Will Canada's Tar Sands Destroy the Global Climate?: Scientific American

Will Canada's Tar Sands Destroy the Global Climate?: Scientific American

RIP! OQO

It is a cool device,



but it just cannot survive, even when netbook is the new fad.



AppleInsider | Former Apple engineers at OQO call it quits

Jory Bell and Nick Merz left Apple in 2000 to form OQO after a struggle within Apple to develop prototype designs for a new micro-sized laptop that resembled a miniaturized Titanium PowerBook. By 2004, OQO had produced a tiny Windows XP device using the Transmeta Crusoe processor.

Since then, the company has shipped machines based on Microsoft's UMPC reference designs, which have found a small but ecstatic fan base. The company's sales have been unable to keep the operation afloat however, underlining Jobs' instincts that the market wouldn't support a tiny mobile handheld laptop even if it were a cool bit of engineering.

...
Apple has expressed no interest in developing a conventional netbook or UMPC-like device, but has signaled intentions to both deliver lower cost, WWAN enabled MacBooks later this year and to deliver a wider array of iPhone and iPod touch models, including a new tablet device many observers expect to see next year. The company is also actively hiring engineers.

Interesting observation from the above piece. The device did not win blessing from Steve Jobs and Apple is rumored/believed to deliver a 7-10" ipod touch later this year. Also, it seems they left for OQO before the iphone or itouch.

OQO is a PC with all the features I would like, but I don't want to buy one.
Iphone is a smart phone which lacks a lot of important features, but I want one.

Cinderella School: The New Yorker

Cinderella School: The New Yorker

I first read this about three years ago. I still think about it from time to time. The experience of the new immigrants, supposedly skilled immigrants who "hadn’t come to the U.S. for survival, [but] had come for success."

One scene I cannot forget is:

Vadim and I still walked to the train together on Monday mornings, and Vadim still waved to me from the opposite platform, but some days I could barely make myself wave back. I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. In the morning hours, there were just one or two people waiting on my side of the station. Almost all the commuters stood on the other side, with Vadim. They were going up the line, into the city, to work at real jobs. I was going down the line, to sell the Cinderella dream and a laxative hyped as a magic potion. More than once, I thought I saw something like pity in Vadim’s expression.

When I first read this, I did not pay much attention to Dr. Solomon, which I should have.

Someone posted the full article when it was available from the official website. Read it while you can

Wolfram Alpha

My first impression with Wolfram Alpha is mixed. It is not a direct competitor with google. Wikipedia might be more worried with the potential of it.

The search knowledge base is still limited, but if it is there, it is relevant and interesting, generally. It is somewhat like a mathematica online. Mathematica's website has always been a good reference. Traffic might be diverted to wolfram alpha.

Another question I have in mind, is that whether this will evolve into some full-blown web application site, or mathematica online.

I am using sage online as an free/opensource alternative to mathematica. I would like to check the direction of future evolution of wolfram.

To be continued.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Just found out that the book "Shop Class as Soulcraft" was originally published as an essay at

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

Sentences to ponder:

Crawford rightly asks whether today's cubicle dweller even has a respectable self. Many of us work in jobs with no discernible products or measurable results. ...
The ideal, when working on a bike, is to keep the customer in mind, to realize that messing with the bike (satisfying our curiosity) ultimately needs to be curtailed by consideration of the wider world—i.e., the customer, who doesn't want to overpay. As Crawford points out, much "knowledge work" lacks this element of practical wisdom, of opening out into the experience of others.
The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Blinder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.

From: Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

It reminds me what Peter Drucker said about the "knowledge worker".

Eisenhower on planning

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

Dwight David Eisenhower