelf G5 Power Macs was assembled in a few weeks for about $5 million. That is significantly less money than the custom supercomputers that research labs use for weather and weapons simulations, drug experiments and other highly complex projects."

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Nokia shows off IPv6 phone: "Nokia Corp., the world's largest handset maker, has unveiled a prototype mobile phone based on IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol (IP) technology."

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Power Mac Is Pretty On The Inside: "With its spectacular performance, Apple could have built the G5 to look like an old milk crate and still have sold a few million of them." (Boston Globe via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Apple And Microsoft: The Great Role Reversal: "In its unaccustomed position as a majority player, is Apple being a good citizen?" (Mac Night Owl via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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A Great Speech by the Man who was really elected President: "Gore discusses the questions many of us have been asking. He runs down almost every single one of the liberties that this Adminstration is in the process of trampling. You can almost make a list of the amendments that are being tossed out the window. Declaring citizens enemy combatants. Sneak and peek entry to homes. Adminstrative subpoenas. Bugging client-lawyer conversations. Running background and credit checks on anyone without any need to demonstrate criminal behavior. [...] In a democracy, the state is open and the people are private. But this Adminstration increasing believes that the state is private and the people are public." [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Once again, trouble starting up Matlab -- Comment()
I once again had trouble setting up Matlab so that the licence manager starts up automatically. Fortunately, the instructions at MathWorks seem to help. But I strongly dislike the flexlm system - it is fine on a multi-user system, but overkill on a personal machine.

Update: Apparently you also need to run an updater to make the graphical interface work under Panther. (The command-line version started with matlab -nojvm works ok.)

Panther: a multi-user system -- Comment()
It just now hit me that Panther is really a multi-user system. I switched between two accounts, and instead of the fine "cube" animation my display went black and switched modes. And I realized that I was using different settings in the two accounts: 85 MHz frequency vs. 100 MHz frequency. Panther was switching monitor settings between the two accounts on the fly. What other nice features are buried under the pretty surface?

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A Fairy, a Low-Fat Bagel, and a Sack of Hammers: "One bright, sunny day, the Bad Internet Fairy closed down every company and organization site on the web. [...] People were reading and writing. Frowning and laughing. Crying and cheering. Agreeing and disagreeing." [via inessential.com]

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Security Flaws Rankle Microsoft: "Microsoft's campaign to snare virus writers indicates the software behemoth is finally feeling the heat of its own security woes. Analysts say Windows flaws are hurting Microsoft's ability to book new contracts with corporate customers." [Wired News]