HackingCough
A blog by Chris Edwards
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Trains? Carriages? They all run on rails
In the Pre-Budget Report, chancellor Alistair Darling put a lot of emphasis on the environment and used that for part of the stimulus package. He claimed £535m would go into bringing forward a plan to build more trains as well as put more efficient heating into low-income homes. Darling claim …
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Chewing through the watts
Some tweets last night written by Danny Bradbury asking about the energy consumption of mobile phones alerted me to GreenYourPhone, a scheme cooked up by Boulder, Colorado-based Renewable Choice and the electronics chain Best Buy. For $10, you can salve your conscience over the amount of CO2 your ta …
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Google developers do it live
Now I get it, Google's SearchWiki isn't an attempt to kill off Mahalo or Wikia Search or part of an elaborate self-destruct plan for the number-one search engine, it's an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records with the World's Largest Extreme-Programming Project. Strangely, Google hasn' …
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The mysterious disappearing pages of Movable Type 4
While doing some remedial maintenance on this blog, I noticed that the links to the static pages, such as the about page, had fallen off. I went into MT4's configuration panel to see if anything had gone funny with the widget that collects the static pages together. It all seemed fine there. Viewin …
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Spansion waves arms around in energy-saving plan
Spansion is trying to milk the attention that comes with supposedly green technologies for all its worth. If you think today's release about EcoRAM is familiar, that's because it is. In June, Spansion talked about its deal with startup Virident and a plan to bung shedloads of flash memory into serve …
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Apple multicore future comes sooner rather than later
When Apple's director of the Unix technology group Jordan Hubbard spoke at the LISA 08 conference for big-iron server admins, he flashed up a slide that indicated Snow Leopard is coming earlier rather than later. The result, naturally, is plenty of speculation that release 10.6 of Mac OS X might mak …
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Spansion waves arms around in power-saving plan
Spansion is trying to milk the attention that comes with supposedly green technologies for all its worth. If you think today's release about EcoRAM is familiar, that's because it is. In June, Spansion talked about its deal with startup Virident and a plan to bung shedloads of flash memory into serve …
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Nosey parkers
Seamus Mccauley at Virtual Economics finds Max Mosley's latest claims a bit hard to believe. "I'm entertained today by Max Mosley's claim that his 'sex life is of interest to no one but this squalid industry'", writes Mccauley. Mosley argued: "No reasonable adult will ever object to (or even be i …
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It's quiet round here...
...because a bunch of stuff has gone up at my synthetic and systems biology blog in the wake of the iGEM competition over the weekend in Boston. In this contests, students from around the world try to tweak simple lifeforms such as bacteria and yeast, at least for the moment, to do useful things: D …
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Flight liveblogging
This wasn't how I anticipated trying out Internet access several miles up in the air. When I got to the American Airlines gates at San Francisco airport, a couple of people in lime-green T-shirts were handing out leaflets on the in-flight WiFi that some of the planes now have. I was flying to Bosto …
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Synergy: the new name for redundancy
The people who think up euphemistic ways for announcing layoffs probably think they are being really clever when they do it. Because I can't think of any reason why this sort of nonsense is a good idea: "ST-NXP Wireless Adjusts to Changed Business Conditions and Accelerates Efforts to Capture Ident …
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All aboard the greenwash express
A note from Graham Titterington at Ovum explains why IT vendors are having a hard time presenting a greener image. He attended a vendor's shindig only to find that, when it came to their carbon footprint, some were forced to wear supersized clown shoes: "One of the delegates, who had travelled from …
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Multitouch (well double touch) for the rest of us
Chipmaker Atmel is banking on an avalanche of iPhone-like handsets that understand multi-fingered gestures. At the start of the year, Atmel decided to buy a UK-based startup Quantum Research Group that had already locked horns with Apple over the capacitive sensors used in the iPod, iPhone and the r …
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Finding work for the GPU
Returning from a visit to Germany that took in a visit to the company's Berlin-based raytracing and 3D-animation subsidiary Mental Images, nVidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and senior vice president of marketing Dan Vivoli stopped off in London. In between working out which series of Star Trek was the bes …
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Spurious recession links of our time
In PR, economic events like recessions take on this strange magnetic force. They attract press releases like no other world event although that might be because they are the only events that don't make the release writer look a little sick for trying to make a connection to their client's product (" …
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But The Man can't bust our music
Almost 40 years ago, Columbia Records tried to cash in on the Californian counterculture with the slogan "But The Man can't bust our music". The record company "wasn't like the others", it wanted everyone to know. It was different. Then the company released the first Chicago album after demanding a …
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The computer accessory that doesn't exist
On the last plane ride, I was watching out of the corner of one eye someone struggling to use a laptop with the seat in front of them fully reclined. At one point they had it open it out all the way so they can see the screen and use the keyboard. But there was no way to keep it in that position bec …
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Slugging it out at 28nm - whatever 28nm means
If it seems like only yesterday that chipmakers were pumping up 45nm processes, it was. But this is now and the talk is about the next generation and the next generation and a half after that. There used to be some breathing space between semiconductor processes: about three years or so. Now that ti …
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The future is in...November
Fed up of not being able to getting all your Singularitarian braindumps in one place? Then prepare for the moment we all - well, OK, the people with money - fast-forward into the future at the Convergence08 not-a-conference conference. I can't find chief Singularitarian Ray Kurzweil on the headline …
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Too much nitrogen
One thing that was bugging me from the news today was why anyone would try to adulterate food with melamine - a material that makes hard-to-break plates but which needs to be kept out of food itself. Given that melamine has turned up in a number of contaminated food scandals, particularly pet food, …
HackingCough
