NYTimes - Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril |
David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing. |
MSN - Pig-Out Picks |
Not sure how long this slideshow will be available, but the dishes at several USA restaurants are simply calorie-orgies. Ruby Tuesday seems to be a popular target though their hamburger doesn't seem to match up to Dangerous Dan's 4C burger. The Ruby Tuesday burger seems more like the Dangerous Dan Coronary Burger Special. |
Seattle PI - Costco to limit money-back returns on electronics |
Some customers taking advantage of a decent retailer. Way to go jackasses. Maybe this was one way some people were able to afford buying fancy schmancy new tech toys often, instead of actually earning the money and buying stuff. Costco isn't a library. The Issaquah-based retailer has begun limiting money-back returns on TVs, computers, cameras, camcorders, iPods, MP3 players and cell phones to 90 days. Previously, there was no time limit except for personal computers, which was six months. |
EFF - DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide |
I'll have to be on the lookout for these dots... |
NYTimes - Lesson One: The Price the Contractor Quotes Is an Estimate |
IN a recent letter to her readers, Dominique Browning, the longtime editor of House & Garden magazine, wrote about the agony of renovation, but suggested her experience was so painful that she preferred not to give details. “I’m still in shock and not ready to talk about it,” she wrote. |
MSNBC - Report: Lab mishandled Landis’ urine samples |
Looks like Landis's lawyers have found a loophole to invalidate the test results. The French laboratory that produced incriminating doping results against Landis may have had several errors along the way, including allowing improper access to the cyclist's urine samples, the Los Angeles Times reported. |
MSNBC - Meetings make us dumber, study shows |
I think the title is a bit on the sensational side. People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests. |
MSNBC - Mortgage woes hit on H&R Block profit |
More housing downturn woes. Lowe's also reported lower profits. I think H&R block is dreaming if they think they're going to get a lot of money for their subprime mortgage unit. The longer they wait for a buyer, the lower the price they're going to get. H&R Block Inc., the largest U.S. income tax preparer, reported a quarterly net loss on Thursday, weighed down by the subprime mortgage unit it has put up for sale, but revenue from its tax and banking businesses rose sharply. |
MSNBC - Scurrying rats plague Yum Brands shares |
Gee, I don't think one store is indicative of all the stores, especially outside of urban areas. I wonder if the store is owned by the Yum company or it's a franchisee-owned store. A dozen rats were caught on video scurrying around the floor of a New York City KFC/Taco Bell restaurant early Friday, running between counters and tables and climbing on children’s high chairs. UPDATE: From Yahooo - AP - Rats Run Wild in KFC-Taco Bell in N.Y.: "This is completely unacceptable and is an absolute violation of our high standards," KFC and Taco Bell said in a statement. "This restaurant has been closed and we are addressing the issue with the franchise owner. We will not allow this store to reopen until is it completely resanitized and given a clean bill of health." |
CBC Marketplace - Trouble's Brewing |
While the Marketplace segment harps on Coffee Time's lack of cleanliness at several of its stores, the other coffee store chains weren't perfect. But they weren't as bad as Coffee Time either who had twice the number of infractions as the other chains. Read the comments - they seem to agree with my opinion. When you walk into many Coffee Time stores, they look dirtier than other coffee stores from the other chains. |
CNet - Don't bury the tube TV quite yet |
CRTs make up almost half of the television sets sold in North America and an even greater percentage overseas. So why does the media totally ignore it??? I suspect because it's "not new". There are improvements being made to CRT technology, but the revenue and profit margins are greater in flat-panel displays. Nonetheless, though tube TVs make up just under half of the TV volume right now, that number is dropping fast. Just four years ago, they comprised 88 percent of the market. In 2004, that number dropped to 75 percent, and in the following year to 64 percent. |
Toronto Star - Judge scolds Rogers in cellphone dispute |
Hell hath no fury like a law professor dissed. Some jerk at Rogers who can't read/is ignorant of their own contract decided to punish her and she turns their own contract against them. Irony and schadenfreude all rolled up into one case. Not even the Rogers CEO can placate the law prof. If Rogers knew what was good for them and any customer goodwill they have left, they'd just lick their wounds and stop wasting money on a no-win court case. And this from the firm that wants to sell the Apple iPhone. I'm sure Apple geeks have just as short a fuse with bad customer service as law profs. Hung by the fine print in its own contract, Rogers Wireless was ordered by a small claims court judge yesterday to pay $2,000 in punitive damages to an Osgoode law professor for turning off her young son's phone because she refused to pay more than $14,000 for long distance calls she never made. |
Toronto Star - Windows XP on Burlington |
A guy tracks down the location for one of the Windows desktop paper images. |
Globe and Mail - On fees, banks to give Flaherty a 'win' |
When your bank announces hundreds of millions to billions in profits, I think it's hard (and pretty stupid) to claim that ABM fees are low. And it looks like the Federal Finance Minister has given up on using a carrot with the big bank executives and is threatening to use his big legal sticks. It serves them right for dawdling. Any sane customer-focused company with an ounce of marketing know-how would've pounced on this idea to get some consumer goodwill. Instead the chintzy bean counters won the daily battle - but they'll lose the war in the end. Big companies can be so stupid. In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe and Mail, Mr. Flaherty said he had received “a number of representations” of concern surrounding ABMs, and noted that some transactions can include three layers of fees. Specifically, he indicated he would like to know what kind of discounts banks could provide to seniors and young people. |
NYTimes - Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam |
A lack of women in much of developed Asia and yet people from the USA, etc. are flying over to China to adopt young Chinese girls. Not sure what happened to the idea of keeping things in balance, e.g. yin & yang, etc. More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem. |
Globe and Mail - On March 14, take your number and run |
It's less than a month before portable wireless numbers make their debut, but consumers wouldn't know it from the cellphone carriers' advertising. |
StorageMojo - Two papers about hard disk reliability |
Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong and Google’s Disk Failure Experience The actual papers are Google - Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population and Disk failures in the real world: Short summary: Below is a summary of a few of our results. |
StorageMojo - Two papers about hard disk reliability |
Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong and Google’s Disk Failure Experience The actual papers are Google - Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population and Disk failures in the real world: Short summary - Disk driver failure rates are understated and expensive disks aren't less prone to cheaper SATA drives. |
Telegraph.uk - Diet and exercise 'transformed our children' |
The behaviour of children with special needs improves "significantly" with a good diet and regular exercise, a study has found. |
Toronto Star - Salary cap or is it cheatin' cap? |
"The cap is put in place to have a level playing field," said Detroit GM Ken Holland. "As you get into the system, you might find there's loopholes here and there, and the league wants to make sure there are no loopholes, that the object to have a level playing field is enforced." |
Windows with 4GB RAM |
Looks like people will have to jump to 64-bit to use gobs of memory. Some HP and Compaq PCs support a physical installation of 4 GB of memory. However, maximum memory is limited to approximately 3 GB in Windows XP (32-bit Editions). This limitation is present on all 32-bit PCs and 32-bit operating systems and is not limited to HP and Compaq systems. That IBM guy talking about 4GB is needed for Windows Vista is crap - 99.9% of the computer users out there don't need 4GB of memory. And he does work for IBM, a PC hardware manufacturer, oops, a former PC hardware manufacturer. One GB of RAM and a decent video card should be the main priority for Vista users. |
AMD Athlon 6000 - pitiful overclocker |
From the four reviews of the Athlon 6000 I've skimmed through today, none of them have a section on overclocking in their Table of Contents. Reading through the reviews, there are two references to overclocking AMD's latest Athlon: From Tom's Hardware While it has been difficult to exceed 3 GHz with 90 nm AMD64 processors, the new one reached as much as 3.28 GHz using standard air cooling, which can be attributed to the new F3 stepping.and Hexus.net Using default voltage as an indicator of the sample's frequency headroom, we were unable to run at the next speed grade up, 3200MHz, with any kind of stability. It's evident that the 90nm Windsor core doesn't have a whole lot of life left in it, and the 3GHz X2 6000+ will be its last hurrah. So less than ten percent overclock? Pass. Intel's Conroe overclocks 50% with ease. |
NYTimes - The Psychology of Pricing |
For 99% of people, negotiating for a house will be the largest set of dollars they'll deal with in their personal life. |
NYTimes - JetBlue’s C.E.O. Is ‘Mortified’ After Fliers Are Stranded |
I think you can tell how well-trained a company's employees are by how they handle the unexpected. The employees should already handle the everyday details easily, otherwise they should be fired.<.p> The basic problem, he said, was JetBlue’s communication system: the ice storm had left a large portion of the airline’s 11,000 pilots and flight attendants far from where they needed to be to operate the planes, and JetBlue lacked the trained staff to find them and tell them where to go. Prior to last week, JetBlue had never had so many people out of position. |
MSNBC - Women's desks are ‘germier’ |
Women have three to four times the number of bacteria in, on and around their desks, phones, computers, keyboards, drawers and personal items as men do, the study by University of Arizona professor Charles Gerba showed. Gerba, a professor of soil, water and environmental sciences, tested more than 100 offices on the UA campus and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington, D.C. The $40,000 study was commissioned by the Clorox Co. |
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Baby Sign Language - Update at 14 months |
Neat idea. Teaching your baby sign language so he/she can communicate with you earlier. |
Toronto Star: Millions on the move for Chinese New Year |
Liu is one of an estimated 155 million people who will travel by train during the holiday period. The government has extended the length of the official holiday to one week in recent years to encourage tourism as an economic development measure. |
Gear For Geeks blog:AMD heading for cash-flow crisis |
AMD seems to be stuck in quicksand, sinking very slowly - they desperately need their next CPU to be a Conroe-killer. Their 4x4 platform has turned out to be a stinking dud. No rational person would go for the lame architecture over a Kentsfield CPU-system. It's the less ugly of two butt-ugly architectures. |
Toronto Star - Wait targets delaying other surgeries: MDs |
Makes sense - unless there's more funding for extra operating rooms/nurses/et al., concentrating on reducing wait times for certain surgeries will cause an increase in others. |
Globe and Mail - Is Telus willing to accept the scorn with its porn? |
But its real landmark may be that it became the first carrier in North America to cross the line separating social responsibility from profits. |
New York Magazine - How Not to Talk to Your Kids |
One facet of the "nature versus nurture" debate. I think this would work well as a parent or a manager - substitute "employee/employees/employees" for "child/children/students". For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent. |
MSNBC - Police: Offender posing as child took kids home |
A bizarre story, especially the reaction of the older men who were living with the younger man. |
Globe and Mail - A canary in the Chinese coal mine |
Great wealth doesn't mean much if you're stuck in a hospital bed. All around this valley, thousands of peasants are trying to carve out an existence against the thick dust that chokes the air and settles heavily over every living thing. The soil is covered with a layer of grey soot. Tree leaves are laden with dust. The cabbages are blackened. |
NYTimes - Forget Gimmicks: Buyers Want Numbers |
More information, up to a point, is a good thing. Offering packages of detailed data is becoming a new method for brokers to build their clientele and a way for general Web sites to feed consumers’ interests. Last month, the search engine Yahoo entered a partnership with a nonprofit site named Greatschools.net to offer buyers detailed data to compare schools. |
MSNBC - Mystery ailment devastates bee industry |
A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination. |
NYTimes - The No-Name Brand Behind the Latest Flat-Panel Price War |
The only ones not getting hurt are consumers, who enjoyed sliding prices on HDTVs in 2006. They are likely to see a rerun of the same action in 2007 as prices are expected to fall further by 40 percent or more. For that they can thank the low-price brands like Syntax’s Olevia. |
NYTimes - Deep Breath as Pitchers Rethink Routines |
I wonder why players in some sports take longer to embrace technology than others? Is it partly tradition? |
NYTimes - 2nd Acts in the Executive Suite |
I don't think Michael Dell will be able to fix Dell's long-term problems easily. He can make short term fixes especially in customer support. But the PC==commodity is a problem if you want profit growth especially when your company is as huge as Dell is. |
MSNBC - Lab disaster may lead to new cancer drug |
Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment. |
MSNBC - Required [Texas state] STD shots worry some parents |
Some conservatives and parents’ rights groups worry that requiring girls to get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way they raise their children. Just ship their kids off to Nigeria where these Texas parents will find people who are against vaccinations too. |
ZDNet Blog - Berlind - The problem at Dell wasn’t the CEO. It’s the commodity R&D |
This 'problem'/feature has been known for years. It's only since the computer industry has stagnated for the past couple of years when CPUs hit the 3-4GHz ceiling and the 2-4GB ceiling for 32-bit CPUs that what once was a feature of Dell, letting the major component makers do all the innovation, turn into a problem. Dell needs to realize the problem before it gets too late. Dell's horrible customer service over the past couple of years will be forgotten by many people if Dell can come up with a hot product. But I seriously doubt that they have the people to develop such a product for 2007. They'll need to let loose the headhunters to round up some decent product development people and give them enough management backing to save the company from a very slow death. |
Larry King - Anna Nicole Smith "not the smartest person in the world" |
As heard on CNN's coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death today. |
NYTimes - Hopes Soar After Record Hospital Gift of $400 Million |
Big charitable gift made off of high credit card interest rates. |
NYTimes - The Netherlands, the New Tax Shelter Hot Spot |
If you've got lotsa revenue from intellectual property, e.g. royalties, the Netherlands is the place to report the income. The Dutch shelter is simple: royalties that flow into or out of a Dutch holding company are exempt from taxes. Although the nominal corporate tax rate in the Netherlands is around 30 percent, analysts say that domestic tax shelters bring that rate down substantially. |
Globe and Mail - How a PlayStation speculator misread the market and lost |
Speculator loses money because he got too greedy. Only different thing about this story is that he was speculating in Sony PS3s. Tough luck, dude. |
LA Times - Bookshops' latest sad plot twist |
Independent bookstores are dying off as people go to big-box and internet book stores. |
Globe and Mail - RIM wins patent challenge in the U.K. |
I think all my friends in the UK are glad/relieved about this ruling. The Court of Appeal backed a High Court ruling from a year ago that RIM had not infringed on a patent held by Luxembourg company InPro Licensing Sarl, RIM confirmed in a brief statement. Patent-troll firms are evil. |
eWeek - Massachusetts Leads National TJX Data Probe |
The TJX incident was announced in mid-January, and according to TJX statements, discovered in mid-December. |
CTV.ca - Vitamin D levels linked to lower cancer rates |
"The data were very clear, showing that individuals in the group with the lowest blood levels had the highest rates of breast cancer, and the breast cancer rates dropped as the blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D increased," said study co-author Dr. Cedric Garland, professor at University of California, San Diego Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. |
Annals of Improbably Research: An Algorithm for Determining the Winners of U.S. Presidential Elections |
|
Toronto Star: More permits than 100-year-old drivers |
There's 2 orders of magnitude difference between the number of disabled driver permits for centenarians and the number of >= 100 year-old drivers. That is careless.
I think putting a man on the moon and issuing disabled driver's permits are several orders of magnitude different in difficulty. But that depends on the competence/honesty/diligence of the people involved. Gee, 30 really old people still licensed to drive. Hmm. Should I worry? |
IT World: Apple's Windows applications aren't ready for Vista |
The article title is the nice corporate-friendly version. It should read "Apple can't write Windows software." Apple releases its Windows software relatively often - at least once a year for some products. Many of the problems that the Apple apps have under Vista have been documented for years as requirements for developing Windows-logo-approved software, but Apple's developers/PMs couldn't be bothered to adhere to the rules. Of course, Apple's developers haven't exactly adhered to the rules for writing code for Mac OS X. Microsoft hasn't caught up to the x86 version of OS X yet - but Apple and Microsoft play by different rules when developing operating systems. Apple announced the switch to the x86 chip family out of the blue - no sufficient warnings to their most visible ISVs - Adobe and Microsoft. These big software houses are on their own schedule, probably 2-3 year schedules for a major product upgrade. As they get closer to the end, it gets harder to turn the ship around to another target. Probably the last year of development would be tied to cleaning up and alpha/beta/RC releases. So, if Apple can't give a 1.5-2 year warning to these companies about the impending change, then Apple will lose support for the new products in the current upgrade cycle unless their switch occurred near the beginning of the development cycle. If Adobe and Microsoft can do a relatively quick recompile/test cycle, they could get an x86 version out in a year or so. If not, then the next major upgrade would get x86 support. Given how few x86 machines would be in the marketplace, the quick recompile/test cycle wouldn't make economic sense. So the next major upgrade cycle is what Apple was looking at when they introduced the x86 boxes. Apple's continuing development of competing products to Adobe's and Microsoft's offerings suggest that Apple would not be getting preferential treatment. Meanwhile Microsoft has been releasing public betas/RCs of Windows Vista and SDK documentation for months before wide consumer availability. Microsoft's Visual Studio has problems with Windows Vista too - but the VS2005 has higher demands /requirements than iTunes. |
BBC: Rowling unveils last Potter date |
2007 July 21 is the magic date.
|