Category Archives: Science and Engineering

More rants about page design and the server-side

I may come back to tweak this essay repeatedly in the coming months. If, in this work in progress, I get a good groove going on, I may move those parts of the essay into my developer section to exist … Continue reading

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Speech Recognition

Speech Recognition (SR) has come a long way in the last five or so years, just recently IBM researchers have managed to make it work in hand-held computers. Such developments might actually make hand-helds, which I’ve regarded as rather dubious … Continue reading

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Added a Protest Badge

To protest the W3C’s proposal for “reasonable and non-discriminatory” patents, I have added a dark cloud over my validation badges. This means that I support W3C standards but only if they are royalty-free. The idea and badge came from the … Continue reading

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Computers With Alternative Energy Sources

NEC just recently developed a new high density fuel cell to power PDAs and laptops. Meanwhile SolarHost is a relatively new ISP/site hosting company whoes server farm is powered entirely by photovoltaic cells. And I just read about Australian plans … Continue reading

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W3C, Tool of Corporate Masters?!

What the hell? Just a few minutes ago I learned that the World Wide Web Consortium, probably bowing to pressure from some of its corporate members, tried to pull a fast one on us by submitting a proposal to patent … Continue reading

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Medical Stuff

Recently doctors in New York used waldos to do gall bladder surgery in France. Now they are thinking of building something like the autodocs that Larry Niven wrote about. In vaguely related news, research has found a gene that appears … Continue reading

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Business Models Continue to Fail on the Internet

The content here is free. However I get some of this content from other sources which have to pay for it somehow. Advertising, despite becoming more and more obnoxious in its presence, doesn’t seem to be able to cut it. … Continue reading

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Even without medical nano–

Sandia National Labs have recently built a micromechanical device that can grip individual blood cells.

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W3C alternative that might be better than Flash

Actually Macromedia did contribute to the SVG standard so I am hoping that it might be more accessible than the current generations of Flash, Shockwave, etc.

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To resume–

Researchers at British Telecom are studying how bacterial colonies organize themselves in hopes of learning new ways to make computer networks self-organizing. This is all part of a larger trend in the computer industry and AI in particular to begin … Continue reading

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