Tag: Technology

Big Rare Earth Discovery in Nebraska

China has emerged as the world’s predominant supplier, controlling 97 percent of the global market for rare earths. In recent years, lawmakers have expressed concerns about China’s “rare earth” dominance, and these concerns were heightened when Beijing temporarily halted exports to Japan last year during a territorial dispute. Despite having such obscure names as praseodymium, promethium and samarium – no copper or zinc here – they are necessary for such routine contemporary technologies as magnets, laser pointers and miniature electronics, such as iPods.

Quantum acquired a circular piece of land – a bit more than 4 miles in diameter – near Elk Creek late last year. The land, which the U.S. Geological Survey projects may have one of the world’s largest deposits of niobium and rare earths, has since been poked, prodded and drilled to determine whether it held any niobium, which has never been mined in the U.S., or rare earths, which the U.S. has not mined in almost 10 years

via Neb. mine find to challenge China’s dominance of vital rare minerals – Washington Times.

The Invention of Ctrl+Alt+Delete

At this rate, even with 12 of the country’s best engineers working round-the-clock, IBM was never going to deliver its first computer prototype to Microsoft in a matter of four months. The parts were all new. The software. The hardware. Even the names “software” and “hardware.” They were treading new ground. There had never been a “PC,” a personal computer, until this group of programmers built the first one in that lab.

So, as you can imagine, there was a lot of frustrating rebooting going on as Dave Bradley tried to get the CPU – the central processing unit, which they named – to talk to a printer or a monitor for the first time, code he had spent months writing.

He needed a quicker way to restart, to refresh, to escape from a computer quagmire than just switching the computer off and waiting for it to reboot. So he wrote nine lines of code, a “10-minute job,” Bradley remembers. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t something you could just press by accident and wipe out your work. He wrote it so that with his left hand, he held down the keys Ctrl+Alt. With his right hand, he pressed Del.

The screen went black, came back to life and voilà: A cultural icon was created and some great one-liners from the creator, such as “I got to meet Bill Gates when he was only worth millions” .

Actually, about that meeting – At a panel discussion with Gates for the 20-year anniversary of the PC, Bradley was asked about how he created the keystroke. Google Dave Bradley and Bill Gates to see video of Bradley quipping, “I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.” The crowd rolls with laughter. Bill Gates, frozen in a smile-shaped grimace, is not amused.

Read more at  Palm Beach Post : In flash of keystrokes, Dave Bradley changed computer history..

Click more to see the video Continue reading “The Invention of Ctrl+Alt+Delete”

3-D PrintingThe Factory of the Future?

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.

It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.

3-D Printing Is Spurring a Manufacturing Revolution – NYTimes.com.

Suicidal iPad Makers

Ask around among the more than 250,000 workers at the Shenzhen complex, and you’ll find explanations. One 21-year-old assembly-line worker, who asked that his name not be used, says conditions at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, make his life seem meaningless. He says conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours, and workers get yelled at frequently. . So far this year, 10 Foxconn workers have committed suicide.

No one disputes that Taipei-based Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai, has cultivated a tough culture. The company generates more revenue in a year than Apple, Dell, or Microsoft (MSFT). It has grown in profitable obscurity to become an industry juggernaut for a simple reason, says Pamela Gordon of Technology Forecasters, a supply-chain research firm: “It’s the prices. Their prices are lower for high-quality work.” Foxconn won Apple’s order to make the iPhone after Gou directed the business units that make components to sell parts at zero profit, according to two people familiar with the chairman’s actions. Net income jumped 37 percent in 2009 to $2.3 billion, Foxconn’s second-best year on record. Foxconn’s suicides are a reminder of the human cost that can come with the low-cost manufacturing U.S. tech companies demand.

via Why Apple and Others Are Nervous About Foxconn – BusinessWeek.

The Post-PC Era

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

via The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary.

Does the Web change how we think?

” By flooding us with information, the Internet also “causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge” (Nassim Taleb of MIT, author of The Black Swan), but makes our knowledge seem “more fragile,” since “for every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact” (Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired).

Even more intriguing are the (few) positive changes in thinking the Internet has caused. The hyperlinked Web helps us establish “connections between ideas, facts, etc.,” suggests Csikszentmihalyi. “Result: more integrated thought?” For Kelly, the uncertainty resulting from the ubiquity of facts and “antifacts” fosters “a kind of liquidity” in thinking, making it “more active, less contemplative.” Science historian George Dyson believes the Internet’s flood of information has altered the process of creativity: what once required “collecting all available fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge” now requires “removing or ignoring unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.” Creativity by destruction rather than assembly.

via Your Brain Online | Print Article | Newsweek.com.