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Net Will Crash in 2010- study

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:09:29 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

A new Nemertes study says that a major Net bottleneck will be where Internet traffic goes to the home from coaxial lines and the copper wires that phone companies use for DSL. To avoid a slowdown, these companies, and increasingly, wireless service providers, must invest $55 billion, Nemertes says. That's almost 70% more than planned.

Enjoy your speedy broadband Web access while you can. The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.

Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."

Two years ago, nobody knew what YouTube was," Johnson says. "Now, it's generating 27 petabytes (27 million gigabytes) of data per month.

Tags: internet, broadband, traffic, crash, bottleneck

Peace

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:18:44 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: www.refdesk.com

"Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other." - Elie Wiesel

Tags: peace, elie wiesal

The Death of E-Mail

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:11:14 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: slate.com

By 2002, everyone in my family had become an Internet convert. For the technophobic older generation, signing up for an e-mail account was a concession to us youngsters—if the kids don't call home, they thought, we'll just reach them through the computer. Everyone was especially eager to send messages to my niece, a kid who wasn't all that chatty on the phone but was almost always glued to her PC. But while the rest of us happily exchanged forwards and life updates, she almost never piped up. Eventually, I sussed out the truth: She was too busy sending IMs and text messages to bother with e-mail. That's when I realized that my agility with e-mail no longer marked me as a tech-savvy young adult. It made me a lame old fogey.

ose of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete

Tags: internet, communication, email, im, facebook generation

The Future of Reading

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:51:13 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book itself.

"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born." So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book. It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos.

Tags: books, amazon, jeff bezos, reading, kindle

Meet Me, Myself And I - the "Googlegänger,"

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:46:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

Eve Fairbanks knew something was up when her mother drove six hours to her college just to have lunch. After a meal of risotto came the moment of truth: "I know about the porn," Mom told her. It was an honest mistake: Eve's name kept showing up on X-rated sites when her mother Googled it to keep tabs on her daughter. But that Eve Fairbanks wasn't her Eve—it was a "Googlegänger," a virtual doppelgänger linked by a shared name thanks to the all-knowing search engine.

Much like the verb "to " has become as famil-iar in our vernacular as "to search," the term "Google-gänger" has also caught on with a generation of people defined not so much by their accomplishments but by how Google-able those accomplishments are. "You are who you are because of Google," says Matthew Slutsky, 26, a political blogger who has befriended his own Googlegänger on Facebook

For some, a Googlegänger is a lifelong irritant

Tags: google, googleganger, virtual, identity online, internet

One Sentence True Stories

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:19:13 GMT

clipped by: wurdzgurl
clipper's remarks: My new favorite website.

Clip Source: www.onesentence.org

It's never like the movies...we pulled the plug and he took two hours to die.

(I've been trying to hide how much I like you, but the most subtle I can be is within parentheses).

When I arrived at the memorial site, I couldn't think of anything witty or poignent to write, so I just carved 'I miss you' into the telephone pole that killed you and went home.

It did not take me long to realize that I was VERY wrong in thinking my students would find it fun and easy to write a one sentence story.

I was hoping that I would be disappointed by the booty call so that I'd stop liking you so much.

The only thing harder than giving a kitten a bath is giving two kittens a bath.

Tags: sentence, true

Mandala & Circle: Bioevolutionary Theory of Universality

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:48:19 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A good article on why circles, madalas etc seem universal, with reference to child development and cross-cultural artefacts.

Clip Source: mc2.vicnet.net.au

Early humans, through a process of trial and error and successive approximation were, in extracting pattern from the world, unwittingly engaged in the appropriation of a technique which would become the basis for encoding thought in a tangible, stored and retrievable form

an attempt to render permanent and tangible that which was formally intangible and fleeting, the seeking of order in the midst of disorder, the expression of the sense of pattern, harmony and symmetry synthesised from the immediate, ambient confusion.

children begin to incorporate two diagrams, producing ‘combines’ where a cross is conjoined with a circle, rectangle or square, to produce a ‘mandala’

Soon afterwards the mandala becomes a more complex form known as an ‘aggregate’, where the child adds further crosses so the circle appears like a wheel with spokes;

early mark-making can be sufficiently explained through evolutionary mechanisms in conjunction with how the brain and visual cortex process information.

Tags: mandala, cortical neural syntax, evolutionary psychology, art

Count your blessings!

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:32:03 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.afp.com

Girl's suicide linked to Philippines poverty

08/11/2007

A faded undated picture shows Mariannet Amper (L

A girl aged 11 hanged herself in a Philippines shanty after leaving a letter and diary depicting a life in rampant poverty

The case put a human face to poverty blighting the nation, where nearly 14 percent of the 87 million population live on less than a dollar a day even as the government says the economy is on a roll

In a letter found under her pillow after Mariannet Amper's death, she said she only wished for a bicycle, bag, new shoes and jobs for her parents so she could finish primary school

family live in a shanty that has no running water or electricity

she wrote: "We weren't able to go to church because we didn't have any money for transport and my father had a fever so my mother and I had to wash clothes for money."

The night before

she asked her father for 100 pesos (about two dollars) for a school project, but he did not have any money

wife works

earning less than a dollar a day.

Tags: health

Cyber Monday?

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:58:45 GMT

clipped by: ericskiff
clipper's remarks: I'd never heard this term before it popped up on on the list of stuff that's hot on google today.

Sara and I were planning out our holiday shopping for friends and family last night, and will likely do a great bit of it online in the next few weeks.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. Whereas Black Friday is associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores, "Cyber Monday" symbolizes a busy day for online retailers, and one in which online stores offer low prices and promotions. This has been speculated by some as because Monday is the day the majority of Americans return to their occupation from the Thanksgiving holiday, giving them ample time in front of their office computers to do online shopping.

[edit] Criticism

Ecommerce sites report that the busiest shopping days usually fall between December 5-15 in a given year.^[1] In 2005, the year the term Cyber Monday was coined, the busiest online shopping day of the year in the U.S. was actually December 12, two weeks after "Cyber Monday".^[2]

What can $611 billion buy?

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:35:24 GMT

clipped by: AcesLucky
clipper's remarks: Click the buttons to see what $611 billion can buy.

Clip Source: www.boston.com

What can $611 billion buy?

If the Bush administration succeeds in its latest request for funding for the war in Iraq, the total cost would rise to $611.5 billion, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit research group.

The amount got us wondering: What would $611 billion buy?

Tags: war, iraq, bush administration, american, globalization, government spending, money, morals, terrorist