Air Cars

Clive Maxfield (PLDesign Line) made a post in April about air-powered cars working on compressed air. Will they be able to compete with the cars of future?

Article
MiniCAT
CityCAT
Other models

Harward's Student Database Hacked

Harward's student database has been hacked and the backup of the whole database structure has been posted online via BitTorrent . The message in the torrent file said: "Maybe you don't like it but this is to demonstrate that persons like tgatton(admin of the server) in they don't know how to secure a website".

Google's Lost Spectrum Bid and Future Plans, White Spaces

AT&T and Verizon won parts of 700 MHz spectrum bid that ranged around $4.6 billion [Wi-fiplanet.com]. Even though Google was one of the bidders and lost the auction, it keeps pushing towards opening the air for other (than cell phones) mobile devices. The targeted spectrum is the "white space", previously used as a guard band between broadcasting channels. FCC is welcoming the initiative by the White Space Coalition, including Google, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, HP, Philips, and Earthlink. Once FCC approves the proposals, the consumers might see a multitude of wireless personal devices on the market that are not based on the conventional cellular networks. Access to internet from anywhere can become massively available to anyone for a fraction of the price that RFs (regular folks in this case) are paying right now for their cellular plans, if not free (Go Google)! As a result, the cell phone monopoly will face the serious competition and will be forced to offer more competitive prices.

We need the similar initiative in Canada! I am sure most of Canadians are sick and tired of expensive mobile plans that they have compared to our Southern neighbor.

[Google's Next Spectrum Battle, Wi-fiplanet.com]
[First White Space devices failed, FCC, reports InternetNews.com]
[White Space Coalition]

VoIP reviews, news, tutorials

I've been browsing Wi-Fi Plant website and came across the following interesting pages related to VoIP.

[List of VoIP articles]
[Skype vs. Other VoIP providers]

UWB News

- August 13, 2007: UK is the first EU state to deregulate indoor use of UWB technology [vnunet]
- US and Japan (deregulated at the end of 2006, beginning of 2007) [vnunet]
- Canada (March 2004, Rogers Wireless Inc. acquired the first UWB license for experimental testing) [Canadian Amateur Radio Society]

The Aging Brain: How to age successfully

Here are a few advices that I've heard at one of UBC's open lectures "The Aging Brain: How to age successfully." Here is the podcast of the full speech and here is the link to UBC podcasts blog.

Good indicators of long life, as suggested by the speaker. Some of them are rather funny.
- Be happy, avoid chronic stress that depresses immune system (stress hormone secreted by the adrenaline eventually comes back to the brain and kills neuron cells)
- Acute stress is not bad
- Choose your carrots (parents, genes are important)
- Good for men to be married (even though sometimes it decreases life) . Here, I'd like to add that my teacher of Aikido says that "even though married man live longer, at the end, they are more willing to die".
- For women by statistics usually unmarried women live longer
- Get higher salary (the more money you make and save, the more you'll have when you retire, hence, prolonging your life)
- Get higher position (the higher you are, the more stress you can pass to subordinates)
- Eating less prolongs life (think of it as if you start eating 30% of food now, you gain 30% more life)
- many more others...

Entrepreneurship Articles, News

Startup from PhD thesis (Farid Mobasser, Ottawa U., 2006 winner (one of two) of Atherton Entrepreneurship Award)

Places to get funding: Sponsoring innovations (Ottawa, Canada)

ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up (Philip Greenspun tells ArsDigita's story), thanks to Nick for the link.

Near-invisible UI improvements

The newest issue of EDN magazine had and article explored near-invisible user interface improvements. While a user is spending time with the system, he/she might not mention little modifications done in the background by a team of developers.

"...expert foley (sound effects) is invisible to a movie viewer, until the foley is either missing or implemented poorly." [read it]

That reminds me the words of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, during StartupSchool conference held in March 2007 at Stanford, who have mentioned that they are doing little improvements to the site every day. Small patches of code are constantly added seamlessly improving the user experience.

Nanotech: New World record - SFU beats MIT's smallest book published in 2001

Previous record: MIT: 5 x 5 mm
New record: SFU: 0.07 x 0.1 mm

read here

GUI Design

As suggested by my friend Alex S.: "it's about user interface design, and it's one of the best articles I've ever read" http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Configurable Processors

In this article, Steven Leibson from Tensilica shows some tricks used to hardware-optimize DSP computations with the help of SoC, FGPA, or ASIC. He emphasizes that the use of hardware acceleration is crucial for many DSP applications. Adding special instruction extensions supported by configurable hardware has advantage over assembly-code optimization of a critical path of an algorithm.

There are a few examples (MPEG4, Viterbi and FFT).

http://www.dspdesignline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=193302782&pgno=1