discomBOByoulated

Android sneaks up on Apple in tablet market

2012-01-27T19:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/01/26/apple_loses_ground_to_android_in_world_tablet_market/

Google's Android increased its share of the tablet market from 29% to 39% in the fourth quarter compared with the year-earlier period as Apple's iPad declined from 68% to 58%, according to a Strategy Analytics report. The research firm also found that Microsoft achieved a 1.5% share, up from zero in 2010. Overall, tablet shipments reached 27 million units during the fourth quarter, a 150% increase from the year before

Shortpaw Acronyms Translated

2012-01-25T16:15:00.000-05:00

From Sally to Doreen With Love, these are really cute.

http://thedantediaries.wordpress.com/shortpaw-acronyms-translated/

Some Favorite Shortpaws (Acronyms)

BOL: Bark Out Loud

BBO: Big Bark Out

BAYL: Bark At You Later

BMTO: Barking My Tail Off

BMJTO: Barking My Jolly Tail Off (this is for the Christmas Season)

BMNYTO: Barking My New Year’s Tail Off!

BMBTO: Barking My Bilingual Tail Off!

BMKTO: Barking My Kingly Tail Off

BMFTO: Barking My Flat Tail Off

BIMMO: Barking In MY Mind Only

BUMB: Barking Under My Breath

BBB: Bummed Beyond Belief

BLAM: Bark Like A Maniac

HBB: Happy Beyond Belief

BDFF: Best Dog Friend Forever

BLWM: Bark Less Wag More

LWW: Lick – Woof – Wag

JFI: Just Fetch It

GSY: Go Scratch Yourself

GW: Guilt Works

HATM: Howling At The Moon

TOPA: The Original Party Animal

FDMM: Flat Dante Mini Me

MHLC: Missing HER Like Crazy

MMDRNF: My Momma Didn’t Raise No Fool

TTB: The Traveling Boy

SUAB: Sit Up And Beg

SBB: Spoiled Beyond Belief

PBB: Proud Beyond Belief

SBALC: Sit Back And Look Cute

ROAPD: Roll Over And Play Dead

OLAL: Out Like A Light

ITDO: In This Dog’s Opinion

IGTBM: It’s Great To Be Me

IAAM: It’s All About Me

ICHW: I Can Hardly Wait

HLCOLGG: How Lucky Can One Little Guy Get

BSMLGH: Be Still My Little Guy Heart

IGBWALHFH: I Get By With A Little Help From HER

HWTMF: Having Way Too Much Fun

TP: Think Pawsitive

TPU: Two Paws Up

TILAM: Take It Like A Man

TILALG: Takin’ It Like A Little Guy

TCOB: Takin’ Care Of Business

TGTBT: Too Good To Be True

TSCLG: Tech Savvy Cute Little Guy

PCQ: Personal Cuteness Quotient

MYLC: Missing You Like Crazy

PFA: Paws For Applause

TTTP: Talk To The Paw

TCDI: The Cat Did It

TCFW: Too Cute For Words

WTCFW: Way Too Cute For Words (this one from MTM)

TCFWWOAD: Too Cute For Words WithOut A Doubt (Thanks to MTM for this one!)

TCLGITH: The Cutest Little Guy In The Hood (another one from MTM…ye haa)

PTP: Pounding the Pavement or Pushing the Pedals

HITR: Human In The Room

CITA: Caught In The Act

CSB: Can’t Stop Barking

CPOP: Completely Pooped Out Pup

GUMB: Growling Under My Breath

GUMJB: Growling Under My Jolly Breath

GUMVB: Growling Under My Virtual Breath

NBFALG: Not Bad For A Little Guy

SAYN: Smiling At You Now

RMT: Read My Tail

TNTB: Trying Not To Bark

WMLO: Working My Legs Off

WWW: Who’s Walking Who

CLG: Cute Little Guy (that’s me!!!)

LGL: Little Guy Lovin’

LH: Love HER (I really, really do)

DE: Dante Effect

4-L: Four-Legged

TFFFC: Too Fit For Fat Clothes (this one’s for HER)

On eBay, It Pays to Snipe - Game Theory - Free Sniping App

2012-01-23T19:14:00.001-05:00

BayGenie eBay Auction Sniper Free
Download Now CNET Installer Enabled

Date added:
November 18, 2011
Price: Free
Operating system:
Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/Server 2008/7

Product ranking:
#1 in Auction Software

CNET Editors' review May 08, 2009

For users who are frustrated by being outbid in the last seconds of an eBay auction, BayGenie makes you that last-second bidder. This unique software lets you automatically bid on a product as the clock winds down, no matter where you are.

This freeware program has a very basic interface that shouldn't take long for any user to understand. The bulk of the screen is dominated by a two column check list detailing a user's options with the free version of the software and with the paid version. However, the bottom right corner of the program will be what interests most users. Here you can set up your future eBay victories by entering your eBay ID, password, the item number you wish to bid on, your maximum bid, and how many seconds before the close of the auction you would like your bid to be placed. From here, a screen outlines your choices and asks you to be positive this is your choice.

This program is simple to use, but its major complaints come from its limitations without purchasing the Pro version of BayGenie. The biggest drawback is that users can only bid on one item at a time with the free version. However, if you don't bid on multiple items at once, this is a great download.

Publisher's Description

Read more: BayGenie eBay Auction Sniper Free - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

http://download.cnet.com/BayGenie-eBay-Auction-Sniper-Free/3000-6905_4-10569541.html#ixzz1kKasYO1O

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2006-06-25-ebay-physics_x.htm

On eBay, it pays to snipe

Posted 6/25/2006 6:21 PM ET

E-mail | Print |

RELATED PAPERS

Roth, Alvin E. and Axel Ockenfels, "Last-Minute Bidding and the Rules for Ending Second-Price Auctions: Evidence from eBay and Amazon Auctions on the Internet," American Economic Review, 92 (4), September 2002, 1093-1103. Ariely, Dan, Axel Ockenfels, and Alvin E. Roth,"An Experimental Analysis of Ending Rules in Internet Auctions," Rand Journal of Economics, 36, 4, Winter 2005, 891-908. Ockenfels, Axel and Alvin E. Roth, "Late and Multiple Bidding in Second-Price Internet Auctions: Theory and Evidence Concerning Different Rules for Ending an Auction," Games and Economic Behavior, 55, 2006, 297-320 Axel Ockenfels and Alvin E. Roth, "The Timing of Bids in Internet Auctions: Market Design, Bidder Behavior, and Artificial Agents," AI Magazine, Fall 2002, 79-88.

Thank goodness for science. How else would we know the best way to nab those barely-used weed whackers, dumbbells or duck-shape salt shakers on eBay? In a study that gives the lie to the notion that eggheads don't like to eyeball online auctions like normal folks, a study by South Korean physicists confirms via some elaborate mathematical modeling that "sniping" — waiting for the very last second to submit your bid on that Elvis-shape throw rug — is indeed "a rational and effective strategy to win in an eBay auction."

Founded in 1995, eBay is the king of online auction sites. Sellers put up items for sale and buyers bid up the price. Thanks to the Internet's lack of state sales tax and the public's thirst for other people's garage sale items, the company has grown into a firm that amassed $4.55 billion in revenue last year. The service sets a deadline on bids for items, which has given rise to the practice of "sniping," bidding at the last minute to deny other bidders time to outbid you.

Savvy buyers have taken to the practice in swarms. Some companies even exist to snipe for you. Sellers, however, have grumbled that the practice keeps winning bid prices lower than they would be in a more open-ended auction, in which prices may be driven up by competition between buyers. If nobody bids until the last second, it's inevitably just a (relatively) low-bidding person who puts in the highest-price bid and walks away with the item.

To test whether sniping is a smart way to do things or just truncates normal bidding, the South Korean team at Seoul National University produced a "master equation" for how bidding proceeds (it's nk(t+1) — nk(t) = w(k-1)(t)*n(k-1)(t) — wk(t)*nk(t) + sigma(k,1)*u(t), if you really want to know), and then tested it against a massive number of auction records, some 264,073 items sold in one day on eBay and another 287,018 items sold in one year by eBay's Korean partner.

Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.

The finding is no surprise to Harvard economist Alvin Roth, who has studied sniping from an economics viewpoint since 2002 with colleague Axel Ockenfels of Germany's University of Cologne. They came to similar conclusions. "I think you might do the most good if you advise bidders to form an opinion of how much they are willing to pay for an item, so that they don't get caught up in a bidding war and pay more than they will be happy with," says Roth, by e-mail. "But, that being said, if they know what proxy bid they want to submit, it won't hurt them to submit it very near the end (but neither will it help them much, or often ...) So, sniping is a good strategy, for those with the time to do it," he adds.

A statement on the eBay site says: Sniping is part of the eBay experience, and all bids placed before a listing ends are valid — even if they're placed one second before the listing ends.

BONUS MATERIAL: Dan Vergano's Q&A with Alvin Roth and Axel Ockenfels

1. Do you view sniping as a problem? Some eBay sellers have complained that sniping works to artificially lower auction prices. What is your view?

Ockenfels: Sniping can help bidders to get better prices on eBay. But sellers too can profit from sniping, because the possibility of sniping may attract more bidders. For instance, sniping can lead to more bidding from experts, because by bidding late, experts can avoid giving information to others through their own early bids. Sniping can also increase the excitement and entertainment value of bidding, which again attracts more bidders.

Roth: Sniping is a feature of the auction that eBay bought into when it chose to have a hard close. They must think it adds enough to the auction, in entertainment value, in allowing experts to protect their information, etc. to make up in increased bidders what it loses in lost bids and bidding wars.

2. If your work and this South Korean paper show that sniping is rational and effective, why doesn't everyone use the strategy?

Ockenfels: On eBay, not the last bid but the highest bid wins. Furthermore, last-minute bids sometimes come in too late, after the close of the auction. So, it can be a perfectly sensible strategy to submit a bid early. In fact, depending on the situation, game theory supports both early and late bidding strategies. However, we are also seeing a lot of non-rational, naive behaviors on markets such as eBay. There is no reason to suppose that everybody always behaves in a rational and effective way. This is especially true for eBay, where many experienced and sophisticated traders interact with many unexperienced, naive bidders.

Roth: EBay isn't an English auction, it is a second price auction with proxy bids. If you're a busy guy, you might find it better to put in an early proxy bid, high enough to have a chance of winning. The winning bidder isn't the last bidder, it's the bidder with the highest proxy bid (and the earlier bidder in case of ties). So sniped bids only get lower prices when other bidders would have been willing to raise their proxy bids, but don't have the chance. That happens often enough so that sniping is a good strategy for those with the time ....

3. How does this new study's approach strike you compared to the one you published in 2002? My understanding was that it rested on game theory, so I'm just trying to see how you see things.

Ockenfels: We closely intertwine game theoretical, laboratory and field analyses. Taken together, our studies help in understanding how the market microstructure qualitatively influence participants' strategies and overall market performance. The new study looks at bidding phenomena from a very different perspective and thus takes a very different approach. It quantitatively analyzes statistical properties of dynamic bidding patterns on eBay — without addressing institutional complexities or equilibrium aspects of behavior.

Roth: We take a lot of approaches, empirical, theoretical, experimental. And so we are able to look into the multiple causes of sniping, and how they are influenced by the auction rules (and why, therefore, there's so much less late bidding on other kinds of auctions, for example.) But the big divide between physics and economics is that physicists tend to study processes that don't have any human volition in them. Molecules do what they do without forming opinions about what other molecules do. Sometimes this physics approach can also yield some insights into large markets, where each player is small enough to be inconsequential. And eBay must have looked that way to the authors of this article, since they report that in one day they have data from 264,073 auctions involving 384,058 distinct bidders. On the other hand, when I look at those numbers, what strikes me is that there were fewer than 2 bidders per auction in their data. To put it another way, a lot of auctions in their dataset had only a single bidder. Obviously conclusions about sniping are going to be different in such auctions (and in our analyses we normally exclude them).

4. Do you see a better auction strategy for online auction?

Ockenfels: What is a good bidding or selling strategy in online auctions depends on the context, such as the degree of competition and the available information about the value of the object. However, there is a fast-growing applied literature in economics on auction/market design and bidding strategies. (See Roth:http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/engineer.pdf.)

Roth: I think you might do the most good if you advise bidders to form an opinion of how much they are willing to pay for an item, so that they don't get caught up in a bidding war and pay more than they will be happy with. But, that being said, if they know what proxy bid they want to submit, it won't hurt them to submit it very near the end (but neither will it help them much, or often…) So, sniping is a good strategy, for those with the time to do it. (You can also pay a fee to third party sniping software on the web, like esnipe.com or others ....)

5. What do you see as the key point(s) to make to readers about a study like this one? How do the results apply to other auctions?

One of the general lessons that comes out of our research in "economic engineering" is: details matter! For instance, our studies demonstrate that replacing eBay's hard close by a soft close, which allows bidders to always respond to late bids, would remove the strategic incentives to snipe and thus substantially affect bidding behavior. Bidders respond to incentives, and incentives can be strongly affected by the details of the auction rules and algorithms. This is true for all auctions, including, for instance, spectrum, electricity and procurement auctions.

Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research. For past articles, visit this index page.

2012-01-19T18:03:00.000-05:00

I love my country, that's why I feel it's important to post this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yuC_4mGTs98

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

(Watch French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese translations of this video.)

TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst officewhere DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.

Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidenceliterally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.

The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimonyextracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.

The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.

The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.

NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.

The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.

This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).

Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilitiesand the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.

This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.

Retro Tech

2012-01-13T09:20:00.001-05:00

Apparently audio cassettes are so retro, they're hip.

Wearing my audio cassette t-shirt, 20 y.o.'s are telling me they love the analog crunchy sound
I have a huge library ready to remaster...
...will definitely keep the crunchy sound.

http://www.harmankardon.com/EN-US/aboutus/ScienceofSound/Pages/SoundthroughTime.aspx

http://www.roger-russell.com/magrevaudio.htm#a1969

Men's Journal 101 - Let's face it, We're afraid of Rejection

2012-01-07T07:43:00.000-05:00

http://blogs.marinij.com/katwilder/2009/10/shy.html

Buddy Hackett

2012-01-07T07:05:00.002-05:00

Just in case you forgot how funny Buddy Hackett is.

http://redux.com/stream/item/2134771/Buddy-Hackett-Wax-Job-1988?ref=c2VhcmNo

Abbey Road Mixing Board

2012-01-06T19:09:00.000-05:00

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/615785-lost-beatles-mixer-rediscovered.html

2012-01-05T20:26:00.001-05:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577142481239801336.html?mod=djemTECH_t

Barnes & Noble Inc. is the latest old-school company to discover how costly it can be to try to reinvent itself for a digital future.
The nation's largest bookstore chain warned Thursday it would lose twice as much money this fiscal year as it previously expected, and said it is weighing splitting off its growing Nook digital-book business from its aging bookstores.

Over the past 15 years, rapid technological change has transformed the company from a dominant retailing force that left smaller booksellers quaking in fear to a struggling giant grasping for a plan to ensure its long-term relevance to the publishing industry.
Barnes & Noble realized early on that e-books could appeal to consumers, but allowed Amazon.com Inc. to get an early leg up. Now it is locked in a battle with Amazon and another deep-pocketed rival, Apple Inc., to sell both electronic books and the high-tech devices consumers use to read them.

Digital technology continues to roil all manner of once-dominant companies. Former giants such as Blockbuster Inc., Circuit City and Barnes & Noble's main book-chain rival, Borders Group Inc., have struggled mightily—and in some cases, disappeared altogether—in the face of digital competitors including Netflix Inc. and Amazon. Wednesday's news that Eastman Kodak Co. was contemplating seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection underscored the severity of the technology threat.
Barnes & Noble's stock fell 17% on Thursday. The company now may be at its most critical juncture since Leonard Riggio, its chairman and largest shareholder, opened his first store in New York's Greenwich Village in 1965.

As recently as the 1990s, Barnes & Noble was known as a carnivorous competitor with the power to wipe out independent bookstores with its steeply discounted books and sprawling stores where customers could sip coffee and read in plush chairs. In New York City, the emergence of a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side was partly responsible for the mid-1990s closing of the beloved neighborhood bookseller Shakespeare & Company—the kind of narrative arc that cropped up in the movie "You've Got Mail."
Ironically, Barnes & Noble had been one of the first to recognize the potential of digital books. In 1998, it invested in NuvoMedia Inc., maker of the Rocket eBook reader, and the bookseller actively supported digital-book sales. But in 2003, it exited the still-nascent business, saying there wasn't any profit in it.

It wasn't until 2009 that Barnes & Noble re-entered the business, introducing its Nook e-reader. By then, Amazon had been selling its Kindle device for about two years, and was offering best sellers for $9.99, a fraction of what hardcover best sellers are priced at.
Apple introduced its iPad tablet in January 2010. Amazon responded with its competing Kindle Fire tablet this past September, and in November, Barnes & Noble introduced its Nook Tablet.

E-book sales have skyrocketed, jumping to $863 million in 2010, from $62 million in 2008, according to BookStats, a joint-research venture between the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers. One publisher predicted Thursday that e-books could account for as much as 40% of total revenue by the end of the year.
Although Barnes & Noble was late to the game, its devices have won critical praise, and publishers estimate today that it controls as much as 27% of the digital-books market. "We saw more growth with e-books with Barnes & Noble this Christmas than anybody else," said the publisher.

But those sales have come at an enormous cost. Developing, manufacturing and promoting e-readers and tablets requires heavy upfront spending. Barnes & Noble's spending on advertising has more than tripled since 2009, according to Kantar Media, an ad-tracking unit of WPP PLC. To promote the Nook, the retailer returned to national TV advertising in 2010, after a 14-year hiatus, buying spots on popular programs such as "American Idol."
The heavy Nook investment has squeezed Barnes & Noble's bottom line. Largely as a result, its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—a critical measure of earnings—fell to $163 million in the fiscal year ending April 30, 2011, from $281 million in fiscal 2010.

When Barnes & Noble's stock weakened, the company came under pressure from activist investor Ronald Burkle. In response, Mr. Riggio, who maintains control with a stake of about 30%, put the company up for sale in August 2010. Last May, Liberty Media Corp. made a bid to buy the business. Mr. Riggio appeared to support the bid, but Liberty Media eventually opted to invest $204 million for a 16.6% stake, receiving two board seats.
This holiday season has offered a ray of hope. Barnes & Noble said device sales had risen 70% for the nine-week period ending Dec. 31, compared with the year-ago period. It said the Nook business is likely to notch $1.5 billion in sales in the current fiscal year, compared with $880 million a year earlier. That business includes the Nook devices, digital-book sales, accessories, magazine and newspaper sales, app sales and sales of warranties.
On Thursday, Barnes & Noble increased its projected loss per share for the current fiscal year to between $1.10 and $1.40, from the 30 cents to 70 cents it reaffirmed one month ago.

Barnes & Noble blamed an unexpected shortfall of sales of the Nook Simple Touch e-reader on a Christmas where consumers embraced color digital devices, including the Nook Tablet and Amazon's Kindle Fire. The e-reader sales shortfall is significant because of its ripple effect on projected sales of related products, including e-books and accessories.
"We over-anticipated the demand for the holiday season," said William Lynch, the company's chief executive officer.
Mr. Lynch said Barnes & Noble has plenty of capital to continue financing the Nook expansion, including a $1 billion credit line.

But in a comment at an investor conference on Wednesday, Liberty Media Chief Executive Greg Maffei hinted that Barnes & Noble might need help to continue building the business. Competing with Apple and Amazon, he said, was a "big-boy game." He said Barnes & Noble may find "partners to help fund that game, meaning the public or strategic partners."
Barnes & Noble said in a statement on Thursday it was "in discussions with strategic partners including publishers, retailers and technology companies in international markets." It said that could lead to expanding the Nook business overseas.

One possibility is that Barnes & Noble could sell a minority stake in the Nook business in a public offering. The two businesses would likely have different managements and different boards. Under such a scenario, Barnes & Noble would continue to have close ties to its Nook devices. Another possibility is selling the Nook business outright.

Edward Latessa, a portfolio manager for Aria Partner, a Boston-based investment firm that owns a stake in Barnes & Noble, suggested one logical buyer could be Google Inc., whose e-book store has had only a minimal impact so far. "The Nook business alone could be worth $1.5 billion," said Mr. Latessa. The Nook runs on Google's Android software. Google declined to comment.
Another potential partner is Microsoft Corp., people familiar with the situation said. Microsoft declined to comment.

The idea for splitting off the Nook business may partly reflect the influence of Liberty Media, whose chairman, John Malone, and chief executive, Mr. Maffei, are experienced at devising complex financial structures to highlight the value of businesses. Mr. Maffei and another Liberty executive, Mark Carleton, are on Barnes & Noble's board.

"This is classic Malone," noted Maxim Group analyst John Tinker.
The idea came up during the company's long-running strategic-review process, which began in the summer of 2010, according to people familiar with the situation. Barnes & Noble executives and the board discussed how the company could increase shareholder value and improve its stock price, these people said, and separating the Nook business was one suggestion.

The idea was also embraced by Liberty, said another person familiar with the situation.
Barnes & Noble said the decision to explore the potential sale of the Nook business was a board-level decision that had the full support of the company.
Investors have shown they are in favor of companies overhauling their structures to focus their business divisions, applauding moves by McGraw-Hill Cos., Kraft Foods and other companies that separated businesses last year.
Barnes & Noble investors may not have the patience to fund Nook growth here and abroad, said Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. "It's going to require sustained investment."
—Gina Chon and Suzanne Vranica contributed
to this article.

Android Tablets - Fierce Competition In 2011?

2012-01-05T20:20:00.001-05:00

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/why-android-tablets-failed-a-postmortem/10011?tag=nl.e101

Why Android tablets failed: A postmortem

By Jason Hiner

January 5, 2012, 10:56 AM PST

Takeaway: Android tablets were expected to give the Apple iPad fierce competition in 2011. It never happened. Here’s why Android tablets flopped.

As I gear up for CES 2012 next week, I can’t help but think back to CES 2011 where the big story was all about Android tablets. I was in the front row at the Verizon keynote when Google made a surprise appearance and did a demo of its newly-unveiled tablet software, Android 3.0 “Honeycomb.” I shot a quick video of that demo, sprinted back to my hotel room, uploaded it to the web, and it quickly went viral.

The tech world was all abuzz about Android tablets. People were yapping about the gorgeous eye candy in Google’s Honeycomb demo. Motorola, ASUS, and lots of other gadget companies quickly made big, flashy CES announcements about their forthcoming Android tablets. The Apple iPad had just surprised nearly everyone by selling 15 million tablets in 2010, but the general consensus at the time was that Android was firing off a clear message: “Dear Apple: We’re coming after the iPad.”

On smartphones, Android had just had a huge 2010 of its own. It went from virtually zero market share in January to a third of U.S. smartphone sales by the end of the year, leapfrogging the iPhone in the process. With so many of tech’s biggest hardware makers lining up behind Android tablets heading into 2011, the expectation was that Android tablets would likely leapfrog the iPad by the end of the year. At the very worst, it looked like Android tablets would pull even with the iPad and split the tablet market. Even as late as June 2011, some prominent tech commentators were still predicting that Android tablets would gobble up a huge chunk of the tablet market by the end of 2011.

It never happened.

Depending on who you believe and what exactly you count (tablets sold to retailers vs. tablets sold to customers, and whether you count Android offshoots like the Amazon Kindle Fire), Android was running on somewhere between 15% to 30% of all tablets sold in 2011. That’s respectable, right? Disappointing, but respectable. However, that’s not the whole story. It gets worse.

If we look at actually tablet usage, the numbers get really ugly for Android. Recent reports (like this one from ComScore) that track web traffic from tablets show that the iPad accounts for 95% of tablet traffic in the U.S. and 88% globally. That means that either Android tablet sales to paying customers are much lower than previously reported or the people who buy Android tablets aren’t using them very much, or a combination of the two. Whatever the details are, it’s an ugly scenario that means Android tablets have almost no traction in the market.

So, why did Android tablets flop in 2011? There are four main reasons. Let’s count them down, and then talk about what 2012 looks like.

4. The 16×9 problem

Google tried to get innovative with the form factor of Android tablets by giving them a 16×9 aspect ratio instead of copying the iPad’s 4×3 form factor. It sounded good. It was different. After all, 16×9 is associated with HD and 4×3 is associated with SD. The problem is that when you put a 16×9 tablet in your hands, it feels awkward. Google made landscape the default orientation so it feels like you’re holding a laptop screen that’s missing a keyboard, instead of holding a book or a magazine or a padfolio like it feels when you have a 10-inch 4×3 device like the iPad. When you turn a 16×9 tablet to portrait mode, the screen feels oddly squished. And now, it’s going to be difficult for Google to fix the problem. The 16×9 landscape orientation is still the default in Android 4.0 and there are a ton of existing Android tablets like the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer that are locked into the 16×9 orientation, so even if Google did a software update, it wouldn’t help.

3. The enterprise doesn’t trust Android

One of the ways that Android tablets were going to move a lot of units in 2011 was large orders of 1,000s of tablets to traditional enterprises like hospitals, manufacturers, and schools. Last March Iwrote about Samsung gearing up to sell a lot of Android tablets to the enterprise by setting up sales programs and preparing its sales force to handle big tablet orders. Samsung reps enthusiastically said they would contact me when they had big customers willing to talk about their tablet rollouts. I never heard from them. By mid-2011 that didn’t surprise me because the IT leaders I spoke with were spooked about Android malware. The fact that users could click on browser links and accidentally sideload apps that could siphon data out of Android devices was not something IT pros wanted to deal with. As a result, surveys like the one from enterprise vendor Good Technology showed that 96% of tablet activations in the enterprise were iPads.

2. The lack of tablet apps

Despite the 16×9 problem (and Honeycomb’s initial software glitches that Google eventually ironed out), the Android tablet platform itself isn’t all bad. I like running widgets and mini-apps side-by-side, for example. That makes Android tablets feel more like a traditional multi-tasking computer. The built-in Gmail, Google Books, and web browser apps in Honeycomb are really slick — I especially like the thumb controls in the browser. The problem is that there just isn’t enough of this stuff. Google has not created enough of its own apps and third party software developers have hit the snooze button on Android tablet apps. Where’s the Google Analytics app or its Google+ app or its Google Finance app or its Picnik photo editing app? Instead of building its own native Android tablet apps and firing up software makers, Google seems intent on focusing app developers on building HTML5 apps that work well across tablets, smartphones, and computers. That’s an important and admirable goal, but dedicated apps can still be extremely useful for taking advantage of a platform’s strengths. And the bottom line is that users like the simplicity and focus of having an app that they can tap and enter a dedicated environment for a particular service. Google doesn’t get that, doesn’t like it, and hasn’t pushed for it on Android tablets. The result is that Android tablets just don’t feel like they’re useful for doing much besides surfing the web.

1. The price

When Apple first announced the iPad, I had honestly started tuning out by end of the event (there’s only so much of that “magical” and “revolutionary” nonsense you can stomach). I was ready to write an article excoriating the iPad as a badly-overpriced toddler toy when Steve Jobs announced that the price of the iPad would start at $499 (I’d expected the price tag to be $800-$1000). I immediately bolted straight up in my seat and my eyes popped open and Apple had my attention again. To this day, I believe that the iPad’s greatest marketing strategy and the No. 1 factor in its success has been its price tag. Conversely, when Google and Motorola announced that the first big Android tablet — the Motorola Xoom — would cost $800, my immediate reaction was to shake my head and say, “DOA.” At the time, other tech analysts tried to argue that what you got for the price with the Xoom compared very favorably to the highest-priced iPad. It was a logical argument but that’s not how most of today’s tech buyers think, and the proof is that virtually no one bought the Xoom. Eventually, other tablet makers rolled out some nice Android tablets for $400-$500 by the middle of 2011 — again, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and ASUS Eee Pad Transformer are both very attractive — but to the masses, that price tag was apparently still too much for tablets whose primary function is surfing the web.

What now?

Even Google’s own numbers don’t paint a pretty picture for Android tablets, and the release of Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is unlikely to help the situation much in 2012. ICS is’t about fixing the tablet problem. It’s about unifying the Android experience between smartphones and tablets. My ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow has been testing Ice Cream Sandwich on the Motorola Xoom and has concluded that it won’t fix any of these fundamental flaws with Android tablets.

Last month Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google will “market a tablet of the highest quality” in the first half of 2012. It’s also been rumored recently that Google is working on a low-cost 7-inch tablet to battle the Amazon Kindle Fire, which runs a bastardized version of Android 2.3 and quickly grabbed the No. 2 spot in the tablet market at the end of 2011.

However, until Google deals with the four issues we’ve talked about here, it’s unlikely that it will change the fate of Android tablets. At the very least, Google will have to fix No. 1 and No. 2, and that might be enough to overcome No. 3 and No. 4.

"The Land That Made Me, Me"... Days Long Gone

2012-01-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

http://chasblogspot.blogspot.com/2009/04/bob-hope-days-are-long-gone.html

Thank you Chas for this wonderful collection of images from the 1950's and 1960's, truly days long gone.

Report: Apple to unveil next iPad in January > Defending Turf vs. Amazon Fire > 8 megapixels camera

2011-12-31T06:38:00.002-05:00

I am so ready for this !

Another week, another fresh set of rumors about Apple's next rendition of the iPad.

The latest wave stems from Digitimes once again, which claims Apple is expected to unveil two versions of its next iPad in late January.

Perhaps the most important detail is Digitimes has backed off an earlier report that Apple was planning to launch a "mini" iPad with a 7.85-inch screen.

According to the latest Digitimes details, it appears Apple will release two new iPad models and price the iPad 2 to compete with Amazon's red-hot Kindle Fire tablet.

The new iPads will reportedly include 9.7-inch screens with retina displays, dual LED light bars to bolster brightness and quad-core A6 processors. What sets these tablets apart: their cameras. One has a 5-megapixel camera while the other is 8 megapixels.

Rumors of the next iPad arrive as sales of Amazon's Kindle Fire continue to flourish. The online retailer says the $199 tablet remains the top-selling item on its site after 13 weeks. Also, Dave Limp, the vice president for Amazon's Kindle division, said earlier this month the Fire "is the most successful product we've ever launched."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/12/report-apple-to-unveil-next-ipad-in-january/1

World's Most Talkative Woman - Computer Has Hard Time Keeping Up !

2011-12-31T06:36:00.001-05:00

http://mrtube.netne.net/mr-tube-worlds-most-talkative-women-guinness-world-records.html

World's Thinnest Woman - no audio, just music

2011-12-31T06:35:00.002-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RCPeFD7pYuE#!

What is Depersonalization disorder?

2011-12-28T10:16:00.001-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization_disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation

U.S.P.S. Pricing

2011-12-17T09:12:00.002-05:00

if item is over 13 oz, goes to priority Mail status, $4.75 is starting point for Priority Mail.

http://postcalc.usps.gov/MailServices.aspx?m=1&p=2&o=6&dz=07458&oz=33912&pob=0&MailingDate=12/17/2011&MailingTime=8:00%20AM

Bending the Notes with E.C.

2011-12-12T07:26:00.000-05:00

Eric Clapton demonstrates how he bends the notes:

http://www.great-guitar-players.com/Eric_Clapton.html

http://www.last.fm/group/Guitar+Blues/forum/50888/_/313381

http://guitarsecrets.com/hammer_on.htm

http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/a_young_eric_clapton_demonstrates_the_elements_of_his_sound.html

Back to the 60's

2011-12-11T16:30:00.000-05:00

Here are all those groovy terms that hippies use and what they mean, starting with the letter A, and click on link for entire list !

http://www.hippy.com/glossary-c.htm

1-A: Status determined by draft board that you are currently fit and available to serve in the military.
1-O: See Conscientious Objector.
4-F: Exemption from military service due to mental or physical disability.

2001 - A Space Odyssey: Written by Arthur C Clarke. The movie was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was touted as "the ultimate trip" in this poster. And many people took those words to heart as this was indeed a great trip. Man's evolution is directed to the stars by strange black obelisks. Hal, the irrepressible silicon concierge is up to his tricks in interplanetary hijinks. The special effects are now classics.

Acapulco Gold: Legendary Mexican marijuana from the 60s. Today it wouldn't be considered so special, but back then it was great!
Acid: see LSD.
Acid Tests: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters did the first Acid Tests. These were events were everyone dropped acid together for an extraordinary group experience. Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the experiences of Ken Kesey the Merry Pranksters.
Activist: A person who participates in protest actions. Anyone involved in a cause, usually political.
Afterglow: A state of peace that can follow after a psychedelic experience when your mind is still detached from worldly concerns. "He's bathing in the afterglow of his last LSD trip".
Agnew, Spiro T.: Vice President during Nixon's reign, he antagonized almost everyone but expecially liberals with his verbal rantings. He claimed the antiwar movement was the work of "an effete corps of impudent snobs." He survived a bribery scandal but was convicted of income tax evasion he was forced to resign much to everyone's delight. Recently declassifed FBI files show Agnew did receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks as Govenor and Vice President.
Allman Brothers: Southern rock Band popular in the early 70s, played the Fillmore. Midnight Rider, Melissa, Ramblin' Man some of their hits.
Altamont: Controversial, ill fated rock concert headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane at Altamont Speedway on Dec.24, 1969. Hells Angels, acting as security, had their hands full as people kept rushing the stage. One man pulled a gun, and the Angels killed him. The film "Gimme Shelter" documenting the concert was used in evidence to clear the Angels.
Antiwar Movement: The organized resistance by students, veterans and other activists against the draft and Vietnam War in the 1960s and early '70s. Rallies, marches, speeches, teach-ins, sit-ins, slogans, banners, and songs were some of the non-violent tactics used to get the message out.
Asanas: Sanskrit word. A series of body postures that stretch and tone muscles, increase endurance, and improve flexibility. Along with breathing and meditation they make up the practice of Hatha Yoga.
Ashram: A monastery where monks practice yoga.
Astral Plane: A dimension of existence beyond the physical world. A place where disembodied spirits dwell. Many attempt to contact the astral plane through meditation or by using psychic energy.
Babe: Affecti

Best NYC Pizza

2011-11-30T07:29:00.000-05:00

Colin Hagendorf, 28, of Brooklyn, reviewing his final slice at Davinci Pizza in Lower Manhattan.

Manhattan is home to some of the country's oldest and most celebrated pizzerias, but the great metropolis also holds many mediocre slices. Colin Hagendorf has tasted it all.
Mr. Hagendorf, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, may know New York-style pizza more exhaustively than any other living soul. During a 2½-year quest, he has sampled nearly every pie sold by the slice in Manhattan. The feat—involving 362 slice joints—is unmatched by any modern-day enthusiast, according to local pizza experts.

"It's become a chore," he admitted recently, over a lunchtime slice. Folding the pizza lengthwise, he watched glumly as the end sagged, unsupported by a doughy crust. A proper slice, Mr. Hagendorf avows, should crease when folded and droop only at the very tip, "just like Johnny Cash's nose."

"This pizza is cotton," he sighed. Still, he was pleasantly surprised at the taste and scribbled notes for a review to be posted on his blog, where he chronicles his pizza forays and rates slices on an eight-slice scale.

With his girlfriend, Christina Sparhawk, Mr. Hagendorf ate his final slice last week in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Hagendorf began his project with the aim of trying every slice in New York City's five boroughs. But with more than 1,600 pizzerias in town, according to a health-inspection database, he soon realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. So he narrowed his focus to Manhattan and set simple rules: only order plain cheese pizza; only eat at places selling individual slices; and no going back after canvassing an area to catch newly opened establishments.

Mr. Hagendorf began in August 2009 at Grandpa's Place near 211th Street and Broadway—in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood—and worked his way down to the island's southern tip. He excluded from consideration national chains and cafeterias that don't make their own pizzas.
The results are chronicled on Mr. Hagendorf's website, Slice Harvester, as well as in printed 'zines he assembles at copy shops and sells for $3 apiece—only slightly more than the price of the average cheese slice. The reviews are deeply personal and occasionally blue, written in the confessional manner of a pizza-obsessed Lenny Bruce. Each pizzeria gets a grade, from zero to an exalted eight.

He bestowed the only perfect score on Pizza Suprema, a slice joint steps away from Penn Station. The place may be the only establishment to proudly hang one of Mr. Hagendorf's reviews, which can be profanity-laced, and he is treated like royalty when he visits.

Mr. Hagendorf says he hasn't gained weight as a result of the project and continues to eat pizza even when not conducting reviews.

"It comes out looking beautiful, grease shimmering above the cheese," he says of the slice at Suprema. "You need that grease!"

For Mr. Hagendorf, the best slices display balance above all, cheese and sauce used in moderation upon a solid yet supple crust. He disdains many of the new wave of recession-friendly dollar-per-slice outlets. He also scorns purveyors of Texas-size slices.

"A good dollar slice is like finding the Ark of the Covenant," Mr. Hagendorf says. "The fixation on giant stuff is part of the current horrible state of American capitalism."
Mr. Hagendorf is a waiter at a Brooklyn diner and describes himself as "activist-y punk." He spent years working for tips as a puppeteer in Union Square. Before devoting himself to pizza, "my project was: I want to work as little as possible," he says.

His slice-eating endeavor was born after a cross-country trip in 2009, when he grew outraged at a New York-style pizza served in Colorado Springs, Colo. After hearing him berate that, friends jokingly suggested Mr. Hagendorf market himself as a consultant for out-of-town pizzerias. He set out to survey the city's slice joints.

"I'm not sure what made me actually do this idea instead of just talk about it, which is what I've done with my ideas for years," he says.

He has learned that even in the home of the New York slice, inferior pizzas outnumber truly delectable pies. But mediocrity may be the price for having so many pizzerias.

There are 1,676 New York City restaurants classified as primarily selling pizza, as well an additional 425 categorized under "pizza/Italian," according to a food-inspection database maintained by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Manhattan is home to 494 pizzerias and 97 other restaurants listed under the joint category. A spokeswoman for the agency cautioned that classifications are assigned by inspectors and are therefore inexact.

The 2010 Yellow Pages phone book lists 412 distinct Manhattan eateries under its "pizzeria" section, according to a hand count by Michael Berman, a Brooklyn-based photographer and pizza-focused food writer. Mr. Berman, 44, recently combed through past phone books stored on microfilm at the New York Public Library as a way to track the growth of the city's pizza industry.

In 1958, the phone book listing for pizzerias showed 117 in the five boroughs—and just 10 in Manhattan, Mr. Berman found. By 1970, the total number of pizzerias in New York had surged to 861.

Scott Wiener, 30, who runs New York pizza tours, credits the commercial gas oven with giving birth to the modern slice as a unit of sale. The dial-controlled technology and lower temperature made the oven easier to manage and allowed slices to be reheated without risk of burning bits of cheese on the cooking surface, which fouls the taste.

"It's that oven that made pizza by the slice a big deal," Mr. Wiener says. "It makes more people into pizza makers. You didn't have to be an experienced baker."
With his final slice consumed last week in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Hagendorf has eaten slices at 362 pizzerias. Of those, he's ranked 75 as good or great.

He hasn't gained weight as a result of the exercise, and continues to eat pizza even when not conducting reviews. He now plans to go through his archive and produce a best-of retrospective. "There's a huge body of work," he says.
New York pizza aficionados watched with interest as Mr. Hagendorf approached the finish line.

"A lot of the time I kick myself for not doing it first," says Adam Kuban, who started chronicling New York pizza in 2003 on his website, Slice. "But at the same time I'm glad I didn't have to endure it."

American and British Toilet Slang

2011-11-08T17:18:00.000-05:00

from

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_toilet_slang

Defecation

A sewer snake to release
Abort a baby
Anaconda action
Arsefire
Back one out
Backing the big brown motorhome out of the garage
Baiting the trap
Becoming the porcelain assassin
Blasting a dookie
Blinking
Blow one out - Also flatulence
Blow the load
BM
Boo-Boo
Boom Boom
Bomb the porcelain sea
Building a log cabin
Burn a mule
Caca
Carpet Bombing Afghanistan
Chocolate time!
Create a custom extrusion
Cripping a crapple
Crowning
Curling one off
Cutting rope
Deceiver of Farts
De-corking the borking
Deucing
Dirty squirties
Doing brown
Doing some spring cleaning
Dominating
Doo-Doo
Doodey
Download a brownload
Dr. Benjamin Fartlin
Drop a double deuce
Dropping a dook
Dropping a bomb
Dropping a deuce
Dropping a hoopsnake
Dropping a jolst
Dropping a load
Dropping a loaf
Dropping a Purtle
Dropping a Washburn
Dropping The Dangle
Dropping anchor
Dropping bass ("base" as in the opposite of treble. Not the fish.)
Dropping logs
Dropping some friends off at the pool
Dropping the Browns off at the Super Bowl
Dropping the Cosbies
Dropping the kids off at the pool
Dropping the Mexican Boll Weevil
Dropping the weights
Dropping wax
Faxing a shit to the toilet machine
Feeding the seagulls (politer version of "Feeding the shitehawks")
Feeding the toilet
Fertilising the plants (refers to defecating outdoors and on the ground, such as while camping)
Filing some papers
Filling the bowl
Fire away
Freeing me chocolate hostages
Giving birth
Giving birth to a chocolate baby boy
Giving birth to a healthy brown baby
Giving birth to the black eel
Giving birth to the Spineless Brownfish
Giving birth to an African
Going Boom Boom
Going poop
Going to meet Jim Davidson
Going to number two
Going to have a talk with Mr.Hanky (South Park [2] Refrence)
Going to the restitorial
Growing a tail
Hanging a rat
Hungry Hungry Hippos
Inagurate Barack Obama to the White House
Inserting a SEAL Team
Kurt Bevacqua
Launching torpedoes
Laying a brick
Laying a brownie
Laying a cable
Laying a Hank
Laying a turd
Laying some wolf bait
Lengthening the spine
Letting loose
Letting the toilet know who's boss
Letting the dogs out
Lift tail (used commonly among members of the furry fandom)
Logging
Logging into the toilet and making a huge download
Logging out
Load your pants
Loafin'
Lose some weight (Also used in urination)
Making a banoogie (referring to an unusually large defecation, often clogging the toilet)
Making a tail
Making an appointment with Dr. John
Making gravy
Making logs (or a log)
Making waves
Makin' bears
Monopoly!
Montezuma's Revenge (traveller’s diarrhoea)
Number two (a portable toilet company advertises itself as "Number One in Number Two"; a Midwest plumbing company proclaims, "We're Number One in a Number Two Business.")
Pebble-dashing the porcelain
Pinching (off) a loaf
Pinching a yam
Pinch-hitting for Kurt Bevacqua (a reference to the old brown uniforms worn in the 1970's and 1980's by the San Diego Padres.)
Poo-Poo
Poopy Doo
Poppin a gooky
Producing some output
Pump a clump of dump out of my rump
Pull a few cones (Think Mr Whippy soft serve ice cream, and the cones)
Punching a growler
Punishing the porcelain
Punishing the toilet
Put food in the dog's water
Releasing a depth charge
Releasing a Dungbomb (from Harry Potter)
Releasing the chocolate hostages
Releasing the hostages
Releasing the Kraken
Releasing the hounds
Ride a pony and trap
Ring of fire
Sacrificing to the Toilet/Porcelain god
Saturday morning special
Scatter bombing
Shitting bricks (Houses or apartments as substitutes for higher quantity.)
Showering the room with roses
Shtounga
Slopping gruel in Oliver's bowl
Speaking with the arabs (When whoever is listening asks "what" the toiletee replies "Mustapha Crap!")
Spray-painting the porcelain
Squirt juice
Stalling a brown sedan
Streaming Nixie (naval expression referring to an anti-submarine device towed behind a ship by a long, thick, possibly brown cable)
Studying one's Process Design notes (refers to Environmental Engineering Process Design, a course taught to civil and environmental engineering undergraduates and that deals with, among other topics, the design of wastewater treatment facilities)
Taking a brew
Taking a crap (see also Mr. Thomas Crapper)
Taking a dump
Taking a Nixon (used by Kinky Friedman in his detective novels)
Taking a poo
Taking a Shatner (as in Captain Kirk; would also accept "dropping" or "doing" a Shatner)
Taking a shit (a coarse expression, not a euphemism)
Taking a slam
Taking a Tarzan (crapping in the woods/forest)
Taking the Browns to the Superbowl
Taking the Cosby kids to the pool
Taking the mains offline and ejecting the warp coil
Taking the morning curl
Throwing up backwards
Tuesday Afternoons
Turtle time (see Turtle Action)
Uni(I've got to take an uni)
Unlikely Traveler (Defecation, usually on vacation, when you defacate in your pants away from a toilet)
Unload
Unloading a batch of cigars
UH-OH! (Peter Griffin again; is incontinent at awkward moments)
Visiting Boston
vote for president.
wrestling a leprecon
Take a Critical Ambient to the Lab
Upgrading my Thetan Level

Zooey -New Girl - Clip # 1

2011-11-03T15:17:00.002-04:00

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

2011-10-29T07:59:00.000-04:00

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

Superior Autobiographical Memory and Memory Bumps

2011-10-27T07:45:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-26T19:15:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-10-25T18:20:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-25T14:17:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-25T07:21:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-25T07:14:00.000-04:00

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

Halloween Music Playlists

2011-10-24T12:49:00.001-04:00

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

Life Explained in Graphs

2011-10-24T08:44:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-22T08:20:00.002-04:00

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

2011-10-20T12:06:00.000-04:00

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

The Beauty of Math

2011-10-19T08:10:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-18T16:50:00.003-04:00

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.

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

2011-10-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-17T08:40:00.001-04:00

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 !

2011-10-17T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Legacy of Steve Jobs

2011-10-16T11:15:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-10-15T14:06:00.000-04:00

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

Laurel & Hardy Dance To Santana

2011-10-10T15:52:00.002-04:00

from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkZGg0qNdCc

Also notice all the business in the background. Thx Wendy for this gem !

Jobs - Digital Immortality As A New Device

2011-10-10T15:46:00.001-04:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203388804576616921133007668.html?KEYWORDS=Jenkins

Steve Jobs was a private man who died in public. In latter years, he took the stage at Apple events knowing that, at least at first, the audience's focus would be on him and the toll his disease had taken on his vibrant persona.

Unlike a lot of CEOs, he seldom took to a stage for any other reason than to talk about Apple products, such as to declaim that the rich should pay more taxes. Bizarrely, he was even chided for not conforming, in the apologetic fashion of the truly rich, to the demand that he be seen conspicuously doing good works with his wealth—as if the work he was already doing was not a good use of his time. When he presented himself to the public, it was to offer instruction on only two subjects. One was Apple, and the other, in a famous address to graduating students at Stanford, was death.

Jobs reflected at length on the undesirability of death from the individual point of view, and the usefulness of it from nature's point of view. He offered no comfort. He was not Thomas Buddenbrook, nonhero of Thomas Mann's novel, who briefly glimpses a kind of peace in thinking that the stuff of which he is made will return to the universe from which he borrowed it. And even that arid peace promptly departs, never to return, and he dies regretting that he had to die, just as most of us will.

Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.

One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who've been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This would not have been Jobs's interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of "technological singularity," that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.

What kind of device should our consciousness occupy?
Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?
And who is the user?

Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our "survivors"—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.

Indeed, he might conclude that the whole flaw in the Kurzweil vision is that anybody anywhere would have any lasting use for us, that our sticking around in digital form would be welcome or valuable in any way.

He might conclude that such a device should have a battery that lasts, oh, about a month, and then goes permanently dead. He might conclude that our essence should not be inscribed on a hard drive or a thumb drive—but in D-RAM memory, the kind that vanishes forever when the power is shut off.

Such a device would let our friends and relations prolong their goodbyes for a few weeks while also avoiding the subsequent guilt when days, weeks and soon years go by without any urge to revisit their electronically immortal but increasingly irrelevant loved one. Such a device wouldn't cure death or materially delay death. It would make death better. Create a month or so of pure communion with the loved one, via a sumptuous screen and high-fidelity headset, untroubled by medical decisions and interventions, free of pain—but also free of the more pleasant forms of physical urgency.

Such a device would offer more comfort, perhaps, to the survivor than to the departed, for whom artificial immortality in any form—whether it's leaving behind an autobiography or monument or foundation—invariably proves a poor substitute for not dying. Electronic immortality would likely prove no less so. Death would still demand that its purpose be served, clearing the way for life to continue, leaving the past behind, where it belongs.

Steve Jobs, who was special, was not of the idea that anyone is special. But leave it to Apple. The iCrypt, whatever form it takes, would undoubtedly be done with the taste, attention to detail, and understanding of the customer that he and his colleagues brought to everything they did.

Steve Job's Philosophy - A Secular Prophet

2011-10-09T17:29:00.000-04:00

Death is very likely the single best invention of life.

It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576615403028127550.html

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.
That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

Brett Arends discusses on Lunch Break why he believes Steve Jobs was the best chief executive of his generation and wasn't just a technology genius but also a hype master.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg joins this special edition of Digits to discuss Steve Jobs's post-PC vision for the future and what his path would have been had he lived longer, as well as what he believes motivated him throughout his legendary career.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.
In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Dow Jones's Neal Lipschutz discuss Apple's future and the challenges any company faces after the loss of its innovator-in-chief.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. Wall Street Journal managing editor Alan Murray and editors discuss Jobs's legacy, early reactions to his death and how his showmanship changed the retail and tech landscape.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.
It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?
For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."
Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

The Wisdom of Dogs

2011-10-08T16:53:00.003-04:00

http://www.any-book-in-print.com/desk_signs/wisdom_of_dogs_ds.htm

One Hit Wonders !

2011-10-05T08:43:00.000-04:00

The list contains recording artists who reached the Top 40 of the U.S. pop chart (the Billboard Hot 100) with just one single
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1980s_one-hit_wonders_in_the_United_States

http://www.onehitwondercentral.com/80s.cfm

Celebrity Workout Music Playlists

2011-09-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

Find out what music celebrities are listening to on their workout playlists, from cardio mixes to cool down.

http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/workout/music/celebrity-playlists/

Amazon Ups The Game with Kindle Fire

2011-09-28T20:38:00.000-04:00

Amazon.com Inc. jumped into the tablet computer fray, escalating its rivalry with Apple Inc. as each aims to provide both the devices and digital stores where people buy books, songs and movies.

Standing on stage in front of a large New York audience, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos Wednesday unveiled a music- and video-playing tablet dubbed the Kindle Fire. The color touch-screen gadget takes direct aim at Apple's market-dominating iPad—particularly with its price of $199, far below the iPad's starting price of $499.

Amazon debuted four new Kindles in New York on Wednesday with features including free wireless 3G, new e-ink, touch interface and streaming content. Stu Woo reports on digits.

The online retailer is gambling it can succeed with its tablet where several other giants, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., have so far failed. Unlike those companies, Amazon already has a vast library of digital content to sell and tens of millions of credit-card numbers.

A Slew of Tablets

View Interactive

Amazon.com via Bloomberg News

A bevy of new and upgraded tablets and e-readers are on the market. See how the base models for the different devices stack up, including Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet.

More photos and interactive graphics

The move highlights how the battle lines are blurring in retail, media and technology. Apple, once known as a computer company, is now the world's biggest music retailer and a leading phone maker. Amazon has morphed from a discount retailer of physical books to a digital department store that streams movies and sells its own gadgets.

Amazon's new Kindle Fire, which will offer magazine content and streaming videos, takes aim at Apple's tablet dominance. How does the Kindle Fire stack up against the iPad 2? Should Apple be worried? Stu Woo and Dan Gallagher join digits.

Enlarge Image

While Amazon has had some success in new markets—it claims its Kindle e-book reader outsells other goods it offers on its website, for instance—the Kindle Fire puts the company into a fast-growing but competitive field.

The competition is likely to heat up further, with Barnes & Noble Inc. expected to release its own tablet next month. The bookseller already has a tablet-like device in the Nook Color. The new tablet is expected to provide faster access to the Web, a broader array of apps, and better video-playing. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Overall, Apple has sold 29 million iPads since releasing it in early 2010. Apple had 68% of the tablet market in this year's second quarter, according to data tracker IDC.

While Amazon's new device could hurt the iPad, Allen Weiner, an analyst with industry-tracker Gartner Research, said Apple could do something from either a technological or pricing standpoint to lure consumers and content providers who might be tempted by the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is only Amazon's second foray into the hardware business, after selling the Kindle reader for four years. And though Mr. Bezos said in an interview that Amazon engineers drove the design of the gadget, people familiar with the device said the company outsourced some of the design and manufacturing to an Asian manufacturer.

Mr. Bezos said his tablet strategy was about more than selling gadgets. "Well, you can call it a tablet if you want. I call it a service," he said. A piece of that service is this hardware, and "the service is that deep integration with that content and that media," he said.

Journal Community

Amazon Unveils 'Kindle Fire'

See photos.

View Slideshow

EPA

Amazon's Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire.

Amazon didn't let reporters test or touch the Kindle Fire at Wednesday's event, having company handlers show them off instead. The Kindle Fire has a smaller screen and less storage capacity than the iPad and runs Google Inc.'s Android operating system.

Amazon is now taking orders for the device, which ships on Nov. 15.

Amazon has had some success tangling with Apple. Both companies have competed to sell digital products such as MP3 downloads. Earlier this year, Amazon made a splash undercutting Apple's leading iTunes music store by selling the new album from Lady Gaga for just 99 cents.

The Kindle Fire also has a notable advantage over other tablets that have tried to narrow the iPad's lead: Amazon's library of digital content, which its tablet users can access. Customers can pay $79 a year for a service known as Amazon Prime, which gives them access to 11,000 movies and TV shows, as well as unlimited two-day shipping for physical goods purchased on Amazon.com. Amazon also sells single movies, TV shows and music songs, with a catalog that competes with that of Apple's iTunes store.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows off the new Kindle Fire tablet Wednesday. The device will be priced at $199.

Analysts said the tablet could boost Amazon's revenue because the device makes it easy to buy both physical goods and digital goods, such as books, music and videos, on Amazon.com.

Still, some speculate that Amazon won't be making much, if any, money from the Fire. But UBM TechInsights, which calculates the cost to build devices, said a preliminary estimate of the components in the Fire likely totaled about $150, netting Amazon a profit of about $50 a tablet.

Amazon's shares rose $5.50, or 2.5%, to $229.71 Wednesday.

"Consumers want email, Web access, games, video and music, and that's exactly what Amazon is delivering for a very reasonable price," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. "The Kindle Fire is all the tablet that most consumers will need."

At the Wednesday event, Mr. Bezos also introduced two new versions of the black-and-white Kindles. The entry level one costs $79, while one with a touch screen costs $99. Both come with advertising on the home screen and on the screensaver; the ad-free version of the Kindles cost at least $30 more.

Book publishers said they expected the new black-and-white Kindles and the Kindle Fire to boost e-book sales, particularly after the holidays. Before the original Kindle launched, the fledgling e-book business had lost traction and had largely been written off by the publishing community.

Today some major publishers say e-books are 15% to 20% of revenue, and as much as 50% or more of sales on certain commercial fiction titles.

"What we saw today is really going to drive the adoption curve in the U.S.," said Maja Thomas, senior vice president of Hachette Digital, a unit of Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group.

Added Jane Friedman, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media Inc., a digital publisher, "Some will continue to want a pure e-reader. But the Kindle Fire is... much more than I expected, and it's going to be great for my company."

Amazon still faces the delicate task of promoting its tablet at the same time as its Kindle e-readers.

Some analysts said that the tablet—on which people can read e-books—might cannibalize sales of the dedicated e-readers. Amazon executives, however, played down those concerns.

"People are going to choose different devices for different content," said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon's Kindle vice president. They would choose the tablet for children's books, comic books and graphic novels, while opting for the black-and-white reader for bigger novels and biographies, he said.

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