How to Deploy/Administer/Run Parallels on Multiple Mac Computers

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v6/docs/en/Mass_Deployment_of_Parallels_Desktop.pdf

Superior Autobiographical Memory and Memory Bumps

Recently we noticed a lot of traffic to our informative page about autobiographical memory. We quickly realized this was a consequence a recent episode of 60 Minutes–a fascinating program called  “Endless Memory”. The episode profiles six people, including Taxi actress Marilu Henner, who can remember literally everything about their lives. Their talent has been labeled “superior autobiographical memory” and is now being studied in depth by neuroscientists. I highly recommend you watch the episode online.



Why does this happen? Why are there just a tiny number of people in the world who have the remarkable ability of remembering, in great detail, every day of their lives? The researchers aren’t exactly sure, but none of the six people appear to be impaired in any other way. MRI scans of the six people are currently being analyzed. While results are preliminary, they have found that some brain regions in these folks are huge compared to you or me. Both the temporal lobe (a key area for memory) and the caudate nucleus (an area implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder and habit formation) appear to be involved. The question is: are these brain regions large because these folks have trained their brain to do this? Or can they do this because they have abnormally large brain regions? More research will need to be done before we can unravel this mystery completely.

Even if you don’t have superior autobiographical memory, you may be interested to know that most of us have a “memory bump”–a certain era of our lives about which we can remember much more than other time periods. To find out what your memory bump is and learn more about this phenomenon, you can take this quick test. 

http://www.positscience.com/test-your-brain/memory/find-your-memory-bump
You can also read more in-depth about autobiographical memory, or learn about five different types of memory, including autobiographical memory.

By Karen Merzenich on December 21, 2010  
 

Spotify.com - Free Online Music - For Now

Monday, Aug. 08, 2011

Spotify, the Swedish-born cult hero of music-streaming services, wants to play you a love song. After years of legal wrangling, the popular European site finally made its U.S. debut on July 14, entering a massive market that is already saturated with music offerings — one of the many reasons most newcomers flop. (Anyone remember Lala.com?
But what makes Spotify more appealing than iTunes is that you can listen to its vast song collection for free. And what makes it more appealing than Pandora is that you can easily share playlists with your friends. Basically, Spotify is what would happen if Facebook had a baby with Napster, except that it's completely legal and comes in the form of a desktop application that can follow you anywhere, streaming music even when you're offline. If this all sounds too good to be true — free access to a library of 15 million tracks! — you guessed correctly that the world's largest music-subscription service comes with a catch.
 
(See five cool websites for new Spotify users.)

For now, users can get unlimited streaming at no charge, but Spotify is expected to drive people to paid subscriptions by eventually capping the hours of free listening per month as well as the number of free plays per song. The site made this shift in April in Europe, where a 10th of its 10 million users now have premium accounts, a sign that Spotify could be one of the first online music services to really understand the digital economy.

Premium versions offer users better sound quality on mobile devices as well as unlimited streaming. For $4.99 per month, customers can eliminate aggravating ads. For $9.99 per month, a price comparable to those of similar services like Rhapsody and MOG, the company's top-notch mobile app will stream playlists even when the listener is offline. (See how to get a Spotify invite.)

Spotify is arriving Stateside armed with deals with each of the four major music labels — Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner — a critical vote of confidence from an industry that has had a tortured history with online music sites. Spotify is also barreling into the U.S. market just as competition is intensifying between the likes of Pandora, MOG and Rdio (pronounced Ar-dee-o) and new cloud-based services from Amazon, Google and Apple. Meanwhile, AOL recently announced it will relaunch its radio player in partnership with streaming service Slacker, and Myspace is getting a makeover by entertainment utility player Justin Timberlake, who in June bought a stake in the once dominant social-networking site.

But J.T.'s considerable star power may not be enough to outshine Spotify's tie-in deal with Facebook, which is letting its 750 million members see which of their friends are using the music-streaming service. That arrangement — plus the hordes of A-listers, including Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and Trent Reznor, who have been gushing about Spotify on Twitter — might just provide the edge it needs to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder.

See TIME's special All-TIME 100 Albums.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2084577,00.html

Thanks Linda for this article!

A Letter from the IRS: Good News or Bad News?

http://www.jklasser.com/WileyCDA/Section/A-Letter-from-the-IRS-Good-News-or-Bad-News-.id-310448,articleId-285350.html

The IRS sends letters to taxpayers for a variety of reasons. Usually, the letter is a notice stating that you owe additional taxes because you failed to report income or for some other reason. However, the IRS also sends letters if it believes a taxpayer is owed an additional refund that could be paid if an amended return were filed. Before fear strikes, read the letter carefully to determine what you must do.

Check the Number of the Notice

The IRS has resigned its notices to make it clearer to a taxpayer why he or she is receiving the letter. There are dozens of different types of notices and other letters. Here is a rundown of some of the more common notices (additional information about notice numbers can be found here).

• CP01H: The IRS cannot process your return because the Social Security number of the taxpayer or spouse belongs to someone who died prior to the current year. The Social Security Administration provides this information to the IRS. If you received this notice, you may simply have made a typo on your Social Security number, which is easy to correct.
• CP04: The IRS believes you may be eligible for the additional child tax credit, which may entitle you to a tax refund.
• CP10: The IRS made corrections to your return because of miscalculations. This affected the amount of estimated tax you wanted to apply to next year's taxes.
• CP11: The IRS made changes resulting in an underpayment. You can accept the IRS corrections or write back that you disagree. The letter tells you what to do in this case.
• CP11A: The IRS made corrections because of miscalculations in the refundable earned income credit and you owe taxes to the government.
• CP21B: The IRS made corrections that you requested and they result in a tax refund. Expect to receive the refund within two to three weeks of the notice.

Take Action

Do not ignore any letter you receive. You may have to write back to the IRS or telephone the service to discuss your letter. You may need to send copies of certain statements, checks, or other receipts to prove a questionable item; keep the originals with the copy of your tax return and other receipts.
Important: When calling the IRS about a notice, be sure to write down the IRS employee's identification number, which is given automatically at the start of every call. This will help you if you need to call back or in case you follow IRS advice that turns out to be incorrect.

Work with an Expert

When in doubt, check it out. Contact a tax advisor who can explain the impact of the notice on you and what action, if any, to take. The advisor's fees may be less than the tax you would otherwise have to pay without the advisor's help.

How Many Nukes Does China Have? Just Look At The Immense Tunnels

Shortly after the end of the Cold War, an American defense official named Phillip Karber traveled to Russia as an advance man for a visit by former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. "We were meeting with Russian generals," Mr. Karber recalls, "and we met a three-star who told us they had 40,000 warheads, not the 20,000 we thought they had." It was a stunning disclosure. At a time when legions of CIA analysts, Pentagon war-gamers and arms-control specialists devoted entire careers to estimating the size of the Soviet arsenal, the U.S. had missed the real figure by a factor of two.

Mr. Karber, who has worked for administrations and senior congressional leaders of both parties and now heads the Asian Arms Control Project at Georgetown University, tells the story as a preface to describing his most recent work. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency—which deals with everything from arms-control verification to nuclear detection and forensics—to look into a mysterious Chinese project known as the "Underground Great Wall." The investigation would lead Mr. Karber to question long-held assumptions about the size—and the purpose—of China's ultra-secret nuclear arsenal.

The agency's interest in the subject had been piqued following the devastating May 12 earthquake that year in Sichuan province: Along with ordinary rescue teams, Beijing had deployed thousands of radiation specialists belonging to the Second Artillery Corps, the branch of the People's Liberation Army responsible for the country's strategic missile forces, including most of its nuclear weapons.

The involvement of the Second Artillery wasn't entirely surprising, since Sichuan is home to key nuclear installations, including the Chinese version of Los Alamos. More interesting were reports of hillsides collapsing to expose huge quantities of shattered concrete. Speculation arose that a significant portion of China's nuclear arsenal, held in underground tunnels and depots, may have been lost in the quake.

Mr. Karber set about trying to learn more with the aid of a team of students using satellite imagery, Chinese-language sources and other materials—all of them publicly available if rarely noticed in the West. History also helped. 

Tunneling has been a part of Chinese military culture for nearly 2,000 years. It was a particular obsession of Mao Zedong, who dug a vast underground city in Beijing and in the late 1960s ordered the building of the so-called Third-Line Defense in central China to withstand a feared Russian nuclear attack. The gargantuan project included an underground nuclear reactor, warhead storage facilities and bunkers for China's first generation of ballistic nuclear missiles.

China's tunnel-digging mania did not end with Mao's death. If anything, it intensified. In December 2009, as part of the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic, the PLA announced to great fanfare that the Second Artillery Corps has built a cumulative total of 3,000 miles of tunnels—half of them during the last 15 years.
"If you started in New Hampshire," notes Mr. Karber by way of reference, "and went to Chicago, then Dallas, then Tijuana, that would be about 3,000 miles." 

Why would the Second Artillery be intent on so much tunneling? There are, after all, other ways of securing a nuclear arsenal. And even with a labor force as vast and as cheap as China's, the cost of these tunnels—well-built, well-lit, paved, high-ceilinged and averaging six miles in length—is immense.

The extent of the tunneling was also hard to square with the supposedly small size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, which is commonly believed to be in the range of 240-400 warheads. "So they've built 10 miles of tunnel for every warhead?" Mr. Karber recalls asking himself. "That doesn't make sense; it's kind of overkill." 

That thought prompted Mr. Karber to take a closer look at Western estimates of China's arsenal. In the late 1960s, the U.S. military projected that China would be able to field 435 warheads by 1973. A straight-line extrapolation based on that assumption would suggest that China would have somewhere in the order of 3,000 warheads today. In 1984 the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that China would have 818 warheads by 1994 and more than 1,000 today. More recent reports in the Chinese media put the figure somewhere between 2,350 and 3,500, with an average annual warhead production of 200 over the last decade. By contrast, estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council suggest that China's arsenal peaked by about 1980 and has been more-or-less flat ever since.
How accurate are any of these figures? Without on-site inspections, it's impossible to say for sure: As a report by the Council on Foreign Relations noted a decade ago, "China stands out as the least transparent by far of all the nuclear-weapon states."

Yet despite the opacity, the consensus view among China watchers is to go with the low estimates. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists insists the Chinese are "not in the business of trying to reach [nuclear] parity with the U.S. or Russia. They're not hiding hundreds and hundreds of missiles in these tunnels." The tunnels, he adds, are China's "typical game of hiding what they have and protecting their relatively limited missile force."

Mr. Karber isn't persuaded. "One kilometer of tunneling is approximately equal to the cost of four or five nuclear weapons and certainly several delivery systems," he notes. Why would China devote such vast resources to building a protective network of tunnels, while devoting comparatively few to the weapons the tunnels are meant to protect?
Then too, there is the question of whether Beijing's declared nuclear policies are believable. Beijing insists that it has a "no first use" policy. Yet in 2005, PLA Maj. Gen. Zhu Chengdu told The Wall Street Journal that China would launch nuclear attacks on "hundreds of, or two hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. came to Taiwan's aid in the event of a war with the mainland. 

Beijing also claims to adhere to a policy of maintaining a small nuclear force, described by one Chinese general as a "minimum means of reprisal." Here too Mr. Karber has his doubts.
China is in the midst of a major nuclear modernization effort that includes building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles reportedly capable of delivering multiple warheads. It fields an estimated force of nearly 1,300 tactical and theater missile systems that can be tipped with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead—the ambiguity itself giving China immense strategic leverage in the event of war.
Mr. Karber also suspects China may have up to five missiles for every one of its mobile launcher vehicles. If so, those "reloads" would go far to explain the discrepancy between China's observed number of mobile launchers—one of the reasons for thinking China has a relatively small number of missiles—and Mr. Karber's suspicions about the true size of its arsenal.

What purpose would a large and presumably invulnerable Chinese arsenal serve? For decades, nuclear experts have understood that the key to "winning" a nuclear exchange is to have an effective second-strike capability, which in turn requires both a sizable and survivable force. The Second Artillery itself suggested some ideas when it announced the completion of the Underground Great Wall in 2009, claiming it gave China the ability to "withstand nuclear strikes"; that "Taiwan independence can despair"; and that China no longer had cause to be "afraid of a decisive battle with the United States." 

Mr. Kristensen writes this off as standard regime propaganda, noting that "the Chinese are known for putting out incorrect information as a form of information warfare." Yet it's unclear why the U.S. arms-control community seems happy to accept Beijing's claims about its nuclear doctrine at face value while dismissing the giant network of tunnels as the equivalent of a Chinese Potemkin village.
Mr. Karber has some thoughts on that score. The low estimate of China's arsenal, he believes, originally derived from an estimate of delivery vehicles—meaning missiles, mobile launchers, airplanes and submarines—that could be observed. After that, he suspects, "lack of new evidence and inertia seem to have kept the numbers flat."

He also fears an institutional bias in favor of the low numbers. Within the U.S. government, "the Pentagon and the intelligence community have been criticized over the years for 'worst case projections,' so now everyone avoids them like the plague." 

Outside of government, "arms-control experts have tried hard to downplay the PLA strategic effort in order to head off 'unnecessary' U.S. reaction." China, after all, is supposed to be the role model for the kind of arsenal a "responsible" nuclear power should have, and a China with an arsenal much larger than commonly believed would be the ultimate inconvenient truth for those pushing for steeper nuclear cuts.
Mr. Karber is a careful, deliberate man, who favors negotiated arms-control with China. In speaking to me, he repeatedly insists that his research is far from definitive and cannot substitute for a real intelligence-gathering effort. He also admits that it's possible—if only just—that the Chinese have led with the tunnels in order to stock them later with weapons, launchers and missiles.

Yet for all of the uncertainties, there is little doubt about the tunnels themselves, which the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time this year in its annual report on the Chinese military. And nobody who cares about the nuclear balance can look away from the mountain of evidence Mr. Karber has compiled, much less fail to consider what it might imply. That goes especially for the Obama administration, which has moved forward with an ambitious agenda of deep nuclear cuts with Russia as if China's arsenal barely existed.
That assumption needs urgent reconsideration. The alternative is for China, steeped in a 2,500 year military tradition of concealment, deception and surprise, to announce—at a time and in a manner of its choosing—its supremacy in a field that we have foolishly abandoned to our dreams.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204346104576639502894496030.html?KEYWORDS=Stephens

About Apple Lion OS

With Lion, Apple claims that it has added more than 250 new features since 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here's Apple's walk-through of features and benefits.

http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html?cid=CDM-US-DM-P0010787&cp=em-P0010787-177303&sr=em 
Touch is a big deal in the mobile world. You can't lug a keyboard and mouse around with you everywhere. That's why tablets, smartphones and other gadgets are touch-based.

Well, Apple is bringing that to Macs. Its laptops already have built-in multi-touch trackpads. Apple also sells a multi-touch trackpad for its desktops and iMacs.

That's why Lion will have full support for multi-touch gestures. You can zoom, pinch, scroll and swipe. It gives you an easy way to control your on-screen content. You'll find it popping up a lot as I go through Lion's features.

Next up are full-screen applications. OS X has always lacked a true full-screen mode for programs. You don't have the maximize button like you do in Windows.

Now, however, OS X allows programs to go full-screen. The program will even cover the dock and top Finder bar. You can use a swiping gesture to move between full-screen applications.

To start, it will mostly be Apple programs that have this feature. However, developers will be integrating this with future third-party programs. Soon, it should be available in all applications.  

Mission Control is the next new feature. It's actually a conglomeration of several existing features. It combines Expose, Spaces, Dashboard and better previewing.
You can enter Mission Control using an upward three-finger swipe. It lets you view all your open programs and documents. Plus, you can easily create and manage workspaces. You can even preview running programs using touch gestures.

Next up is the Mac App Store. This isn't actually a new feature. You can visit it right now. However, it is now fully integrated into Lion.

That makes finding and installing new applications much easier. It also allows in-app purchasing, push notifications and extra security. So it will be similar to the App Store in iOS.

Lion is going to feature a new option for launching programs. It's appropriately called Launchpad. You open it using a pinch gesture. (I told you gestures would keep popping up!)
Launchpad shows you a grid of installed applications. It looks somewhat like the home screen in iOS. You can quickly browse for the application you want to run.

OS X now supports a feature called Resume. When you open a program or system window, it will appear exactly as you last left it. That includes size, position, toolbars and highlighted text.

This is supposed to increase productivity. You don't have to spend time arranging things just as you like them. Once you set them, they'll always open that way.

Similar to that is the new Auto Save feature. Every document you create will be automatically saved. You don't even have to think about it.

Auto Save is controlled through the document's name on the top bar. For example, you can lock the document to prevent auto saving. You can duplicate the file or revert to the last-opened state.

There is also an option to Browse All Versions. A new document version is saved every time something changes. You can also create manual snapshots. This means, you can review all the versions at any point.

If you accidentally changed something, just go back and get it. Changes can be copied and pasted between versions. Multiple versions of a document are stored within a single file. It keeps you from creating clutter with multiple files.
Next up is AirDrop. This is a peer-to-peer sharing system. It makes it simple to share files with other AirDrop users.
Your computer will auto-detect any other users on your network. Just drag a file to that user. It will send them a notification; they can start downloading the file. The transfer is fully encrypted to prevent snooping.

Finally, Apple has upgraded its built-in Mail program. It has a new layout with two or three columns. You can more quickly browse through your mail and folders.
Searching through your mail is easier with intelligent searching rules. There is also a conversation view for following a thread of email. Neither of these is revolutionary, but it's nice to see Mail finally include them.

Those are the main features Apple covered in the keynote. However, there are still over 200 more. This includes things like better searching, system-wide spelling auto-correct and streamlined file dragging. A lot of the new features really tweak and polish existing features.


The good news is that Lion will only cost $30! Plus, you only need to buy one copy for all your authorized Macs. That means you can install it on any Macs linked to your iTunes and Mac App Store account.

Apple is also offering an Up-To-Date upgrade. Any Mac purchased on June 6 or after gets a free upgrade to Lion. However, you will need to request the upgrade within 30 days of purchase.

Now for the not-so-good news. Apple says you need to be running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to upgrade. There is no information yet on upgrades from other versions.
The reason you need Snow Leopard is that Lion won't be available on a disc. It can only be acquired from the Mac App Store. The App Store was added in Snow Leopard.

Apple says the Lion upgrade will be 4 gigabytes. That's a very large file. You'll need a fast Internet connection or a lot of patience to get it. A 1.3 megabit-per-second connection will take over 7 hours to download it.

There are also some hardware restrictions to consider. Unlike previous OS X versions, Lion only runs on Intel Core 2 Duo processors and newer. If you have a PowerPC or Intel Core Duo processor, forget it. However, any computer purchased after 2006 should be okay.

There are still some upgrade questions to be answered. What do you do if you don't have Internet? How do businesses and schools go about upgrading? Apple hasn't commented on this yet. I'm sure it will before Lion is launched, however.

Macs are great computers. You might be considering getting one. Learn more about what you should know before you buy:

• There are several types of Macs available. Find out which one is right for you.
• Macs are reputed to be immune to viruses. Unfortunately, this isn't true. Learn how to secure your Mac from threats.
• Mac has almost all the software you could want. However, you might need a Windows-only program. Get instructions for installing Windows on your Mac.

 http://www.komando.com/toolbox.aspx?mode=print&id=10915

About Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon's and Apple's recently announced cloud computing services have generated a lot of buzz. 

The "cloud" simply refers to the Internet. "Cloud computing" refers to software and services that run over the Internet. 

Webmail like Gmail and Hotmail are considered cloud computing. So are online backup services.


You can access cloud computing services and data from virtually any Web connection. Here are Amazon's and Apple's cloud services and the advantages they offer.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon Cloud Drive provides 5 gigabytes of free storage. That holds about 1,000 songs, 2,000 photos or 20 minutes of high-definition video. There is a 2 GB size limit per file. You can upload documents, videos, music, photos and more.
You get unlimited access to your files from up to eight devices. Amazon will upgrade your account to 20 GB for a year at no charge. You just have to buy an MP3 album. 

If you need more storage, Amazon offers paid plans. They start at 20 GB and top out at 1,000 GB (1 terabyte). You'll pay $1 per gigabyte per year. Plans renew automatically.
There are different ways to upload and download files. You can store MP3s purchased from Amazon on Cloud Drive automatically. Purchased music won't count against your storage limit. You can upload or download single files via your Web browser. To download multiple MP3s, you'll need the Amazon MP3 downloader. It runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and OS X.

Clicking a music file from your account will open the Amazon Cloud Player. You can listen to your music directly from the Web. You can only play MP3 files or AAC (M4A) files that are DRM-free. There's also a Cloud Player app for Android phones and tablets.

Apple iCloud

iCloud is a free service that replaces MobileMe. It is integrated into apps and iTunes. Some iCloud features appear in iTunes 10.3 beta, but the full roll-out is this fall. iCloud provides 5 GB of free storage. You can also store up to 20,000 songs purchased from iTunes. Other purchased content and photos don't count against your limit.

When you purchase a song from iTunes, you can download it to any of your devices. Past purchases are available, and you can have music downloaded automatically. You can't play music directly from iCloud. You must download it.

You probably have music purchased from another store or ripped from CD. In that case, there's iTunes Match ($25 yearly). It scans your music collection. You can listen to music already in iTunes. If music isn't available, you can upload it from your collection.

iCloud isn't just about music, though. Photo Stream syncs photos taken on your iOS device with other devices. You can view and download photos to other iOS devices, PCs, Macs and Apple TVs. A Photo Stream album containing your last 1,000 photos is created. New photos are stored for 30 days.

iCloud also backs up a variety of other data, like apps, text messages and iWork documents. You get a free email address that works across all your devices. And it stores your calendar and contacts and syncs entries across all your devices. If you choose, you can create a calendar to share with your entire family.

To get all the features of iCloud, you'll need iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Mac users need OS X Lion. It is available in July for $30. Windows users need Vista or Windows 7. Outlook 2007 or 2010 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.

As users, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. No longer is our data, music, media, photos, and documents tied to a particular computer at a specific location. When all this moves into the cloud, access to your files is literally at your fingertips.

http://www.komando.com/toolbox.aspx?mode=print&id=10910

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Halloween Music Playlists

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080729234225AAPilbU

Life Explained in Graphs

http://rammygram.com/index.php/2010/08/12/life-explained-by-graphs/


http://www.thethinkingblue.com/fun/yourlife.html

Thanks for Doreen for this one !

Steve Job's Biography

Some information from the book is already starting to leak out. Take a look at the links below
Read more


http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/preview-steve-jobs-biographer-on-60-minutes-on-sunday/9549?tag=nl.e101

• Official site: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• Jobs questioned authority all his life, book says (Associated Press)
• Steve Jobs: Android a ’stolen product’ (ZDNet)
• Biographer: Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery (CBS News)
• Steve Jobs and biological father unknowingly met, biographer says (CBS News)
• Steve Jobs biography reveals he told Obama, ‘You’re headed for a one-term presidency’ (Huffington Post)
• Amazon: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

American Slang

http://www.slangsite.com/slang/G.html

The Beauty of Math

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=h60r2HPsiuM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Thanks Kathy for this fascinating video !

Psych Central - Dr. Phil's Personality Test

How Do Others Perceive You? Quiz

Instructions: Click on the link below and answer the questions below honestly about yourself.  The quiz is automatically scored and tells you how how others might see you.

http://psychcentral.com/personquiz.htm

Not done yet?  Here's more personality tests?


http://psychcentral.com/quizzes.htm

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
-- Albert Einstein

Thanks Carolynn for this one ! 

Steve Jobs and the Coolest Show on Earth

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203388804576614951355580150.html?KEYWORDS=Gelernter
Computing is a young, heedless industry unused to reflection. The tragic death of Steve Jobs at 56 is the first event that has ever forced this hyperactive industry to sit still, pipe down, and think about what matters. Nearly everyone in the technology world is moved by his death, as we were all moved by his life.

Jobs was an original, but he was also the latest of a long line of seers all carrying the same message: Technology is design. To be great, technology must be beautiful.
Whatever his formal titles, at Apple and the other companies he created, bought or shook up, Jobs was always designer-in-chief. He knew from the start that his task was to tell engineers, here's how it should look, sound, feel; here's how the controls should work; it should be this big and cost that much. Now do it. Let me know when you're finished. 

Steve Jobs and the original Macintosh personal computer, 1984

Jobs brought about the invention of some of history's most elegant machines: the iStuff—pods, phones, pads—the handsome and influential Next Computer of 1988 and, above all, the Apple Macintosh of 1984, prototype of virtually every desktop and laptop computer in the world today. He always saw himself as an artist. The first Macintoshes shipped with the designers' and engineers' signatures molded inside the case. Jobs transformed the computing industry from a specialist supplier of complex, expensive machinery for businessmen, engineers and scientists to the coolest show on Earth, a world-wide force whose products touch nearly everyone, everywhere. 

He told the computing industry: Take off that lab coat, lose the plastic pocket protector, stop fidgeting with the damned calculator, shake out your hair. Who would have thought it? You're beautiful! He turned the industry into a supermodel: elegant, classy, incomparably desirable, with money to burn.
He and Stephen Wozniak founded Apple in 1976. Mr. Wozniak was an engineer of soon-to-be-legendary brilliance; he was obsessed with the elegance and beauty of the electronic circuitry he designed. 

As for Jobs, no one could figure out what he was. He was no engineer or technologist. He was no conventional businessman either. Like everyone who counts most in the world, he made himself up as he went along, improvised himself out of scratch, occupied a job category whose total size was always one.

For several decades the tale has been told around technology campfires of how Jobs (like Jason of Greek myth) led a famous band of adventurers in 1979 from Apple—already a big, successful company but still scruffy and oddball—into the heart of Xerox research. They emerged with the ideas that transformed the industry. 

At Xerox in the 1970s, a group of brilliant researchers invented the personal computer—they called it the Alto—complete with onscreen windows, menus, icons, graphics and the mouse, all more-or-less as we know them today. Alan Kay was foremost among these genius innovators. Mr. Kay built, in turn, on the 1960s inventions of Douglas Engelbart. Mr. Engelbart was first to develop the mouse, the onscreen window, and the whole idea of computers that did more important things than compute. He wanted computers to solve everyday problems, do word-processing and make pictures and graphs instead of (only) performing complex numerical calculations, controlling intricate machinery, and keeping inventories and payrolls up-to-date.

Corporate Xerox was unimpressed with the Alto. It was expensive, and who needed a personal computer anyway? "Personal computer" sounded like "personal aircraft carrier." The market had to be smallish. Xerox accordingly made a deal with Apple whereby a group from Apple was ushered into the top-secret research boudoir in Palo Alto and allowed to look and ask questions. Jobs led the Apple group, and he understood right away that the Xerox researchers had done something tremendous. They had made an easy-to-use computer that spoke pictures instead of numbers. Jobs saw that a cheap version of this elegant computer might be gigantically popular and hugely important. And he ran the project that rolled out the Apple Macintosh in 1984. That Mac was a milestone of modern history.

But in the short-term, the Mac was a loser. IBM's PC—which had no onscreen windows or menus or icons, no mouse, no cuteness or easy-to-use-ness and zero elegance—slammed the Mac during the 1980s. Meanwhile, Jobs quarreled with Apple management, and in 1985 he was asked to leave. (In 1996 he made his triumphant return.) 

But one man who had been an outspoken admirer of the Mac from the very start was Bill Gates of Microsoft. When Microsoft finally managed to build a Mac look-alike in 1990, the Mac vision triumphed—either in Apple's original form or Microsoft's cheaper, nearly-as-good version. Douglas Engelbart's vision, improved and perfected by Alan Kay, refined and selected for greatness by Steve Jobs, purveyed to the teeming masses by Bill Gates, became the desktop computer—and a full generation later, 27 years after it was born (which equals about 27 million in this breakneck industry), it still is. 

The 1984 Mac was catastrophically slow, had a laughable 128,000 bytes of memory, and a tiny nine-inch screen. It looked like an upright shoebox plus keyboard and mouse. But if you were to sit down at that ancient, obsolete museum-piece of a machine today, you would be right at home. The windows and menus, icons and mouse, onscreen rectangles with rounded corners and casual, easy-going pronouncements when the machine made a mistake or you did would all be familiar.

Steve Jobs had a genius for seeing what was good and refining, repackaging and reselling it with dazzling panache. He knew what engineering was for, he understood elegance and he made machines that were works of art. We miss him already.

San Francisco Highlights

Weather and Clothing

S.F. can be cool and rainy. Bring tennis shoes. And a folding umbrella or something to cover your head. 

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=37.774929,-122.419415

Even in the "conservative" financial district, it's commonplace to see women dressed up but walking the streets in gym shoes for comfort and dryness.


But, S.F. can also be very dry and beautiful.


Restaurants

Try the great Italian district and also Chinatown. Next to each other.


http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=San+Francisco&ns=1&find_loc=San+Francisco%2C+CA#attrs=RestaurantsPriceRange2.1&find_desc=Restaurants


At the wharf, we had a great reasonably priced meal at the Eagle Cafe, which now has a 2nd name, also called "the Tin Fish" see below,


THE EAGLE CAFE/ TIN FISH


Pier 39, Space A-201


San Francisco, CA 94133


Phone: (415)-433-3689

http://www.thetinfish.net/right-tinfish.php?nav_ID=107&nav_Parent=104


http://www.yelp.com/biz/eagle-cafe-san-francisco


Make sure you get validated when you park in the parking structure 1 hour before 6pm and after 6pm validation is good for 3 hours.


At Fisherman's wharf, try the Ghiradelli Choc Factory, the Boudin sour dough bread stores (which are also throughout the city).


More info here:


http://www.frommers.com/destinations/sanfrancisco/0029020791.html


Menus


http://sanfrancisco.menupages.com/restaurants/all-areas/fishermans-wharf/all-cuisines/tags/dinner/





Sightseeing

Top Tourist Sites

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/travel-tips-and-articles/68242


If you have time, Fisherman's Wharf is an fun tourist spot. Just be forewarned about some of it's more negatives:


http://www.sftravel.com/fish.html


You can ride the cable car from downtown over to Fisherman's Wharf. The Powell-Mason line begins at the Powell/ Market turntable, and the line runs from there up and over Nob Hill and down to Bay Street at Fisherman's Wharf, an incredibly beautiful view. Just get there early, it gets crowded.


http://www.sfcablecar.com/routes.html

13 Dogs Skipping Rope !

The Legacy of Steve Jobs

from:  http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2011/the_legacy_of_steve_jobs.asp

"Steve Jobs set out to change the world. He succeeded."

On October 5, 2011, we said goodbye to arguably the person most singularly responsible for the way we have been using computers (and, more recently, entertaining ourselves and making phone calls) for nearly 30 years.
In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I should state up front for the record that I have never personally purchased an Apple product. It was (and is) easy at times to poke fun at the “Cult of Apple”. Like so many of my contemporaries, though, many of my formative computing cycles came on an Apple ][, and I have always admired the design (and marketing!) of Apple products.

Visionary Innovator

In the hours and days following the death of Steve Jobs, there were a lot of comments in the world of social media asserting that he had never actually invented anything. This is not only completely untrue (Jobs is listed as the primary or co-inventor on almost 350 US patents or patent applications), but completely irrelevant: claiming that Steve Jobs was not an innovator because he “didn’t invent anything” is like saying that Nikola Tesla wasn’t an innovator because he didn’t invent electricity, or that Henry Ford wasn’t an innovator because he didn’t invent the internal combustion engine.

Contributions

It is beyond the scope of this Tech Tip to serve as an exhaustive compendium of all things Apple, all things Steve Jobs, or even as a complete list of all of Jobs’ groundbreaking and innovative contributions to the world of computers and consumer electronics, but here are a notable few:

The Mouse & GUI

This one almost goes without saying. Nearly everyone knows the story of how Jobs “stole” the ideas of the mouse and the GUI (Graphical User Interface) from Xerox PARC to develop the Lisa and, later, Macintosh computers. Remember using computers before they had mice? I do. Were it not for Jobs and the success of the Mac, which of course inspired Microsoft Windows, who knows how or when the mouse and GUI would have made their way into mainstream computing.

“Fonts”

Before 1984, you got any computer font you wanted – as long as what you wanted was the default system font. One of the biggest features of the early, black and white-only Macintosh computers was the ability to use different typefaces not only on-screen, but in print. This seems incredibly pedestrian now, but for a home computer user to be able to do this back then was revolutionary. My friends and I joked that “everyone with a Mac was a ‘desktop publisher’. ” The joke was on us, though: that was the idea all along.

USB

This one’s for the EE (Electrical Engineering) Geeks out there, but no less relevant for all of us. Obviously, Apple didn’t invent the Universal Serial Bus. But they probably inspired it: The Apple Desktop Bus (invented by Steve Wozniak) was simple, inexpensive method for connecting a variety of external devices, including keyboards and mice, to a host computer. ADB had four pins: Data, Power on, +5 VDC, and Ground. Sound familiar? The first system to use ADB was the Apple IIGS in 1986. The USB working group didn’t begin development until 1994.

AppleTalk

AppleTalk as a networking protocol has, for all practical purposes, been gone for a long time now, having been deprecated by Ethernet (TCP/IP). The point though, is that AppleTalk shipped with every Macintosh computer beginning in 1984. This meant that all Macs were “networkable” right out of the box. Ever try to network a few IBM “clone” computers together before, say, 1990? I did, and two words come to mind: “expensive”, and “nightmare”. Clearly, Jobs and Apple understood very early on the importance of easily and inexpensively connecting people, by way of their computers, together. After all, that’s what they set out to do.

PDA

Anyone remember the Apple Newton? I do. It was generally considered the first commercially-viable Personal Digital Assistant (remember those?) Incidentally, “personal digital assistant” was a term coined by Apple CEO John Sculley to describe the Newton. It didn’t work particularly well, and was later supplanted primarily by the Palm Pilot (and variants). But like a number of other products on this list, it was an industry first – a concept, if not a product, that changed the way we work with information and with each other.

iPod/iPhone/iPad

The iPod, iPhone, and iPad aren’t category killers. Like the Newton, they’re category creators. There were no digital music players to speak of before the iPod, no “smartphones” as we define them today before the iPhone, and no tablets (other than in Star Trek) before the iPad. These devices have changed the way we listen to music, read books, watch movies and TV, and connect with our friends and family.

iTunes

Without a doubt, one of Steve Jobs’ single greatest contributions to the world was convincing the archaic, slow-moving music industry to not only break up its product (overpriced CDs) and sell songs à la carte, but also to stop insisting on useless, annoying, and fair use-infringing copy-protection schemes. He was still working on applying the same concepts to movies and TV shows.

MacOS/iOS

A quick nod to the powerful, intuitive, aesthetically-brilliant software that powers Apple’s computers and mobile devices.

The Personal Computer

“PC” became a hardware, software, and ideological “them” to Jobs’ “us” at Apple, but of course it always really stood for “Personal Computer”. Jobs didn’t invent computers, or even personally-owned computers – I remember seeing ads for Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80 “PC” for $999 in 1977. I used an IBM “PC Jr. ” in 1985. But Steve Wozniak and Apple, through the vision of Steve Jobs, made computers personal.

Final Thoughts

In the end, Steve Jobs’ legacy is so much more than a vast laundry list of cool inventions and fun gadgets: Steve Jobs set out to change the world. He succeeded.

Are Smartphones Becoming Smart Alecks?

New Devices Dish Out Sarcasm, Tell Jokes; 'Two iPhones Walk Into a Bar'

Now even your phone talks back.

One of the top draws to Apple's iPhone 4S is its new speech recognition software, called Siri, that's designed to talk back. In San Francisco, Ian Sherr hears some new owners' favorite questions.

Matt Legend Gemmell, a software designer from Edinburgh, got a new Apple Inc. iPhone on Friday and asked it: "Who's your daddy?"
"You are," the phone answered, in the voice of an authoritative man.

Earlier, he commanded: "Beam me up." This time, the iPhone responded: "Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode."

The real science of artificial intelligence is finally catching up to science fiction. HAL 9000, the creepy sentient computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," has been incarnated, in the form of Siri, a virtual personal assistant that comes with Apple's new iPhone 4S, which arrived in stores Friday.

How Smart Is Siri?

The phone takes verbal commands and questions, and responds with computer-generated speech.
Real humans are responding to this alarming breakthrough by asking their iPhones ridiculous questions. 

The good news is, Siri has a sense of humor.

Micah Gantman, the director of mobile business at software firm HasOffers.com in Seattle, asked his iPhone: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" It answered: "Depends if you're talking about African or European wood."

Nicky Kelly, a 40-year-old from Suffolk, U.K., asked her iPhone: "Tell me a joke." It answered: "Two iPhones walk into a bar...I forget the rest."

There are already websites to collect some of Siri's best material, including one called "S— That Siri Says." Some of the responses appear to be pre-programmed.

It's what's inside that counts - such is true in the case of the new iPhone, the iPhone 4S. Should you upgrade? Walt Mossberg gives his assessment and tests the personal assistant feature, Siri, live on today's special edition of Digits.

Google Inc. is in on the AI joke, too, with its smartphone and search technology. 

After 13 years of research, some of the world's smartest engineers have created algorithms able to answer questions such as "What's that movie that's backwards and the guy can't remember anything?" (Answer: "Memento.")

Hold a Google Android phone up to your mouth and ask "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" It will answer, in text on the screen, "42," a reference to the favorite geek book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
A lot of work went into so much artificial sarcasm.

 

A customer displays an iPhone 4S at a Sprint store in Palo Alto, Calif., Friday.

The creators of Siri put "deep thought" into the personality of their software, says Norman Winarsky, a co-founder of the company that was bought by Apple for $200 million in 2010. Siri was born out of an artificial intelligence project at SRI International, a research institute. 

Siri has two distinct systems at its heart. One listens and translates what customers are saying, the other interprets the meaning behind the request and responds. It's in that last part where the sass comes in.

"There were many conversations within the team about whether it should be gender neutral" or "should have an 'attitude,' " said Mr. Winarsky, who didn't go to Apple, and still works at SRI. The result, before the software was bought by Apple, was "occasionally a light attitude," he said.

When Apple began integrating Siri into the iPhone, the team focused on keeping its personality friendly and humble—but also with an edge, according to a person who worked at Apple on the project. As Apple's engineers worked on the software, they were often thinking, "How would we want a person to respond?" this person said.

The Siri group, one of the largest software teams at Apple, fine-tuned Siri's responses in an attempt to forge an emotional tie with its customers. To that end, Siri regularly uses a customer's nickname in responses, as well as those of other important people and places in his or her life. "We thought of it almost as a person on the phone," this person said. 

An Apple spokeswoman declined to answer questions about how Siri works. It uses different voices in each of its available markets: female in the U.S., Australia and Germany, and male in the U.K. and France.

Some of the Siri's jokes were apparently built by geeks, for geeks. Aral Balkan, a U.K.-based software designer and self-described "Renaissance Geek" asked Siri: "Do you know Eliza?"—a reference to ELIZA, one of the first experiments in natural language processing by computers, created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Siri's response: "Do you know Eliza? She was my first teacher!"
Ask the iPhone to "Open the pod bay doors"—a reference to the movie "2001"—and some users say it answers back in a frighteningly slow voice, reminiscent of HAL 9000, the computer that leaves an astronaut to die in space. "I'm afraid I can't do that," says Siri.

Sometimes she punctuates that answer with, "We intelligent agents will never live that down, apparently."
What makes the current crop of artificial intelligence services so fun isn't just that they can parrot back answers to prescribed questions. Computers have done that for years, including a 2004 website called "The Subservient Chicken," which featured a video of a man in chicken costume who would appear to do whatever a user would type into a box on a website. (Behind the scenes, software recognized more than 400 commands for which it could play video snippets, including "build a fort" and "walk like an Egyptian.")

Apple's advances in artificial intelligence can carry on limited conversations about ridiculous topics. Tell Siri "I need to hide a body," and it asks "What kind of place are you looking for?" and lists a number of options, including mines and swamps. 

Understanding the quirkier fascinations of the human mind is the next frontier for artificial intelligence, said Henry Lieberman, a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab. For the past 12 years, his lab has been gathering "common sense" human knowledge, and putting it into a database. So far, it has one million entries. The average human understands about 100 million different "common sense" ideas.

That database, which is being built by volunteers online, has as much personality and humor as the people who contribute to it, he said. Already, it is over-weighted in entries on topics such as kittens. "We have a lot of knowledge about trees, not so much about aardvarks," he said.

Siri, too, doesn't have the answer to everything.

Paul Johnson, a photographer from Lynn Haven, Fla. asked it: "What's the meaning of life?" Siri's answer: "That's easy....It's a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general."

Other users have gotten a different response. When blogger Joshua Topolsky asked Siri about the meaning of life, it said: "I can't answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576631271813770508.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

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