mad_ddog

Windows 7 links

2009-01-14T08:21:00.002-05:00

I jumped onthe Windows 7 Beta bandwagon. Unfortunately, the 64-bit version. Looks like some of the hardware on my old box doesn't have 64-bit drivers. So, it's time to install the 32-bit version.

Here's a nice link of interesting UI nehancements for Win7: Tim Sneath - The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

A list of hash values and info for the Win7 64-bit ISO:


7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO
   MD5: 773FC9CC 60338C61 2AF716A2 A14F177D
  SHA1: E09FDBC1 CB3A92CF 6CC87204 0FDAF655 53AB62A5
  Size: 3387009024 3.154GB
 Tiger: D16265C7793C3ACC FAF7F75F3429EC86 1FA4173D70B9CF2D

Roughly Drafted - Palm Pre - The Emperor's New Phone

2009-01-14T08:10:00.002-05:00

Here's an article that doesn't drool over the Palm Pre. Most of the other articles seem to be written from the point of view of a schoolboy who's just had a date with the hottest woman on earth.

If Palm is only going to allow HTML/JS/CSS apps/widgets, then they're not in competition with the iPhone.

Forget any decent iPhone games or any app that requires a serious amount of computation.

Remember HTML/JS/CSS is "Cobol for the Internet".

List of edits from CBC's broadcast of "Doctor Who - Journey's End"

2008-12-22T17:35:00.005-05:00

The DWIN has a summary of most of the CBC edits What got cut from Journey's End.

2:10
Gwen Cooper approaches suspended bullets, touches the suspended air, sees air ripples, "What the hell?"

3:11
After Rose & Doctor hug, Donna says to Jack "You can have me", Jack smiles, Donna says, "No really, you can have me"

5:40
Martha arrives 60 miles outside Nurenberg, Germany, hears Daleks speaking german

6:50 [After Rose talks about the "Darkness"]
Donna asks about herself in the parallel world
Rose: "all timelines converge on you"
Donna: "what have I ever done, I'm just a temp from Chisick(?sp)"
Doctor looks at screen - "The Dalek Crucible - all aboard"

8:40 Supreme Red Dalek commands Doctor to "Surrender Doctor and face your Dalek masters"
Dalek: "Crucible on maximum alert",
Rose and Jack exchange nervous banter
Doctor looks at Donna, Jack, and Rose and says to each of them in turn "You were brilliant", "Blimey"

9:50 [after TARDIS door closes with Donna still inside]
Donna bangs on door saying "Doctor!", "What have you done?"
Doctor: "It wasn't me. I didn't do anything. "
Donna: "Oy! I'm not staying behind."
Doctor: "What did you do?"
Supreme Red Dalek: "This is not of Dalek origin"
Donna:"Doctor!"
Doctor: "Stop it. She's my friend. Now open the door and let her out".
Supreme Red Dalek: "This is timelord treachery"
Doctor: "The door just closed on its own"
Supreme Red Dalek: "Nevertheless, the TARDIS is a weapon and it will be destroyed"

15:21 Donna: "I kept hearing that noise [Doctor's heartbeat] That heartbeat"
Doctor Donna: "Oy. That was me. My single heart. Cause I'm a complicated event in time and space. Must've rippled back. Converging on you."
Donna: "Well, why me?"
Doctor Donna: "Cause you're special"
Donna: "Oh. I keep telling you I'm not."
Doctor Donna: "No you are." [Pause] "Oh...You really don't believe that, do you?" [Pause] "I can see in there???? what you're thinking. All that attitude, all that lip, cause all this time you think you're not worth it"
Donna: "Stop it".
Doctor Donna: "Shouting at the world cause no one's listening. well why should they"
Donna: "Doctor. Stop it"
Doctor Donna: "But look at what you did" [Pause] "No... there's more than that, I..." [Pause] "We were always heading for this"
Doctor Donna: [Montage of Donna scenes] "You captured the TARDIS" "and you found me again ...your granddad ...your car"
Doctor Donna: "Donna, your car, you parked your car right where the TARDIS was going to land. that's not coincidence. Ohhhh. We've been blind, someone's been drawing us together for such a long time"
Donna: "But you're talking like... Destiny. But there's no such thing. Is there?"
Doctor Donna: "We're still not finished. It's like... the pattern's not complete. strands are still drawing together. but heading for what?"

16:40 [switch to Martha in Germany]
Lady: Hier ist niemand [No one is here]
Lady: Was immer sie wollen, gehen sie fort. Lassen sie mich in Ruhe [Whatever you want, go away. Leave me in peace]
Martha: Ich heisse Martha Jones [My name is Martha Jones]
Martha: Ich komme von UNIT. [I come from UNIT]
Martha: Agentin funf sechs sechs siebens eins [Agent 5 6 6 7 1]
Martha: von der medizinishen Abteilung [from the Dept of Medicine]
Lady: Es hiess sie kaemen vorbei [They said you might come]
Lady: That accent - that is London, Ja? I went to London long time ago
Martha: I thought this place was supposed to be guarded
Lady: There were soldiers - boys - I brought them food everyday - but when the Albtraum came from the sky, they went home to die. But not you
Martha: I've got a job to do. [goes inside castle, goes into room, removes curtain hiding doors and hand scanner reader/keypad], she enters numbers and places her hand on scanner.
Lady: "London, in those days to see it, so much glamour, I was so young, I heard the soldiers talking... many times. they would speak of the Osterhagen key... I think London must be changed now, yes? but still, the glamour" Lady pulls out gun and cocks it.
[Martha having unlocked door, looks back at sound of gun cocking]
Lady: "YOU WILL NOT GO"
Martha: "I've got no choice"
Lady: "I know the key... what it does Sie sind der Albtraum. Nicht die anderen, Sie! Ich sollte Sie umbringen, am besten gleich jetzt! [You are the nightmare. Not them, you! I should kill you right now!]
Martha: Nodding "Then do it"
Lady: After much consternation, she gives up and lowers her gun.
Martha: Enters the hidden elevator
Lady: "Martha. To hell with you."
Martha: Presses elevator button "I know"

19:37 Dalek Voice: "Prisoners now on board the Crucible. They will be taken for testing."
Line of walking human prisoners, hands clasped behind their heads.
Sara Jane Smith: "One step closer to the Doctor"

21:54 [After Dalek Caan says one of the Doctor's children of time will die]
Doctor: "Was it you Kan? Did you kill Donna? Why did the TARDIS door close? Tell me!"
Davros: "Oh that's it. The anger, the fire, the rage of a timelord who butchered millions. There he is. Why so shy? Show your companion. Show her your true self. Dalek Kan has promised me that too."
Dalek Caan : "I have seen at the time of ending that the Doctor's soul will be revealed"
Doctor: Muttering "What does that mean?"
Davros: "We will discover it together - our final journey because the ending approaches - the testing begins"
Doctor: "Testing of what?"
Davros: "The reality bomb."

Scene switches to Daleks bringing human prisoners into a room.
Dalek: "Prisoners will stand in the designated area. Move. Move"

24:00 [After Supreme Red Dalek says "activate planetary alignment field"]
Switch to Doctor Donna and Donna in TARDIS getting rocked by the activation.
Looking at screen, Doctor: "It's the planets - the 27 planets"

27:21 Donna's mom: "They're leaving. Dad, they're going. The Daleks are going."
GrandDad: "Going where though? And Donna's still out there. It's not over yet, sweetheart"

28:39 [After Jack Harkness says "an explosion waiting to happen"]
Switch to Martha in control room in Germany
Voice #1 [from China]: "This is Osterhagen Station 5. Are you receiving Station 1?"
Martha: "I've got you. That makes three of us and three's all we need."
Voice #1: "My name is Anna Cho. What's yours?"
Martha: "Martha Jones"
Martha: "what about you station 4? You never said."
Voice #2 [from Liberia]: "I don't want my name on this given what we're about to do."
Voice #1: "So what happens now? Do we do it? "
Martha: "No not yet."
Voice #1: "UNIT instructions say once three Osterhagen stations are online..."
Martha: "Yeah but I've got a higher authourity, way above UNIT, and there's one more thing the Doctor would do..."

29.50 [After Davros says "It begins as Dalek Caan foretold"]
Dalek Caan: "Children of time will gather and one of them will die - he he"
Doctor: "Stop saying that. Put me through"

33:17 [After Davros says "Think of how many have died in your name"]
Montage of people who have died in new Dr. Who series.
Davros: "The Doctor, the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame. This is my final victory Doctor. I have shown you yourself."

35:17 [After Supreme Red Dalek says "activation in 200 rels"]
Doctor: "You can't, Davros - just listen to me - just stop"
Davros: "Ahh Ha ha ha ha ha Nothing can stop the detonation! Nothing! And no one! [more laughing]"

36:43 [After Donna gets blasted into object and Doctor yells "Donna!"]
Doctor: "Donna?! Are you alright, Donna?"

39:30 [After Donna says "Now let's send that trip station ???"]
Donna: "Did I ever tell you, [points at herself] Best temp in Chisick [fingers tapping air quickly] 100 words per minute"
Doctor Donna: "Ha"

40:03 [After Mickey says to Davros "Just stay where you are"]
Jack: "Out of the way" kicks Dalek out of the way
Sara Jane Smith to Rose: "Good to see you again"
Rose to Sarah Jane Smith: "And you too"
The two push another Dalek away.
Martha pushes a third Dalek away.
Donna: "Ready?"
Doctors get ready...
Donna: "And reverse..."

43:29 [After Gwen Cooper says "There goes the timelock"]
Scene of debris falling down on companions/Davros in the Dalek Vault
Doctor: "Do you know what you've done?"
Doctor: "Now get in the TARDIS!"

Doctor: "Davros. Come with me. [Holds out hand]"
Doctor: "I promise I can save you!"

44:50 [After Jack says "Gwen Cooper"]
Doctor: "Tell me Gwen Cooper, are you from an old Cardiff family?"
Gwen: [looks at Ianto, then back to screen] "Yes. all the way back to the 1800s"
Doctor: "Oh. thought so. Spatial genetic multiplicity" [Rose agreeing] "...??? world"

47:03 [during scene where TARDIS is towing Earth]
Scene inside TARDIS, companions manipulating controls.
Donna and Doctor Donna leaving controls
Donna: "That's really good Jack. ??? you're the best"
Jackie laughs.

48:25 [After TV news display of fireworks with subtitle "EARTH RETURNS HOME"]
Scene of Martha's mom walking outside into sunlight, looking up, smiling, twirls around.
Hear the sound of the TARDIS materializing.
Scene of the TARDIS in the middle of a park path.
Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith exit TARDIS.
Sarah: "You know you act like such a lonely man. But look at you. You've got the biggest family on earth."
Doctor and Sarah hug.
Sarah: "Gotta go. He's only 14. It's a long story. And thank you."
Doctor and Sarah wave goodbye to each other.
Sarah runs off.
Donna talks on the cellphone: "Yeah I'm fine. Are you alright?"
Mickey [to Jackie]: "I'm going to miss you, more than anyone."
Jackie: "Whatcha mean? Doctor's gonna take us home. Isn't he?"
Mickey: "Well, that's the point."
Mickey and Jackie hug.
Doctor [to Jack]: "I told you. No teleport. And Martha. Get rid of that Osterhagen thing. Eh? Save the world one more time."
Martha: "Consider it done."
Jack and Martha salute the Doctor.
Doctor returns the salute casually.
Jack and Martha walk off hand-in-hand.
Jack: "You know I'm not sure about UNIT these days. Maybe there's something else you could be doing?"
Mickey exits TARDIS.
Doctor: "Hey! Where are you going?"
Mickey: "Well, I'm not stupid. I can work out what happens next. And hey, I had a good time in that parallel world. Well, my gran passed away. nice and peaceful. spent her last years living in a mansion. There's nothing there for me now. Certainly not Rose."
Doctor: "What'll you do?"
Mickey: "Anything. Brand new life. Just you watch. "
Mickey and Doctor fist-tap.
Mickey: "See you boss. [Speaking to Jack and Martha] Hey you two!"
Jack [looking back]: "Ugh. I thought I got rid of you."
Mickey jogs to catch up to them. The three of them walk off.
Doctor enter TARDIS.
Doctor: "It's time for one last trip. Darlig Ulv Stranden... better known as..."

52:50 [After Rose puts her hand on Doctor Donna's chest to feel his heart beating]
TARDIS makes dematerialization sound
Doctor: "We've got to go. This reality is sealing itself off... forever"
Rose, running after Doctor and Donna: "But... it's still not right."
Rose: "cause the Doctor's still you."
Doctor: "And I'm him."
Rose: "Alright. Both of you answer me this. When I last stood on this beach on the worst day of my life, what was the last thing you said to me? Go on, say it. [looking at Doctor]"
Doctor: "I said 'Rose Tyler..."
Rose: "Yeah, and how was that sentence gonna end?"
Doctor: "doesn't need saying."
Rose [looking at Doctor Donna]: "And you Doctor? What was the end of that sentence?"
Doctor Donna whispers something into Rose's left ear.

54:25 After TARDIS leaves, Doctor Donna and Rose look at each other.

55:51: [After Doctor says, "Look at me." and Donna looks at him]
Donna: "I was going to be with you... forever."
Doctor, softly: "I know"
Donna: "rest of life... travelling...in the TARDIS. the Doctor Donna"

56:56 [After Doctor wipes memories of Donna and him from her memory]
Donna: "NO!"
Donna collapses. Doctor grabs and hugs her.
Camera shows wider view of Donna and Doctor in the TARDIS.

57:29 [After Doctor looks at Donna resting on her own bed at home]
Doctor: "She took my mind into her own head."
Scene switches to living room with Donna's mom and granddad.
Doctor: "But that's Timelord conciousness. All that knowledge is killing her."
Wilfred: "But she'll get better now?"

59:06 [After Doctor says that for one moment, Donna was the most important woman in the whole wide universe]
Donna's mom: "She still is. She's my daughter."
Doctor: "Well, then maybe you should tell her that once in a while"

59:33 [After Donna says, "What have I missed now?"]
Donna's mom: "As I said, I think you should go."

Donna's granddad gets teary-eyed. Doctor looks down.

Switch to Donna in the kitchen.
Donna: "How thick do you think I am? Planets? Tell you what that was Dumbo... that's those two for one lagers you get ????? that man with the goatee Ha ha Yes you do I've seen ya"
Doctor: "Donna."
Donna looks at Doctor at the door:
Doctor: "I was just going."
Donna, curtly: "Yeah. See ya."
Donna looks away.
Donna: "I tell you you're wasting your time with that one. Because seriously you know, she got on that ??? inside, and she saw him. No. no. no. no. listen. listen. this is important. Susie Mayer wouldn't lie. Not unless it was about calories. Ha ha ha"

1:00:14 [Outside door opening, Doctor exiting house into rain]
Doctor: "Ah."
Doctor steps outside.
Doctor: "You'll have quite a bit of this. Atmospheric disturbance."
Scene switches to Doctor and Donna's granddad.
Doctor: "Still it'll pass. Always does."

1:01:34
Scene looking down on Doctor in the TARDIS
Camera switches to looking up at Doctor.
Camera switches back to looking down at Doctor.
Camera switches to looking up at Doctor.
[END CREDITS]

Faster way to reset and clean your Blackberry simulator

2008-09-24T17:03:00.001-04:00



/*

@echo off

REM clean up the simulator directory, this just involves wiping all files new since the SDK was installed

if not exist _manifest goto error

REM mark files in manifest as read only

for /f %%f in ( _manifest ) do attrib +r %%f

REM delete everything else

del /q /a-r *.*

REM clear the read only flag

for /f %%f in ( _manifest ) do attrib -r %%f

goto end

:error
echo Can't find the master manifest! exiting...

:end

*/

var fso;
var files = new Object();
var manifestFile = "_manifest";
var ReadOnly = 1;
var dir = ".";
var start = new Date();

fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");

if (WScript.Arguments.length > 0)
{
 dir = WScript.Arguments.Item(0);
 if (!fso.FolderExists(dir))
 {
  WScript.StdErr.WriteLine("'"+dir+"' isn't a directory.");
  WScript.Quit(-1);
 }
 manifestFile = dir+"\\"+manifestFile;
}

if (!fso.FileExists(manifestFile))
{
 WScript.StdErr.WriteLine("Can't find manifest file: '"+manifestFile+"'.");
 WScript.Quit(-1);
}

var ts = fso.OpenTextFile(manifestFile);
while (!ts.AtEndOfStream)
{
 var line = ts.ReadLine();
 files[line.toLowerCase()] = 1;
}
ts.Close();
ts = null;

var folder = fso.GetFolder(dir);
var fc = new Enumerator(folder.files);
for (; !fc.atEnd(); fc.moveNext())
{
 var file = fc.item();
 if (typeof(files[file.Name.toLowerCase()]) == "undefined")
 {
  var attribs = file.Attributes;
  if (0 == (attribs & ReadOnly))
  {
   file.Delete(true);
  }
 }
}

var end = (new Date())-start;
WScript.StdErr.WriteLine("Time: "+end);

WScript.Quit(0);

Engadget.com: Rogers iPhone 3G plans aka How Rogers snatches defeat from the jaws of success

2008-06-27T23:22:00.002-04:00

I'm going to pass on the iPhone from Rogers - their plans suck - no unlimited data? I could live with crappy phone minutes. But a three year contract with low data limits. Nope.

ZDNet - Waste Management sues SAP over 'complete failure'

2008-03-28T00:24:00.002-04:00

Isn't this how all enterprise software projects work - marketing promises everything, development suddenly has to create brand new features.

The software maker [SAP] sold Waste Management computer programs that were supposed to be designed to manage tasks unique to U.S. companies that haul waste and handle recycling, with no customization required, the lawsuit said.

Those programs handle tasks including billing, waste logistics, container management, and on-board computing, according to a December 2005 press release from SAP America.

"Unknown to Waste Management, this 'United States' version of the Waste and Recycling Software was undeveloped, untested, and defective," the suit says.

Engadget.com - Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon

2008-03-26T18:02:00.002-04:00

This guy is not pulling any punches...

Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey;

Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands.

On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.

But apparently different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola -- except instead of merely being inept, you're actually actively killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer side of Motorola doesn't give you a valid reason for selling the handset business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence.

You clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mold Motorola into the market leader it can and should be. Taking control of the handset division, as you have recently announced, will accomplish very little except but to give you an ability to say, "We tried our best" -- which you haven't -- when you finally do cart the business off to the highest bidder.

Bloomberg.com - Miners Top MBAs as Metal Boom Makes Geologists Scarce

2008-03-14T02:27:00.002-04:00

Brittan Jones passed up a $100,000-a-year job at a mining company last December when he finished his degree in geology. The 24-year-old Canadian said he's confident he'll get a better offer.

Salaries for geology undergraduates in Canada, home to three of the world's largest gold producers, jumped to an average C$90,000 ($91,776) from C$62,500 in 2004, according to Norman Duke, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, who has been a consultant for companies including Teck Cominco.

Geologists' pay tops the average for new U.S. MBAs, which, according to an August 2007 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, was $86,696. Those with mining skills are also catching up with Harvard University MBAs, whose average starting salary rose 15 percent over three years to $115,000 in 2007, according to the university. Tuition for the two-year program is $87,600.

This year there will be about 1,200 geology grads in Canada to fill 9,000 positions in the country's mining industry, said Ryan Montpellier, executive director of the government's Mining Industry Resources Council. In the U.S., the number of jobs open to geologists will rise 22 percent in the decade ending in 2016, about double the average for all occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Instead of taking a permanent, full-time position, Brittan Jones started a research project after completing his four-year course at Canada's provincially funded Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba. Tuition for his undergraduate honors degree was about C$15,000 for the program.

In June, he will start a four-month contract managing a British Columbia drilling program. Jones said he is betting the additional experience will result in a more lucrative job than the C$100,000-a-year position offered by a private exploration company in Manitoba.

Demand for his skills is unlikely to drop. Mining companies announced 1,100 new projects last year with a total value of $308 billion, 50 percent more than a year earlier, Magnus Ericcson, an analyst at Stockholm-based Raw Materials Group, said in an interview.

Teck Cominco estimates that as many as half its workers in British Columbia will retire over the next five years.

The shortage of mining expertise is particularly acute in Canada, Australia and the U.S., said Frances McGuire,

NYTimes - U.S. Is Examining Spitzer’s Funds

2008-03-14T02:17:00.002-04:00

But he has told his aides in recent days that he used prostitutes only in the last eight months and never spent campaign or public money in that regard, according to several of the aides. He reaffirmed that position to his lawyer during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday, others present said.

A person briefed on the inquiry said on Thursday that investigators pursuing the case discovered something last fall that raised suspicions that Mr. Spitzer may have used campaign money to pay for transportation or hotel rooms for trysts with prostitutes.

A person close to Mr. Spitzer said that prosecutors told Ms. Hirshman this week that they would be more inclined to pursue a criminal case against Mr. Spitzer if he remained governor because of the violation of public trust.

IE8's Automatic Crash Recovery Whitepaper

2008-03-06T19:18:00.001-05:00

Over 70% of all Internet Explorer crashes and hangs are caused by extensions, such as ActiveX® controls, Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), and Toolbars. By isolating extension code in the tab process, we can protect the integrity of the browser and limit many failures to the tab process.

The Apple Core Blog - Google; AT&T shocked by iPhone usage

2008-02-17T15:54:00.002-05:00

Well those people at Google and AT&T are pretty dumb then. There's a reason that there were way more US consumers on the internet than in Europe back in the old dialup days. US consumers typically paid a flat rate for internet access (both phone & ISP) while in Europe, consumers were charged per minute for phone use.

AppleInsider reports that Google has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset. They were so shocked, in fact, that they suspected that they had made an error tabulating their data.

In related news René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG, says iPhone is driving up average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones. The average Internet usage for an iPhone customer is more than 100 MBytes. Which is 30 times the use for their average contract-based consumer.

NYTimes - Massachusetts Accuses Merrill of Fraud

2008-02-02T04:06:00.000-05:00

William Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state, filed a civil fraud complaint against Merrill a day after the firm took the unusual step of agreeing to reimburse Springfield for losses on the investments. Merrill agreed to buy back the securities at their original value, $13.9 million, after determining that its brokers had not been authorized by Springfield to buy the securities on the city’s behalf.

According to the suit, Manuel Choy and Carl J. Kipper, two Merrill brokers hired by the Springfield Finance Control Board, were told to pick “instruments that yielded more than Merrill’s money market account as long as the products were triple-A rated by the major credit-rating agencies.”

The pair invested about $14 million of the city’s newfound budget surplus into three so-called collateralized debt obligations — pools of debt securities that were backed by residential mortgage-backed securities and commercial-backed securities (which in turn are pools of residential and commercial mortgage loans). Some of the debt obligations were backed by other debt obligations and synthetic securities, securities backed by derivatives, the suit says.

Last summer, when the market for collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime markets seized up, the value of Springfield’s securities plummeted. For example, Mr. Choy and Mr. Kipper invested $12.6 million in April 2007 into the “Centre Square C.D.O.” By August that C.D.O. had a value of 84 percent of its purchase price; by September it was down to 50; in October, 30 percent, and by December, only 5 percent. When the city asked that Merrill sell the securities, Merrill said there were no buyers.

After the city complained to Merrill about the products, James Mann, the firm’s general counsel, responded in a letter, “While Merrill Lynch is disappointed with the unfortunate disappearance off liquidity in the residential mortgage-backed C.D.O. markets, Merrill Lynch has no legal responsibility to the city concerning the financial performance of this investment.”

Mr. Mann wrote that Springfield was responsible for making the investments, saying, “The city made its own investment decisions.”

MacBook Anorexic (Air)

2008-01-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

Reviews seem to harp more on what got left out. Executives who watch DVDs on long plane trips are not the primary customer.

ArsTechnica: Open source: mob mentality or innovation engine?

2008-01-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

I was also somewhat puzzled by the specific examples of closed-source innovation that Lanier chose to defend his argument. He considers products like Adobe Flash and the Apple iPhone to be paragons of proprietary innovation. Lanier fails to note that many important components in both of those products are built with open-source software. Adobe opened the source code of its Flash ECMAScript implementation and at the heart of the iPhone is Apple's Mac OS X operating system which leverages BSD and a kernel derived from the open source Mach kernel.

This guy's refutations to Lanier's examples are hit-and-miss.

Adobe didn't open-source the Flash ECMAScript engine until Flash was already a widespread success.

Yes, iPhone uses BSD, but I don't think that's what enabled the iPhone's more interesting features - any closed-source OS would've done the job adequately.

Where open source seems to shine is in providing technologies, not finished products.

How many of the OSS projects are innovative? Probably close to the Pareto principle ratio, about 20%.

Ars Technica: Adobe, Omniture in hot water for snooping on CS3 users

2008-01-01T04:26:00.000-05:00

I keep on reading articles about the problem and I keep on thinking "Do people know how to read URLs???"

It all began with a post at UNEASYsilence titled "Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies" which caught on to the fact that Adobe CS3 apps were calling out to a suspiciously-crafted IP address. As it turns out, the IP in question—192.168.112.2O7.net (note the capital O instead of a zero)—is not an IP at all, but rather a domain owned by statistics-tracking firm Omniture.

But the "IP" address ends in '.net', how can it be an IP address then??? Very social-engineering of the folks at Omniture.

Globe and Mail: Calgary cracks down on trans fat

2007-12-31T17:49:00.000-05:00

I recall in Toronto Star: Burger King worst for trans fats:

In response, Burger King Restaurants of Canada called it “one of the highest priorities” for the company to make its restaurants free of added trans fat by the end of next year, starting in Calgary on Jan. 1.

“The company has also identified trans fat-free, par-fry and baked-good solutions for our products, and is currently testing these products as well,” Burger King said in a statement.

The above text makes it sound like Burger King decided to roll out the non-trans fat cooking oil in Calgary first for no particular legal reason - just an arbitrary business-related reason.

But now, there's the article about Calgary's switch to non-trans-fat cooking oils for ALL food establishments:

That quick hit of greasy food to ease the New Year's Day hangover will come with an unexpected bonus in Calgary as the city becomes the first in Canada to regulate use of artery-clogging trans fats served in restaurants.

As of Tuesday, city eateries will not be allowed to cook with fats and oils that have more than 2-per-cent trans fats in total fat content. The same rule applies to all margarines and margarine-based spreads served in those outlets.

Burger King - always second-place to McDonald's and now we see why. They just can't get their act together unless there's government legislation involved. Lazy or apathetic - take your pick.

Globe and Mail: The dark side of booming TV sales

2007-12-31T16:33:00.001-05:00

At the end of the article about what to do with old CRT-style TVs, there's this nugget of info (summary - they recycle as much as possible as opposed to the old method used on Black & white TVs - dump them in the landfill):

By the numbers

$1,099 — Average cost to make a 42-inch high-definition television last year

$820 — Average cost to produce that TV now

150 million — Global demand for HD TVs by 2010

Discover: Long Live Closed-Source Software!

2007-12-31T16:25:00.000-05:00

Comments to come, just wanted to put this thing up so I wouldn't forget.

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

Heise security: Mac OS X Leopard firewall breaks programs

2007-11-14T18:52:00.000-05:00

In restricted mode, simply trying to start a service brings up a window asking the user for permission. The user can then allow or forbid this. The system records this choice and enters it into the firewall's exceptions list. To achieve this, Apple furnishes unsigned programs with a digital signature in the process. If changes are made to the program subsequently, the permission is withdrawn.

Code signing becomes a problem when an application performs its own self-integrity check and determines that the file on the hard disk has been changed. The firewall's code signature changes the checksum of Skype's binary on the disc:

MD5 (Skype) = 9d7fa7f77b8dc2a3c2ae61737a373c11 MD5 (Skype-org) = 4245cb201a94c76ddcb54b1cc1e58cfa

after which, if the user attempts to start Skype from the command line it displays the following message:

Main starting Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Users who start Skype from the GUI merely see a dancing symbol which then disappears without further comment. Reinstallation is required to restore the application to normal function.

NYPost - NEW TITANIC THREAT

2007-11-08T19:10:00.000-05:00

More than $500 billion of potentially worthless paper is padding the balance sheets of the nation's top-10 banks - and could also be contaminating the huge pensions and annuities that support millions of Americans.

What's scaring investors and politicians is the murky nature of many asset-backed investments strewn throughout the global economy, with about $100 billion written off in the past months at funds, banks and other institutions.

The assets, collectively known as level 3 securities, are considered the riskiest breed because their true values are still largely uncalculated.

But tough new standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board kick in Nov. 15, requiring companies to place values on these assets or write them down.

Woo Hoo!!! Canadian Dollar reaches US$1.10

2007-11-07T01:02:00.000-05:00

From Yahoo Finance:

Not going to pay a large premium for goods in Canada!!!

2007-10-31T18:38:00.001-04:00

I just got an email from Amazon.ca about a sale they were having. One of the products they offered on their Canadian website cost about one-third less if I bought from the USA website in straight numbers - no currency conversion applied.

Amazon.ca: Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Vol. 5 - $80.98 => $64.78

Amazon.com: Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Five - $64.98 => $44.99

Hah. How stupid do they think I am?

Anything more than fifteen percent difference isn't going to make me open up my wallet.

I really don't care about their excuses about why things cost more in Canada than in the USA. Deal with it. I'm not your mom.

Blackberry 8830 First Impressions

2007-10-22T15:28:00.001-04:00

Someone was showing off their new Blackberry. I took a look at it.

The initial screen is nice - decent-looking icons.

But then I decided to start one of the apps - Calendar. It was like I was transported back to Windows 2.11 (sans the garish colour scheme).

Ugly fonts. Damn ugly fonts. There's a reason I bought a Mac II (paying lots of $$$ even with the developer discount) instead of MS Windows. Fonts.

Looks like RIM ripped off the vector fonts from the Tempest arcade game, with one improvement - they removed the extra bright pixels where the vertices join.

After taking a look at the bare-bones craplets, I mentioned the ugly fonts to the owner of the Blackberry and someone said that you could change the default font.

So off I went in search of the Settings page to see if there was a better font.

I found the Settings page. But a decent font was not apparent out of the ten or so available.

Is it just me or are Blackberry fonts crappy?

NYTimes - Canada’s Policy on Immigrants Brings Backlog

2007-10-18T17:14:00.000-04:00

With an advanced degree in business management from a university in India and impeccable English, Salman Kureishy is precisely the type of foreigner that Canada’s merit-based immigration system was designed to attract.

Yet eight years went by from the time Mr. Kureishy passed his first Canadian immigration test until he moved from India to Canada. Then he had to endure nine months of bureaucratic delays before landing a job in his field in March.

Mr. Kureishy’s experience — and that of Canada’s immigration system — offers a cautionary tale for the United States. Mr. Kureishy came to this country under a system Canada pioneered in the 1960s that favors highly skilled foreigners, by assigning points for education and work experience and accepting those who earn high scores.

A similar point system for the United States is proposed in the immigration bill that bounced back to life on Tuesday, when the Senate reversed a previous stand and brought the bill back to the floor. The vote did not guarantee passage of the bill, which calls for the biggest changes in immigration law in more than 20 years.

The point system has helped Canada compete with the United States and other Western powers for highly educated workers, the most coveted immigrants in high-tech and other cutting-edge industries. But in recent years, immigration lawyers and labor market analysts say, the Canadian system has become an immovable beast, with a backlog of more than 800,000 applications and waits of four years or more.

The system’s bias toward the educated has left some industries crying out for skilled blue-collar workers, especially in western Canada where Alberta’s busy oil fields have generated an economic boom. Studies by the Alberta government show the province could be short by as many as 100,000 workers over the next decade.

In response, some Canadian employers are sidestepping the point system and relying instead on a program initiated in 1998 that allows provincial governments to hand-pick some immigrant workers, and on temporary foreign-worker permits.

“The points system is so inflexible,” said Herman Van Reekum, an immigration consultant in Calgary who helps Alberta employers find workers. “We need low-skill workers and trades workers here, and those people have no hope under the points system.”

TheInquirer.net: G92 and RV670 are GPGPU monsters

2007-10-12T16:04:00.000-04:00

Oooh. double-precision floating pt in the GPU. Droool.

We learned that G92 and RV670 are sporting dual-precision units (128, 112 or 96 to be available in G92, RV670 will have 320 units), albeit it is unknown what type of Binary Floating-Point formats are these units supporting.

TheInquirer.net: Speeding up Flash... in a flash

2007-10-12T16:03:00.000-04:00

Faster is usually better...

During one of those obscure hidden tech sessions at the recent IDF, Intel showed something that caught my eye: ONFI. What the hell is that? By the name alone, one would think of Paris Hilton's next puppy...

Well, ONFI is more than that - it is a part of an initiative to optimise the flash memory integration and performance in the PCs, starting with NVMHCI "Non Volatile Mem Host Controller Interface" akin to SATA AHCI.

NVMHCI is a standard programming interface for multiplatform OS support for flash as native storage at low level, enabling a single driver for both hard disks and flask memory. It can be used to support both the cache-like flash drive supplements like ReadyBoost or ReadyDrive, and full SSD storage devices.

Now, ONFI, or Open NAND Flash Interface, is a flash-optimised, uniform electical and protocol interface, with 1.0 ratified spec since end of last year. Intel and Micron are right now shipping ONFI-compliant chips. The current 60+ ONFI members include pretty much all major names, including ATI, Nvidia and a host of memory and controller vendors.

That's just the start - the upcoming ONFI 2.0 improves performance drastically by changing the NAND interface to almost quadruple the transfer rate from the NAND array to the memory buffer - from 40 MB/s to 150 MB/s per die, not bad eh?

Then, they borrow some thingies from SDRAM and DDR DRAM, like source synchronous data strobes and dual data rate timings with a clock speedup generational chart, ranging from Gen1 at 133 MB/s to Gen2 at 266 MB/s and Gen3 at 400 MB/s - or 10x above the current flash dies. The only pinout change? An extra source sync pin, that's it.

NYTimes - The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste

2007-10-02T17:16:00.000-04:00

The NY Times interviews the man who overcame the Panamanian government bureaucracy to report the diethylene glycol ingredient in some toothpaste.

NYTimes - Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs

2007-09-27T18:24:00.000-04:00

I remember a software company, probably Sierra On-Line, in Steven Levy's book, Hackers, tried to do the same thing - train non-programmers to be programmers - because the company thought they could save money.

Guess what? It didn't work. Unless you're planning on cranking out a bunch of somewhat-competent programmers with maybe one or two superheroes in the bunch, it just doesn't work. Maybe these Indian companies have come up with a new formula. But I severely doubt it.

The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.

Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.

“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.

Bloomberg: India Brokers Desert CLSA, JPMorgan for Local Firms, Millions

2007-09-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

PMorgan Chase & Co. and Prudential Plc also have had defections in India. Domestic brokerages are winning staff with signing bonuses of $2.7 million and more, plus equity stakes. The competition is about to worsen as unlisted local brokers plan initial public offerings to fund expansion and as India's largest companies enter the industry.

Indian brokerage shares are surging. India Infoline has jumped 174 percent this year, with almost all the increase coming after the announcement of its new hires in May. JM Financial Ltd., which lured five sales traders from JPMorgan in August, has risen 92 percent in 2007. The nation's benchmark Sensitive Index is up 12 percent this year.

The chase for talent in finance and trading is one of the most intense in India, where high-skilled labor is in short supply. Professional wages will rise 14.5 percent this year after climbing 14.4 percent in 2006, according to human-resources firm Hewitt Associates.

Infoline's Jagannath and his three former CLSA colleagues were given signing bonuses of 110 million rupees ($2.7 million) each.

Jagannath, who spent five years in New York for CLSA before returning to Mumbai, was given the option to buy 2 million warrants at 440 rupees each, according to a statement made by India Infoline to the Bombay Stock Exchange. At today's value, his stake in the company is valued at 1.68 billion rupees. Subtracting his purchase price for the warrants and adding the $2.7 million initial bonus, he's ahead by $22 million.

NY Times - Bye, Bye B-School

2007-09-16T01:14:00.000-04:00

Three years into his new job, Mr. Hammond noticed something. Very few of his young co-workers were taking a hiatus from Wall Street to go to business school, long considered an essential rung on the way to the top of the corporate ladder.

So he, too, decided to forgo an M.B.A.. Instead, he raised $5 million and started his own hedge fund, Alerian Capital Management, in 2004. The fund now manages $300 million out of offices in New York and Dallas, and Mr. Hammond, 28, enjoys seven-figure payouts.

Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.

As more Americans have become abundantly wealthy, young people are recalculating old assumptions about success. The flood of money into private equity and hedge funds over the last decade has made billionaires out of people like Kenneth Griffin, 38, chief executive of the Citadel Investment Group, and Eddie Lampert, 45, the hedge fund king who bought Sears and Kmart. These men are icons for the fast buck set — particularly the mathematically gifted cohort of rising stars known as “quants.” Many college graduates who are bright enough to be top computer scientists or medical researchers are becoming traders instead, and they measure their status in dollars instead of titles.

At funds that manage $1 billion to $3 billion, people with just a few years of finance experience will make $337,000 this year, Mr. Zoia says, and those with five to nine years of experience will average $830,000, up 6 percent from last year. These estimates include analysts and researchers but not portfolio traders, who can make much more because they sometimes share in profits.

MSNBC - Thrown off plane for outfit deemed too skimpy

2007-09-07T16:53:00.000-04:00

It doesn’t take much to get thrown off an airplane these days, as Kyla Ebbert found out when a Southwest Airlines employee told her she was too bare for the air. Two months later, she’s still trying to figure out what was wrong with her outfit.

It was a lot more clothing than the 23-year-old college student wears on her job as a Hooters waitress. Her mother, Michele Ebbert, said she would have told her daughter if the outfit was inappropriate.

“But her outfit is fine, Michele Ebbert told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer. “She looks like every other college girl in San Diego.”

Not according to a Southwest employee identified only as “Keith,” who approached Ebbert after she had taken her seat on the plane and was listening to the flight attendants go through their pre-departure routine.

A compromise was finally reached when Ebbert promised to pull up her top, which wasn’t showing cleavage to begin with, and pull down her tiny skirt.

What really tops the whole story off is that Ebbert wore the same outfit on the return flight to San Diego later that day. A female flight attendant also took note of it, according to Ebbert.

“I was complimented by the stewardess on my return flight,” she said.

NYTimes - Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit

2007-09-05T15:40:00.000-04:00

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

“We’ve all been working on the workplace safety side of this, but the potential for consumer exposure is very concerning,” said John B. Hallagan, general counsel for the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States, a trade association of companies that make butter flavorings for popcorn producers. “Are there other cases out there? There could be.”

A spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration said that the agency was considering the case as part of a review of the safety of diacetyl, which adds the buttery taste to many microwave popcorns, including Orville Redenbacher and Act II.

But nothing in the Colorado man’s history suggested that he was breathing in excessive amounts of mold or bird droppings, Dr. Rose said. She has consulted to flavorings manufacturers for years about “popcorn workers’ lung,” and said that something about the man’s tests appeared similar to those of the workers.

“I said to him, ‘This is a very weird question, but bear with me. But are you around a lot of popcorn?’ ” Dr. Rose asked. “His jaw dropped and he said, ‘How could you possibly know that about me? I am Mr. Popcorn. I love popcorn.’ ”

The man told Dr. Rose that he had eaten microwave popcorn at least twice a day for more than 10 years.

“When he broke open the bags, after the steam came out, he would often inhale the fragrance because he liked it so much,” Dr. Rose said. “That’s heated diacetyl, which we know from the workers’ studies is the highest risk.”

Dr. Rose measured levels of diacetyl in the man’s home after he made popcorn and found levels of the chemical were similar to those in microwave popcorn plants. She asked the man to stop eating microwave popcorn.

Six months later, the man has lost 50 pounds and his lung function has not only stopped deteriorating but has actually improved slightly, Dr. Rose said.

NYTimes - As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes

2007-08-27T15:46:00.000-04:00

Scary stuff.

No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.

But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.

NYTimes - Inside the Countrywide Lending Spree

2007-08-27T15:42:00.000-04:00

Stick a fork in this thing - this NY Times article just roasted the company.

ON its way to becoming the nation’s largest mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial Corporation encouraged its sales force to court customers over the telephone with a seductive pitch that seldom varied. “I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible,” the sales representatives would say.

But providing “the best loan possible” to customers wasn’t always the bank’s main goal, say some former employees. Instead, potential borrowers were often led to high-cost and sometimes unfavorable loans that resulted in richer commissions for Countrywide’s smooth-talking sales force, outsize fees to company affiliates providing services on the loans, and a roaring stock price that made Countrywide executives among the highest paid in America.

Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews with former employees and brokers who worked in different units of the company and internal documents they provided. One document, for instance, shows that until last September the computer system in the company’s subprime unit excluded borrowers’ cash reserves, which had the effect of steering them away from lower-cost loans to those that were more expensive to homeowners and more profitable to Countrywide.

Now, with the entire mortgage business on tenterhooks and industry practices under scrutiny by securities regulators and banking industry overseers, Countrywide’s money machine is sputtering. So far this year, fearful investors have cut its stock in half. About two weeks ago, the company was forced to draw down its entire $11.5 billion credit line from a consortium of banks because it could no longer sell or borrow against home loans it has made. And last week, Bank of America invested $2 billion for a 16 percent stake in Countrywide, a move that came amid speculation that Countrywide’s survival was in question and that it had become a takeover target — notions that Countrywide publicly disputed.

Homeowners, meanwhile, drawn in by Countrywide sales scripts assuring “the best loan possible,” are behind on their mortgages in record numbers. As of June 30, almost one in four subprime loans that Countrywide services was delinquent, up from 15 percent in the same period last year, according to company filings. Almost 10 percent were delinquent by 90 days or more, compared with last year’s rate of 5.35 percent.

Many of these loans had interest rates that recently reset from low teaser levels to double digits; others carry prohibitive prepayment penalties that have made refinancing impossibly expensive, even before this month’s upheaval in the mortgage markets.

To be sure, Countrywide was not the only lender that sold questionable loans with enormous fees during the housing bubble. And as real estate prices soared, borrowers themselves proved all too eager to participate, even if it meant paying high costs or signing up for a loan with an interest rate that would jump in coming years.

But few companies benefited more from the mortgage mania than Countrywide, among the most aggressive home lenders in the nation. As such, the company is Exhibit A for the lax and, until recently, highly lucrative lending that has turned a once-hot business ice cold and has touched off a housing crisis of historic proportions.

NYTimes - Virus Spreading Alarm and Pig Disease in China

2007-08-16T18:01:00.000-04:00

A highly infectious swine virus is sweeping China’s pig population, driving up pork prices and creating fears of a global pandemic among domesticated pigs.

Animal virus experts say Chinese authorities are playing down the gravity and spread of the disease.

So far, the mysterious virus — believed to cause an unusually deadly form of an infection known as blue-ear pig disease — has spread to 25 of this country’s 33 provinces and regions, prompting a pork shortage and the strongest inflation in China in a decade.

More than that, China’s past lack of transparency — particularly over what became the SARS epidemic — has created global concern.

Field experts are reporting widespread disease outbreaks. Fear among pig farmers that their livestock will contract the disease has led to panic selling. And the government and media here have issued alarming reports that farmers are selling diseased or infected pigs to illegal slaughterhouses, which could pose food safety problems.

Scientists who track blue-ear pig disease are puzzled because the disease is generally not so deadly.

“This virus generally makes them ill but on its own it doesn’t cause a lot of deaths,” said Steven McOrist, a professor of pig medicines at the University of Nottingham in England. “The evidence they put up so far is not conclusive.”

Many experts, meanwhile, worry that China, which the F.A.O. says is the fourth-largest exporter of live and slaughtered hogs, could already be exporting the disease.

Globe and Mail - Analysts fear shorting effect

2007-08-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

"The market move was not caused by the rule change, but there is little doubt that it made the slide occur faster than it might otherwise," Gregory Drahuschak, vice-president of Janney Montgomery Scott Inc., wrote in a note to clients this week. "Increased volatility is here to stay as long as the new regulation remains."

The so-called "uptick rule" or "tick test" was implemented in the 1930s after the stock market crash to ensure short sellers were not alone in causing a stock price to fall.

But regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revoked the rule in July, suggesting it modestly hurt liquidity and did not appear necessary to prevent the manipulation of a stock price.

"The hedge funds were very, very aware of this. They sit around and giggle when this stuff happens," said Mallory Hill, chief executive officer of mortgage lender Novelle Financial Services Inc. "Without the uptick rule, they can put anyone out of business."

Also, since the tick test was officially eliminated July 6, downside trades have proliferated and volatility has become increasingly prevalent in the stock market.

NYTimes - Bear Stearns Says Battered Hedge Funds Are Worth Little

2007-07-18T14:56:00.000-04:00

Bear Stearns told clients in its two battered hedge funds late yesterday that their investments, worth an estimated $1.5 billion at the end of 2006, are almost entirely gone. In phone calls to anxious investors, Bear Stearns brokers reported yesterday that May and June had been devastating months for the portfolios.

The more conservative fund, the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, was down 91 percent by the end of June, investors were told. The High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, which used extensive borrowings and assumed more risk, has no investor capital left, the firm said.

The announcement that the funds are now almost worthless came as a surprise to many on Wall Street. “How did you go from reporting very high returns to suddenly now saying the collateral is worth nothing?” asked Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a research firm in Chicago.

The Bear Stearns funds, like so many others, bought collateralized debt obligations, investment pools consisting of hundred of loans and other financial instruments. Wall Street divides the pools up in slices based on their credit quality and sells them to investors.

Mark H. Adelson, head of structured finance research at Nomura Securities, said that the Bear Stearns funds steep decline had broad implications for investors in these bonds. “It’s going to provide an additional item that argues for lower valuations on these positions,” he said.

Ms. Tavakoli said other hedge funds would face a tougher time justifying to both investors and regulators the value they have assigned to mortgage-backed securities they hold. “Depending on how aggressive the S.E.C. wants to be, this could get ugly,” she said.

“There are a bunch of unanswered questions here,” said Joshua Rosner, a managing director at Graham & Fisher, an investment firm. “For me, one of the big unanswered questions is, do the prime brokers and others who have extended lines of credit to the hedge funds really have a good handle” on how those borrowings have been invested.

The best summary of the Bear Stearns debacle, from Naked Shorts: BS BS, translated

Some key sentences, translated:

The preliminary estimates show there is effectively no value left for the investors in the Enhanced Leverage Fund and very little value left for the investors in the High-Grade Fund as of June 30 2007.

Translation: You’re screwed.

At this time approximately $1.4 billion remains outstanding on this [$1.6 billion] line and we continue to believe there are sufficient assets available in the High-Grade fund to fully collateralize the repo facility.

Translation: We’re not..

Epicenter blog - Mike Moritz: The S&P 500 Beats 80% of Venture Funds

2007-07-17T10:07:00.000-04:00

Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz, the uber-VC who earned his reputation backing Google, Yahoo, eBay, Cisco and Apple, was pessimistic about the future of the venture capital industry at a Fortune-sponsored conference Friday. "People would be far better off investing in an index fund," rather than putting their money into a VC fund, Moritz claimed, estimating that fewer than 20% of VC funds outperform the S&P 500.

AP: Beijing steamed buns include cardboard

2007-07-12T16:26:00.000-04:00

Chopped cardboard, softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning, is a main ingredient in batches of steamed buns sold in one Beijing neighborhood, state television said.

The hidden camera follows the man, whose face is not shown, into a ramshackle building where steamers are filled with the fluffy white buns, traditionally stuffed with minced pork.

The surroundings are filthy, with water puddles and piles of old furniture and cardboard on the ground.

"What's in the recipe?" the reporter asks. "Six to four," the man says.

"You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?" asks the reporter. "Fatty meat," the man replies.

The bun maker and his assistants then give a demonstration on how the product is made.

Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda — a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap — then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in.

Globe and Mail - 'Made in Canada' - via China

2007-07-06T18:07:00.000-04:00

"Anything at all that comes from China that's edible we are not going to eat now," said Ms. Wood, a retired secretary in Lac-des-Îles, Que. She's even nervous about putting leftovers in made-in-China plastic containers.

She's not alone. More consumers are taking a hard look at "Made in China" labels after a string of recalls and publicity over deplorable safety standards in China. But it's nearly impossible to get out of the supermarket without food from China in your cart.

The good news is that avoiding products labelled "Made in China" won't crimp your grocery list, unless you really like frozen seafood - including shrimp, pollock, sole, haddock and salmon.

The bad news is that food labels don't tell the whole story. A host of Chinese imports are hiding behind "Made in Canada" labels, from the freeze-dried strawberries in your cereal to the wheat gluten in your hamburger buns.

"Made in Canada" simply means that 51 per cent of the production cost was incurred in Canada; the ingredients could come from anywhere, and increasingly they come from China. For example, manufacturers can import apple juice concentrate from China - for about one-fifth the cost of Canadian concentrate - add water to it in Canada, and mark it "Made in Canada."

NYTimes - China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves

2007-07-05T16:35:00.001-04:00

The Chinese government PR is getting drowned out by all the defective product reports.

The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the survey, conducted in the first half of this year, showed quality and safety improvements compared with conditions in the period a year earlier. But the announcement also suggested that Chinese consumers are at serious risk of being harmed by purchasing tainted foods, substandard goods and suspect or defective equipment.

Regulators said, in effect, that goods sold in China were far more hazardous than the exports that were driving the country’s economic growth and now partly the subject of safety and quality debates.

During the last month, regulators and quality inspectors say they have discovered candied fruit with 63 times the permitted amount of sweetener; excessive additives and preservatives in nearly 40 percent of the children’s snacks surveyed in western Guangxi province; fake human blood protein at hospitals; and food tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.

Experts say aggressive and opportunistic entrepreneurs continue to take advantage of the country’s chronically weak enforcement of regulations, choosing to blend fake ingredients into products; to sign contracts agreeing to sell one product only to later switch the raw materials for something cheaper; and to doctor, adulterate or even color foods to make them look fresher or more appetizing, when in fact they might be old and stale.

In its report released on Wednesday, the government said 80.9 percent of the food and other products checked in a nationwide survey met safety standards, and that this rate was higher than a year earlier, when about 78 percent of the good surveyed were deemed safe.

NYTimes - IPhone-Free Cellphone News

2007-07-05T16:11:00.000-04:00

Very cool idea.

It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.

Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)

SAVING NO. 1 It’s not just your calls at home that are free; you may also get free calls at your office, friends’ houses, library, coffee shops and so on — wherever Wi-Fi is available. You can access both unprotected and password-protected Wi-Fi networks (you just enter the password on the phone’s keypad).

There’s one big limitation to all this freeness: these phones can’t get onto any hot spot that require you to log in on a Web page (to enter a credit card number, for example). Unfortunately, this restriction rules out most airports and many hotel rooms.

There’s one exception — or, rather, 8,500 of them: T-Mobile’s archipelago of hot spots at Starbucks, Borders and other public places. In these places you encounter neither the fee nor the Web-page sign-in that you would encounter if you were using a laptop; the words “T-Mobile Hot Spot” simply appear at the top of your screen, and you can start making free calls.

SAVING NO. 2 T-Mobile’s billing system isn’t smart enough to notice handoffs between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. So each call is billed according to where it begins. You can start a call at home, get in your car, drive away and talk for free until the battery’s dead.

The opposite is also true, however; if you begin a call on T-Mobile’s cell network and later enter a Wi-Fi hot spot, the call continues to eat up minutes. If HotSpot @Home catches on, therefore, the airwaves will reverberate with people coming home and saying, “Hey, can I call you right back?”

SAVING NO. 3 When you’re in a hot spot, T-Mobile has no idea where you are in the world. You could be in Des Moines, Denmark or Djibouti. So this is a big one for travelers: When you’re in a hot spot overseas, all calls to United States numbers are free.

SAVING NO. 4 T-Mobile’s hope is that you’ll cancel your home phone line altogether. You’ll be all cellphone, all the time. And why not, since you’ll now get great cell reception at home and have only one phone number and voicemail? Ka-ching: there’s an additional $500 a year saved.

Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective

2007-06-27T19:40:00.000-04:00

3. What are the office arrangements like? Do you have an office or cube space?

In terms of employees per square-foot, every Microsoft Building 9-sized office is a triple at Google.

Google doesn’t seem to think that private offices are valuable for technical staff. They’re wrong.

7. Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?

Make the food in the café free. If an employee eats an average of $15 of food per day (the actual average at Google which is closer to $10) it would cost Microsoft $3,750 per year per employee to offer 3 meals a day. Instead of increasing starting salaries, switch to free food. Give everyone else half the merit increases we would have gotten AND ANNOUNCE THE FREE FOOD AT THE SAME TIME. For that quoted $10 average Google provides free soda, free organic drinks (odwalla, naked juice), breakfast, lunch, and dinner (most people only eat lunch), free sport drinks (vitamin water, etc.), and free snacks (trail mixes, nuts, chips, candy, gum, cereal, granola bars).

That single benefit gets people to work earlier because hot breakfast is served only until 8:30. And since dinner isn’t served until 6:00 or 6:30 the people with a home-life tend to skip it.

Google actually pays less salary than Microsoft.

Google’s health insurance is actually not nearly as good as Microsoft’s.

NY Times - In Food Safety Crackdown, China Closes 180 Plants

2007-06-27T19:14:00.000-04:00

For instance, in 2005, officials in south China found a company repackaging food waste and shipping it to 10 other regions. And just last week, officials said a company in Anhui province, not far from Shanghai, was selling a two-year-old rice dumpling mix as fresh, according to the state-controlled media.

NYTimes - The Real Owner of All Those Planes

2007-05-28T17:15:00.000-04:00

When Steven Udvar-Hazy was a teenager in New York City, he would often head after school to Idlewild Airport, as Kennedy International was known then, to watch planes take off and land.

Airplanes symbolized freedom to the young Mr. Hazy, whose family moved from Hungary when he was 12. For hours, he would spot different aircraft and pore over timetables to figure out where they were coming from, or headed to.

Today, if anyone were to watch planes taking off at Kennedy — or at most airports around the world — they probably would be looking at planes owned by Mr. Hazy, a billionaire three times over and one of the most powerful players in commercial aviation.

As founder and chief executive of the Los Angeles-based International Lease Finance Corporation, Mr. Hazy has a fleet of 824 Boeings and Airbuses, with 254 more on order, that dwarfs any airline’s in the world. He owns more planes than the industry leader, American Airlines, which has 679, and more than the combined holdings of Air France (265), Lufthansa (245) and British Airways (239).

But Mr. Hazy prefers to keep a low profile, a rarity in an industry that has attracted more than its share of big egos. He rarely grants interviews, and is more than happy to let his 157 customers — airlines like Cathay Pacific, Air France and American — paint their names and logos on his jets.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but in our industry, Steve Hazy is God,” said Edmund S. Greenslet, editor of AirlineMonitor.com. “No one has more influence than he does. He has an enormous impact on how manufacturers design their planes. He’s the financial engine for airlines around the world.”

Airlines lease airplanes for the same reason that cash-short consumers lease cars — they can get new models for lower payments.

Nearly half of the airplanes flying today are leased by the airlines, and Mr. Hazy, with his $45 billion portfolio, is the biggest player, as measured by dollar volume, followed by General Electric.

CNN - Biting gnats bug people, kill chickens in Midwest

2007-05-28T17:13:00.001-04:00

Kyle Winkelmann has learned in the past two weeks that if he's going to get into the cab of his tractor, he had better do it in a hurry.

"I run really fast and get in quick, or else they'll get in with you," said Winkelmann, who farms near Tallula, about 15 miles northwest of Springfield.

"They" are buffalo gnats, a type of black fly that has hatched in unusually high numbers the past two weeks in west-central Illinois.

The females bite. They're parasites, spending most of their roughly three-week life looking for blood to provide the protein needed to lay eggs. Their saliva causes an allergic reaction, leaving big, red, itchy welts on people and animals.

In the 10 or 12 days since the little bugs -- about the size of the exposed lead at the end of a pencil -- hatched, they've irritated farmers like Winkelmann and driven golfers and gardeners indoors in scattered spots between Springfield and the Mississippi River. They apparently have also killed some poultry.

The state Department of Agriculture received reports from several people who lost birds from backyard flocks and tested the poultry for bird flu and other ailments, spokesman Jeff Squibb said.

"There is no test per se for buffalo gnats in a necropsy," he said. "It's a process of elimination, and all other causes have been eliminated."

The birds could have died of blood loss, allergic reactions to the bugs' saliva or even asphyxiation, with their airways clogged with gnats, said Colleen O'Keefe, manager of the department's food safety and animal protection division.

Illinois doesn't have much of a poultry industry, and its few big farmers raise their chickens indoors, safe from the gnats.

ZDNet blogs - Retailers haven’t learned from TJX - still running WEP

2007-05-28T17:12:00.001-04:00

Many big name retailers still using WEP. Sad. Just stay away or use cash only.

Toronto Star - Dwight Wilson, 106: WWI veteran

2007-05-28T17:10:00.000-04:00

Then there was one left.

A private funeral with military honours is being arranged for World WarI veteran Dwight Wilson, who died at Sunnybrook hospital yesterday at 106.

His passing all but eliminates the possibility of a state funeral for the last surviving Canadian veteran of the conflict, a proposal the House of Commons endorsed unanimously in November.

With Wilson's death, the distinction of being Canada's last living veteran of the Great War belongs to John Babcock of Spokane, Wash.

"That means that I'm it," Babcock told Canadian Press from his home, after expressing his regret at Wilson's death.

Babcock became a U.S. citizen 60 years ago and has made it clear he doesn't want a state funeral in Canada, an honour usually extended only to prime ministers and governors general.

Lloyd Clemett was the most recent World War I veteran to die. He passed away at Sunnybrook in February at the age of 107.

Like Wilson, Babcock also escaped combat because he was underage. By October 1918, the then 18-year-old was awaiting training that would send him to France but Germany's surrender in November ended the war.

Some 650,000 Canadians served in World War I, of which about 66,000 were killed and another 172,000 were wounded.

With the war over, Wilson took a job with Bell Canada, holding numerous positions in several communities and rising to manager of the phone company's Stratford operation. He retired in 1966.

Throughout his life he also sang.

"I love to sing and I'll sing anywhere," he said last November.

He met his wife Eleanor Dean, a singer and pianist, while studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music. They wed in 1927 and remained together until her death in 1993 at 94. They had two sons, Dean and Paul.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Wilson tried to enlist but at 38 was deemed too old. Instead, he joined Stratford's 7th Perth Regiment Reserves, rising to the rank of captain.

NY Times - Mr. Right, It Turns Out, Does Not Take Classes

2007-05-28T17:06:00.000-04:00

AFTER more than two years of disheartening online dating, Charlotte Kullen resolved to spend less time pursuing men and more time pursuing her hobbies. She plunged into tennis, running, sailing, horseback riding, fitness boot camp and scuba diving classes, assuming that somewhere between the situps and the strapping on of fins she might meet some eligible prospects.

She did. They all just happened to be women.

“You would think you would meet some good men,” said Ms. Kullen, 34, who lives near Union Square in New York and is the vice president of marketing for Bellmarc Realty. “But there just aren’t any.”

“I’ve been in tennis for four months and there’s maybe one guy out of six people,” she said. “They start getting cute because there’s no one else to look at.”

Conventional wisdom for singles has it that taking a golf, cooking or music class is not only fulfilling, but also an unpressured way to meet like-minded members of the opposite sex. “Put yourself out there!” the dating gurus say.

Yet in New York City, in many (if not most) adult courses, the women are numerous and the men are few — for approximately the same reason that men behind the wheel don’t ask for directions. It goes against the male grain to acknowledge ignorance about a subject, said professionals who organize classes.

The women who take such courses are often successful, bright and adventurous. And plenty of them forge powerful alliances. Yet eager students hoping to find both enrichment and romance say their classes suffer from a dearth of testosterone.

Professionals who oversee classes in New York suggested that men have a tendency to avoid group instruction, particularly beginner classes, because they think they should already know all about, say, sports or wine. Those who do seek instruction, they said, generally prefer private lessons.

“It’s mostly women,” said Jennifer Brown, the director of the Midtown Tennis Club, which will offer more than 50 group classes each week this summer. “Eighty percent women.”

At JackRabbit Sports, the running, swimming and triathlon classes are filled mostly with women, said Lee Silverman, the owner. At the Brooklyn store, for example, the beginning running class has 18 women and 2 men, and another running class has 13 women and 2 men.

Thomas Dare-Bryan, the manager and a wine buyer for Morrell & Company in Rockefeller Plaza, said that the makeup of the shop’s wine-tasting classes changes weekly but that they, too, mostly comprise women, some of whom have told him they wish there were more men. “They have actually come out with that statement,” Mr. Dare-Bryan said.

He offered this explanation for the disparity: “It’s argued that women are better tasters of wine than men. A higher percentage of women have more taste-bud receptors.” So maybe they are getting more out of the class. But, echoing others who lead classes, he added: “It may also come down to the fact that men think they know more about wine anyway, so they don’t need to learn more about it.”

The imbalance of the sexes in personal growth classes of all kinds reflects the demographics of New York City, where women outnumber men in categories including never-married, separated, divorced and widowed, according to the 2005 census. Over all, the city is home to about 4.2 million women and 3.8 million men. And nearly all of them have opinions on just how conducive the city is to dating.

Globe and Mail - At the heart of BMO's crisis, a 'smart and cautious' trader

2007-05-28T16:42:00.001-04:00

A story about some of the people behind a >$600M loss at Bank of Montreal.

The way former colleagues see it, David Lee is the sort of guy any bank would love to hire: intelligent, hard-working, loyal and - a rarity in the brutally competitive trading world - downright modest.

Certainly, none of them envisaged this father of two would be ousted from his senior trading post at the brokerage arm of Bank of Montreal amid a spiralling scandal that has dented the company's reputation, resulted in more than half a billion dollars in losses, and prompted a wide-ranging internal investigation.

"It's completely against what I ever would have guessed," said one former co-worker, who was clearly dumbfounded by the controversy. "He's smart and cautious, so I can't imagine him setting himself up for such a loss."

No one has accused Mr. Lee of any wrongdoing, and he could not be reached for comment. An acquaintance said last week Mr. Lee was in Florida with his family.

Last week, Mr. Cassidy stepped down as Optionable's chief executive officer, amid news reports that he had received jail sentences for fraud and tax evasion.

BMO, which is still trying to unravel what went wrong, has not levelled any accusations at its former traders or at Optionable, but sources within the bank said investigators can't reconcile the books kept daily by BMO traders with the quotes delivered by Optionable at the end of each month. That is an about-face from last month, when the bank pinned the losses on market factors.

Another article from NY News, Losses at Optionable customer mount:

Kevin P. Cassidy resigned as chief executive last Saturday after the New York Mercantile Exchange pulled its representative from Optionable's board. Records show that in 1993 Cassidy was sentenced by a federal judge in White Plains to six months in prison for income tax evasion. In 1997, he was sentenced to 30 months by a judge in Florida for credit card fraud.

Cassidy served as chief executive from March 2001 to March 2004 and then again from September 2005 through last weekend. The company has said in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Cassidy served as managing director of Capital Energy Services LLC, an affiliated company, since December 1996. Capital Energy is described as an energy options brokerage firm on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and used to be called Orion Energy Services LLC.

But records from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons show he started serving a sentence in October 1997 and was not released for good until March 1999, getting credit for time he spent in custody during his court proceedings. He spent the last five months of that sentence in a halfway house.

The suit also says Optionable did not reveal that the Bank of Montreal was connected to more than 80 percent of Optionable's revenues, not the 20 percent to 30 percent that was reported.

NYTimes - Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist

2007-05-28T16:27:00.000-04:00

Sick bastards who perpetrate this scheme should be shot into space.

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.

Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those victims. He ended up on scam artists’ lists because his name, like millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life’s savings.

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone — surrounded by his Purple Heart medal, photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine years earlier — the telephone rang day and night. After criminals tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account, according to banking records.

“I loved getting those calls,” Mr. Guthrie said in an interview. “Since my wife passed away, I don’t have many people to talk with. I didn’t even know they were stealing from me until everything was gone.”

NYTimes - Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages

2007-05-28T16:23:00.000-04:00

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

The inspiration for the flashlight hit him, he said, while working for Perenco in Asmara, Eritrea. One Sunday he visited a local dump to watch scavenging by baboons and birds of prey, and came upon a group of homeless boys who had adopted the dump as their home.

They took him home to a rural village where he noticed that many people had nothing to light their homes, schools and clinics at night.

With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.

He worked with researchers, engineers and manufacturers, he said, at the Department of Energy, several American universities, and even NASA before finding a factory in China to produce a durable, cost-effective solar-powered flashlight whose shape was inspired by his wife’s shampoo bottle.

The light, or sun torch, has a narrow solar panel on one side that charges the batteries, which can last between 750 and 1,000 nights, and uses the more efficient light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.s, to cast its light. “L.E.D.s used to be very expensive,” Mr. Bent said. “But in the last 18 months they’ve become cheaper, so distributing them on a widespread scale is possible.”

The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com, where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.

Toronto Star - Hydro pay packages unplugged

2007-05-28T16:19:00.000-04:00

Due for release in the coming days is an eagerly awaited report on executive salaries at the government-owned electricity companies. It could cause big trouble for the Liberal government.

The report has been prepared by a panel chaired by James Arnett, a former CEO of Molson Inc. who was appointed by the government in January after NDP Leader Howard Hampton raised a stink over "hydro fat cats" in the Legislature.

Hampton pointed out that 15 executives in Ontario's public energy sector make more than the top person at Hydro Quebec (about $470,000). Topping Hampton's list is Jim Hankinson, president of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), at $1.48 million. In appointing the Arnett panel, Energy Minister Dwight Duncan seemed to agree with Hampton's analysis. "We've asked the panel to recommend compensation arrangements that are more in line with comparable public energy organizations in other jurisdictions," he said.

The solution seems simple, then. Cut the top salaries down to Hydro Quebec's level. But then the government will encounter Newton's third law: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Hankinson and his executive team might quit, and OPG's board of directors might go with them.

William Sheffield, a member of the OPG board and chair of its compensation committee, defended the salaries in an appearance before a legislative committee in February. He said that OPG executives make "about half" of what they could get in the private sector.

"Our people are well-paid, yes," said Sheffield. "Are they paid above market? No. They're paid below private-sector market but at the top of the utility sector because it (OPG) has the most complex and important assets in the business."

Eventually, at the lowest level of management, OPG will encounter a "pay compression" problem: management will be getting less than the highest-paid unionized employees. (Of the 5,518 OPG staffers on this year's list of public-sector employees making more than $100,000, a staggering 4,525 of them were unionized.)

In other words, a seemingly simple reduction in Hankinson's salary could start a chain reaction of events that would cripple Ontario's major supplier of electricity.

On the other hand, if the government doesn't cut the pay of executives, it will open the door for Hampton to rail against "fat cats" in the fall election campaign.

Globe and Mail - Burnout Buster

2007-05-28T16:15:00.000-04:00

Related to the article about fear of failure - the stress of failure or less than stellar success is bad for one's health.

Not long ago, seeking out a shrink after a bad deal or a few rough days on the market would have been tantamount to a hockey goon crying to mommy after a poke check. But e-mail, BlackBerrys and a flattening world of international commerce have placed new pressures on high-fliers. Work stress is no longer a 9-to-5 affliction. Today, the strain verges on trauma.

Eight years ago, Dr. Cass published a clinical study of Wall Street traders that found 23 per cent of them diagnosable with major clinical depression. That stress, he believes, is only growing.

So these days, on Wall Street and Bay Street, captains of industry and finance are making a serious investment in help for their overworked psyches. They're going where their predecessors didn't dare: the shrink's office.

"Business right now, it's surpassing all my expectations," said Dr. Cass, who writes a column for Thestreet.com. "Everything from here on in is gravy."

"The stigma is lifting," agrees one of his Bay Street counterparts, Brian Shaw. "It's something we've been fighting for a long time."

Their clientele is a rarefied breed: One patient sought out Dr. Cass after his salary was cut from $500,000 (U.S.) a year to $300,000. "It's a little hard to stomach hearing someone say that kind of thing, I know," Dr. Cass says. "But you have to understand that this person is deeply frustrated and they need some empathy."

CNet - Electricity crisis hobbles an India eager to ascend

2007-05-28T16:09:00.000-04:00

India is in denial about its lack of energy resources and infrastructure. I don't see how it can compete effectively with China with this handicap.

This being India, a country of more than one billion people, the scale is staggering. In just one case, Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company, maintains five giant generators, along with a nearly 5,300-gallon tank of diesel fuel underground, as if it were a gasoline station.

The reserve fuel can power the lights, computers and air-conditioners for up to 15 days to keep Tata's six-story building humming during these hot, dry summer months, when temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees and power cuts can average eight hours a day.

The Gurgaon skyline is studded with hundreds of buildings like this. In Gurgaon alone, the state power authority estimates that the gap between demand and supply hovers around 20 percent, and that is probably a conservative estimate.

Back then, electricity was in short supply, but she was fully confident things would improve. The advertisements at the time described Gurgaon as the best address south of Delhi. It was pitched as a millennium city.

Today Tandon says she prefers to think of it as a medieval city. The day before, the power went out for roughly 11 hours. Her power inverter, which is basically a series of rechargeable batteries--a household necessity here--failed after four hours.

For respite, some of her neighbors drove around in their air-conditioned cars. Her own children lingered outside and finally, when they nodded off to sleep, they lay on the living room floor, the coolest spot in the house.

This summer, Tandon said, the family will have to choose between buying a generator and going on vacation. "We're living in the Dark Ages," she said.

In Gurgaon, for instance, transformers routinely blow out because of heavy loads. Voltage fluctuations damage electrical appliances of all sorts.

What the state cannot provide efficiently, many take for themselves. The World Bank estimates that at least $4 billion in electricity is unaccounted for each year--that is to say, stolen. Transparency International estimated in 2005 that Indians paid $480 million in bribes to put in new connections or correct bills.

WSJ - Managers Struggle to Locate Cheap Stocks

2007-05-28T16:06:00.000-04:00

Just last week, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index came close to topping its record closing level of seven years ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has set numerous records this year and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index has been at its highest levels in six years.

The advances have made things tough for "value" mutual-fund managers, who look to grab stocks on the cheap. "It's very difficult to find truly bargain-priced issues in the large-cap U.S. markets," says Ty Nutt, a senior portfolio manager and leader of the large-cap value team at Delaware Investments in Philadelphia.

Still, most value managers are managing to keep their cash busy. While it's hard for them to find stocks they consider "deep value," or trading deeply below the value of their assets or operations, they say there are "relative values" to be found, meaning stocks that appear cheap relative to the overall universe of stocks.

There's no doubt that value managers have to look harder now than they did a few years ago.

Says Mr. Tjornehoj of Lipper: "I think there are so many [value] managers turning over rocks on that same path that all the big ones have been flipped over and now they're looking for smaller or less intriguing value plays than they did years ago. As well, they're holding on to their winners because they have to."

Nevertheless, investors should have exposure to the area, Mr. Tjornehoj says. At some point, he says, the market will weaken and "the private equity or hedge funds or whoever is adding a great deal of value to the market is not going to feel that way, and people are going to seek safety in firms with steady dividends and low debt on the balance sheet -- the typical characteristics that make a value play attractive."

Toronto Star - Did Pakistani gang steal captives' kidneys?

2007-05-28T15:57:00.000-04:00

The urban legend comes to life.

Pakistani police have arrested nine people, four of them doctors, for abducting people, drugging them and stealing their kidneys for transplant operations, police said today.

Selling kidneys from living donors is not illegal in Pakistan, which medical experts say has a reputation as the world's "kidney bazaar".

But police said those arrested in the eastern city of Lahore tricked people then drugged them before removing their kidneys.

"These poor people were given tranquillisers and were deprived of their kidneys without their consent," Lahore police chief Malik Mohammad Iqbal told Reuters.

Hundreds of rich foreigners come to Pakistan every year and buy kidneys from live, impoverished donors, in a business thought to be worth millions of dollars.

WSJ - Fewer Firms Offer Big Dividend Payouts

2007-05-28T15:55:00.000-04:00

The old-style companies/industries still pay out dividends, it's the new tech companies that are so stingy, thinking they are still a growth company.

Some strategists and institutional investors believe that corporations fail to recognize that dividends are increasingly popular with individual investors, and that ample payouts can be just as good -- or even better -- for stock prices than big buybacks.

"A lot of corporations are missing the seismic shift in retail demand for yield," says Henry McVey, chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley. A key to this trend: As tens of millions of baby boomers near retirement, the demand for high-yielding investments is rising.

Record-Low Payout

Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are expected to disburse just 30% of their 2007 earnings in dividends, a record-low payout. The dividend yield on the S&P 500 is just 1.8% and the yield on the Dow Jones Industrial Average isn't much higher at 2.1%.

As recently as the 1980s, companies regularly paid out half or more of their earnings in dividends. Within the S&P 500, 387 companies, or 77%, currently pay dividends, down from 94% in 1980.

Stock repurchases by S&P 500 companies totaled $494 billion last year, more than double the $233 billion they disbursed as dividends.

Yet given the strength of corporate balance sheets, companies could pay 50% of their earnings in dividends. Such a payout ratio would lift the yield on the S&P 500 to 3%, making stocks a better yield alternative to bonds.

Higher dividends also could be good for stock prices. Some of the strongest sectors of the market in the past few years carry ample dividends -- including electric utilities, telecom providers, cigarette makers and master limited partnerships that invest in energy pipelines and oil and gas reserves.

Washington Post - How the Pentagon Got Its Shape

2007-05-28T15:51:00.000-04:00

Nice story of how fast the govt can act when it has to. The original site for the Pentagon was an asymetrical 5-sided area. So the original design was 5-sided. When the site was moved due to aestethetic reasons, there wasn't time (original timeframe called for 1 year to build the Pentagon) to redesign the building.

The War Department needed a new headquarters, Somervell said. The building he wanted to create was too big to fit in Washington and would have to go across the Potomac River in Arlington. It would be far larger than all the great structures of the city, including the U.S. Capitol. Somervell wanted a headquarters big enough to hold 40,000 people, with parking for 10,000 cars. It would contain 4 million square feet of office space -- almost twice as much as the Empire State Building. Yet it must be no more than four stories high -- a tall building would obstruct views of Washington and require too much steel, urgently needed for battleships and weapons.

The War Department would occupy the new headquarters within half a year, Somervell instructed. "We want 500,000 square feet ready in six months, and the whole thing ready in a year," the general said. Somervell ended the meeting with orders to have the basic design plans for the building by Monday morning.

Lifehack - How fear of failure destroys success

2007-05-28T15:47:00.001-04:00

Nothing terribly new - just a reminder - don't be afraid to fail - or the appearance of failure, as long as you learn something from it.

Yahoo Finance - Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind

2007-05-14T17:25:00.000-04:00

Getting rich also requires a certain amount of stubbornness and clarity of purpose. Consultant Joel Kurtzman, who evaluated 350 startups for his book Startups That Work, found that successful outlets usually have a team of two or three founders who share a common vision; the success rate for this model was a remarkable 50%. The odds for solo founders were more like the oft-quoted one in 10, in part because they often found themselves working at cross-purposes with hired guns who see things differently.

NYTimes - Faster Fashion, Cheaper Chic

2007-05-14T16:29:00.000-04:00

A USA company to compete in the same space a Zara, H&M, and Mexx.

NYTimes - Easy, Mr. Fix-It

2007-05-14T16:28:00.001-04:00

Painful stories from do-it-yourselfers.

The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla

2007-05-14T16:06:00.000-04:00

Geez, these guys seem to pick the worst of the best available scripting languages - first TCL, then Perl. What's next? PHP?

Perl is crap for anything large. There's a reason Bittorrent is written in Python and not Perl. And Perl 6 development is going to last longer than the x86 instruction set or until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

Wired - Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health

2007-05-09T14:48:00.000-04:00

Modern humans are bacteria-killing machines. We assassinate microbes with hand soap, mouthwash and bathroom cleaners. It feels clean and right.

But some scientists say we're overdoing it. All this killing may actually cause diseases like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome and even diabetes. The answer, they say, is counterintuitive: Feed patients bacteria.

"Probiotics (pills containing bacteria) have resulted in complete elimination of eczema in 80 percent of the people we've treated," says Dr. Joseph E. Pizzorno Jr., a practicing physician and former member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Pizzorno says he's used probiotics to treat irritable bowel disease, acne and even premenstrual syndrome. "It's unusual for me to see a patient with a chronic disease that doesn't respond to probiotics."

"After the Second World War, when our lifestyles changed dramatically, allergies increased. Autoimmune diseases like diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease are increasing," says Kaarina Kukkonen, a University of Helsinki allergy expert. "The theory behind (what causes) the diseases is the same: Lacking bacterial stimulation in our environments may cause this increase. I think this is the tip of the iceberg."

In a recent study, Kukkonen and her colleagues gave a probiotic containing four strains of gut bacteria to 461 infants labeled as high risk for developing allergic disorders. After two years, the children were 25 percent less likely than those given a placebo to develop eczema, a type of allergic skin inflammation. The study was published in the January issue of Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Microbial exposures early in life, scientists believe, cause mild inflammation that calibrates the body's responses to other pathogens and contaminants later in life. Without exposure as infants, researchers say, people can end up with unbalanced immune systems.

"Many of the most difficult problems in medicine today are chronic inflammatory diseases," says Blaser. "These include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, atherosclerosis, eczema and multiple sclerosis. One possibility is that they're autoimmune or genetic diseases. The other possibility is that they are physiological responses to changes in microbiota."

Observer - Guardian.co.uk - Names really do make a difference

2007-05-09T14:46:00.000-04:00

Parents are being warned to think long and hard when choosing names for their babies as research has discovered that girls who are given very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely to study maths or physics after the age of 16, a remarkable study has found.

Both subjects, which are traditionally seen as predominantly male, are far more popular among girls with names such as Abigail, Lauren and Ashley, which have been judged as less feminine in a linguistic test. The effect is so strong that parents can set twin daughters off on completely different career paths simply by calling them Isabella and Alex, names at either end of the spectrum. A study of 1,000 pairs of sisters in the US found that Alex was twice as likely as her twin to take maths or science at a higher level.

Part of the reason is that names provide a powerful image of a person and influence people's reactions to them. An Isabella is less likely to study maths, according to the theory, because people would not expect her to. 'There are plenty of exceptions but, on average, people treat Isabellas differently to Alexes,' commented David Figlio, professor of economics at the University of Florida and the author of the report. 'Girls with feminine names were often typecast.' Figlio pointed to the controversy that arose over the first talking Barbie's phrase, 'math is hard'. 'It is a stereotype, and girls with particularly feminine names may feel more pressure to avoid technical subjects,' he said. Not that they were any less capable. When the Isabellas, Annas and Elizabeths took on their tougher-named peers in science, they performed just as well.

To carry out the study, to be published in the Journal of Human Resources, Figlio calculated a linguistic 'femininity' score for each name. It was arrived at by using 1,700 letter and sound combinations that could be associated as either female or male and matching them against the names on 1.4 million birth certificates.

He also showed how harmful giving your child a 'chav' or lower-status name can be. In a study of 55,000 children, the exam marks of those with 'lower-status' names - often spelled in an unusual way or including punctuation - were on average 3 to 5 percentage points lower than siblings with more traditional names. One of the reasons was that teachers had lower expectations of them.

MSNBC - Doctors Change the Way They Think About Death

2007-05-09T14:42:00.000-04:00

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a "cardioplegic" blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent.

Becker also endorses hypothermia—lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius—which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit.

NYTimes - From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine

2007-05-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in antifreeze.

It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.

Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.

Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.

Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

The Long Tail - The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles

2007-05-09T14:38:00.000-04:00

In the next issue of Wired we've got a great story about a woman who cyberstalked the lead singer of Linkin Park. She correctly guessed the password to his cellphone account. The rest was easy. She was a technician at a secure military facility, the Sandia National Labs. When eventually confronted, she explained that her job only took her half an hour a day. The rest was spare cycles. She used them to stalk the lead singer of Linkin Park.

Globe and Mail - Warners cuts promo screenings over movie piracy worries

2007-05-09T14:36:00.000-04:00

I can't see this making a big dent in piracy. The internet is pretty fast.

Frustrated with what they see as the world's biggest piracy nation, Warner Bros. Pictures announced this week an immediate ban on promotional and word-of-mouth screenings in Canada.

The ban includes Warner Independent Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, and will affect the studio's next release, Ocean's Thirteen, as well as the summer release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

WSJ - You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well

2007-05-09T14:31:00.000-04:00

...or maybe you need to do/say something that's worthy enough for Google to list your name on the first page.

Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband's last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight.

In Web-search results for her new name, links to Ms. Wilson's epidemiology research papers became lost among all manner of other Abigail Wilsons, ranging from 1980s newspaper wedding announcements for various Abigail Wilsons to genealogy records listing Abigail Wilsons born in the 1600s and 1700s. When Ms. Wilson applied for a new job, interviewers questioned the publications she listed on her résumé because they weren't finding the publications in online searches, Ms. Wilson says. (See Google results for Abigail Garvey and Abigail Wilson.)

Toronto Star - Doan not to blame, official tells MPs

2007-05-04T12:56:00.000-04:00

Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson said yesterday it was not Canadian-born Shane Doan who insulted a francophone linesman in 2005 but a foreign-born player on the Phoenix Coyotes.

Doan has denied the linesman's claim, saying he told goalie Curtis Joseph: "Four French referees in Montreal ... figure it out." The comment came after a controversial call during a game in Montreal.

The NHL cleared the Coyotes forward of the allegation, but last month linesman Michel Cormier testified in a court hearing that he was skating right next to Doan when he heard the slur.

"There is no question those words were said on the ice," Nicholson said. "The NHL's investigation clearly shows that that was stated, but it also clearly shows that they felt that it wasn't Shane Doan.

Cormier's post-game report does accuse Czechoslovakia-born Ladislav Nagy of having made the slur in the second period of the game.

Doan's insult came at the end of the third period after the Coyotes bench had already been warned not to repeat any anti-French epithets, Cormier wrote at the time.

Nicholson said it was unfair to hold Doan up to public ridicule because of baseless accusations when the evidence shows he did nothing wrong.

Nicholson said he has known the star forward since he was a teenager and described him as gentle-hearted, devout Christian who doesn't even swear.

"You can talk to all of his teammates that have played with him. He says `fudge,' a lot if he gets upset. He's a Christian and a person that I am proud to know," Nicholson said.

Toronto Star - Hockey captaincy row called 'embarrassing'

2007-05-03T20:49:00.000-04:00

I guess the Bloc Quebecois didn't have anything better to do than play keep-away with the ball. I can't believe these guys. Losers.

The NHL calls the Shane Doan controversy "embarrassing" but Hockey Canada officials will appear before a parliamentary committee today to explain why he was named captain of Canada's team at the World Hockey Championships in Moscow.

Colin Campbell, the NHL's executive vice-president and director of hockey operations, said yesterday he is mystified that politicians have revived the Doan controversy.

The league cleared the Phoenix Coyotes forward and captain of allegations that he made a derogatory remark to a French-Canadian official during a 2005 game in Montreal.

"It's rather embarrassing to all Canadian hockey fans we're rehashing this again, particularly when Hockey Canada and Shane Doan are representing and working hard in Moscow right now, competing for our country. It's ridiculous," Campbell told The Canadian Press.

Dim sum at Casa Imperial Chinese Restaurant on Steeles Ave.

2007-05-03T13:43:00.000-04:00

Here's the eastern part of the building:

The central part of the building looks like the entrance to the restaurant. But no...

The actual entrance is at the western side of the building

There's a large eating area when you enter the restaurant. It can get pretty loud during lunchtime.

There are three smaller eating areas in other parts of the restaurant. Walls are covered with lots of large mirrors throughout the restaurant.

There are also chandeliers in the eating areas.

Here's the fancy dim sum setting. With such a fancy setting, you know the bill will be larger than the typical plastic-covered-table-dim-sum-restaurant.

It seems strange to drink Chinese tea from a Western-style tea cup.

Here's something I haven't seen in other Chinese restaurants. A combination soup spoon holder and chopstick rest.

Without the soup spoon:

No ladies wheeling around the dishes on carts in this fancy place.

They hand you a piece of paper with the available dishes. You write how many of each that you want and hand it back to them.

A few minutes later, food arrives:

Minced beef in rice noodle

Siu mai

Har gow

Egg roll

BBQ Pork buns

Deep-fried taro

Deep-fried pastry with pork and corn

BBQ pork in rice noodle

Beef dumpling

Pork wrapped in bean curd

The manager came by and offered his business card. Very Hong Kong-like.

They didn't have egg custard tarts on the menu :(.

The dishes are more expensive than other Chinese restaurants. The size of the dishes was about the same as other restaurants, except the Har Gow which was much larger (and you pay for the larger size).

Prices range from ~$3 up to ~$7 for the larger dishes like Har Gow. So expect to pay about double what you would pay at one of the cheaper dim sum places.

Globe and Mail - Jailed Chinese judge dies of 'adult sudden death syndrome'

2007-04-30T13:09:00.000-04:00

A Chinese judge charged with corruption died in his cell from “adult sudden death syndrome,” Xinhua news agency said on Monday.

Investigators said Li Chaoyang, 38, had been unco-operative while in detention in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southwestern China. “Cuts on his face and other injuries” had been caused by a fall during an escape attempt, they said.

Judge Li, an official with the local Pingle County Court, was detained on March 23, accused of taking bribes.

Judge Li's relatives had claimed there were wounds on his body, a gash across his lip and one of his front teeth was missing. They questioned the cause of his death and wrote about it on a blog.

The investigation found that Judge Li had been “mentally unstable,” would not stop shouting and refused to return to his cell after exercise. Investigators said Judge Li had attempted to escape many times and detention centre officials had had to shackle him.

Globe and Mail - Five-point vitamin D primer

2007-04-30T13:05:00.000-04:00

GET TESTED

He recommends going to the doctor three or four times a year and asking for a 25 Hydroxy Vitamin D level test. "It should be between 125 and 150 nanomoles per litre," he said. "It's important that the patient not accept the doctor saying your levels are fine. They've got to get the number and get their levels up."

Sunlight is the best source of vitamin D, experts agree. How long you should stay outside depends on how much sun block your skin creates naturally, Dr. Cannell says. "Unfortunately, vitamin D deficiency discriminates according to race." Fair-skinned people, especially blonds and redheads, need only about 20 minutes a day to produce the recommended levels. Those with darker skin could need five to 10 times longer.

In the winter months, and for those who do not want to expose their skin to sun, Dr. Cannell recommends taking vitamin D supplements. Vitamin D3 cholecalciferol pills are available over the counter in most pharmacies and health-food stores. He suggests taking 2,000 international units of the supplement per day.

It is possible to have too much vitamin D; Dr. Cannell cautions against buying supplements over the Internet. "You can get capsules with 50,000 units. That's a medicine; it's not for supplementation," he says.

Globe and Mail - Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light

2007-04-30T12:06:00.000-04:00

More benefits of Vitamin D (and problems associated with the deficiency of Vitamin D) keep on rolling in.

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries — and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry.

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for a bogeyman that doesn't exist," argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world's top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor "is more likely a lack of vitamin D."

What's more, researchers are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly.

Not everyone is willing to jump on the vitamin D bandwagon just yet. Smoking and some pollutants, such as benzene and asbestos, irrefutably cause many cancers.

But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D's effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day.

Authorities are implicated because the main way humans achieve healthy levels of vitamin D isn't through diet but through sun exposure. People make vitamin D whenever naked skin is exposed to bright sunshine. By an unfortunate coincidence, the strong sunshine able to produce vitamin D is the same ultraviolet B light that can also causes sunburns and, eventually, skin cancer.

Only brief full-body exposures to bright summer sunshine — of 10 or 15 minutes a day — are needed to make high amounts of the vitamin. But most authorities, including Health Canada, have urged a total avoidance of strong sunlight or, alternatively, heavy use of sunscreen. Both recommendations will block almost all vitamin D synthesis.

Those studying the vitamin say the hide-from-sunlight advice has amounted to the health equivalent of a foolish poker trade. Anyone practising sun avoidance has traded the benefit of a reduced risk of skin cancer — which is easy to detect and treat and seldom fatal — for an increased risk of the scary, high-body-count cancers, such as breast, prostate and colon, that appear linked to vitamin D shortages.

The sun advice has been misguided information "of just breathtaking proportions," said John Cannell, head of the Vitamin D Council, a non-profit, California-based organization.

"Fifteen hundred Americans die every year from [skin cancers]. Fifteen hundred Americans die every day from the serious cancers."

Microsoft Longhorn Server Beta 3 Hash signatures

2007-04-29T20:36:00.000-04:00

Downloaded the Longhorn Server Beta 3 a few days ago. Here's the hash signatures using a bunch of different hash algorithms since the Microsoft download page didn't show them.

wsl_6001.16510.070417-1740_x86fre_server-KB3SFRE_EN_DVD.iso
MD5: 095397E5 568D5E7E B9FB7972 1B9E876C
SHA1: 25280E55 887C83A9 2EB70863 610A5761 8A51B291
Size: 1891971072 1.761GB
Tiger: CE3594FD8CFB8818 453DBDDCBF518962 BA0BAE2A46A86BA6
SHA224: D0393AB3 ACBDBE15 CEA380D9 3428B18A DAB90120 2685D978 17122955
SHA256: D5ACE825 7A3F2A22 F7C6C271 3CE249CD B3E83E3E C709F898 6859DAEE 9E80BB8A
SHA384: BC1D0010 8FF95A17 31D82BEE FEB15A32 6F8B44BB FED91188 75888378 D6DF41DB EF15866D 05F5C316 21A287C7 4B78580A

SHA512: 2D28DF49 1A64C862 5710CF07 D9FF98BE D5C17E3C 22217FAA C0539ADA 822E9D2F D610FADB DC651345 829D7229 F07F6D40 7D641AFC D05774DE 8663A58B 05D12E75

WHLPOL: 68C1005C 6451F54E 137E3324 A98625A9 132FA2FB E6643876 F08E2C6D E4B23DF3 52AB71D8 2A93C837 66488DBF EFF02294 8DD7EF4F 6DFDAD3E B07BC485 2A98C983

RIPEMD: D605CC78 1123C043 DEC89CCC 1C77A6A5 75D51261
Time: 12:45.090
Wait: 0:00.481
Hash: 12:43.937
Kernel: 0:00.670
User: 12:37.118

NYTimes - For Shareholders, a Ticket Into an $8 Billion Deal

2007-04-27T12:25:00.000-04:00

Looks like the founder will come out sitting on a nice pile of dough - ~$400M.

The buyers, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs, have offered Harman shareholders a chance to retain a stake in the newly private company and share in any profit made if the company is later sold or taken public.

Under the terms of the deal, the public shareholders could hold as much as 27 percent of the private company.

The offer represents a major concession to public shareholders, who have increasingly voiced concern about selling their shares to private equity firms only to watch the new owners reap large profits by flipping the companies a few years later, and in some cases a few months.

For Sidney Harman, the 88-year-old founder of the company, who owns about 5 percent of its stock, the sale will not end his involvement in the business, which he started in 1953. As part of the deal, which is expected to close this summer, he will remain as executive chairman.

Mr. Harman has sold the company before, once for $100 million in 1977 after he joined the Carter administration as an assistant commerce secretary. (His wife, Jane Harman, is a United States representative from California.) The company performed poorly under the owner at the time, the Beatrice Company, and Mr. Harman bought it back in 1980 for $55 million.

NYTimes - Before Deadly Rage, a Life Consumed by a Troubling Silence

2007-04-23T00:32:00.000-04:00

In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a girlfriend. Her name was Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship, and she existed only in the dimension of his imagination.

When Andy Koch, one of his roommates, returned to their suite one day, Mr. Cho shooed him away. He told him Jelly was there. He said she called him Spanky. SpankyJelly became his instant-message screen name.

He became fixated on several real female students. Two of them complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. They found him bothersome but not threatening. After the second complaint against him in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop.

A few hours after they left, he sent an instant message to one of his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself. The campus police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health facility.

His junior-year roommates mostly ignored him because he was so withdrawn. If he said something, it was weird. During Thanksgiving break, Mr. Koch recalled, Mr. Cho called him to report that he was vacationing in North Carolina with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president; Mr. Cho said he had grown up with him in Moscow.

In class, some students thought he might be a deaf-mute. A classmate once offered him $10 just to say hello but got nothing. He hunched there in sunglasses, a baseball cap yanked tight over his head. Sometimes Mr. Cho introduced himself as “Question Mark,” saying it was the persona of a man who lived on Mars and journeyed to Jupiter. On the sign-in sheet of a literature class, he simply scribbled a question mark instead of his name.

NYTimes - Housing Slump Takes a Toll on Illegal Immigrants

2007-04-17T12:53:00.000-04:00

From Fresno to Sacramento, big tangles of wire and PVC pipes clutter vacant lots in silent subdivisions, waiting for houses to be built — some day. Dozens of “For Sale” signs already dot the lawns across new residential communities. And right next to the ubiquitous billboards from builders are fresh signs offering homeowners help to avoid foreclosure.

But another set of losers is less visible: the immigrant workers, mostly illegal, who rode the construction boom while it lasted and now find jobs on building sites few and far between.

Offering more than $10 an hour as well as new skills and a shot at upward mobility, construction provided many illegal immigrants the best job they ever had, a step up from the backbreaking work reserved for those toiling without legal authorization, which in the Central Valley mostly meant pruning and picking in fruit and vegetable fields.

The growing presence of illegal immigrants in home building, mostly working for small labor contractors, might help explain why government statistics have recorded only a small decline in construction employment, despite the collapse in residential investment.

“Technically they don’t fire them,” said Myrna Martínez, coordinator for the Fresno office of the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit organization working on social assistance projects for immigrant workers. “They just tell them that there is no more work.”

NYTimes - Managers Use Hedge Funds as Big I.R.A.’s

2007-04-17T12:33:00.000-04:00

These hedge fund managers just have to make sure that their fund doesn't implode.

A lot of the hedge fund managers earning the astronomical paychecks making headlines these days are able to postpone paying taxes on much of that income for 10 years or more.

The key to the hedge fund tax boon is that many managers of these lightly regulated private pools of capital have the ability to earn the bulk of their compensation offshore and invest it in their funds, where it grows tax-free.

“If you could compound your compensation tax-free, why wouldn’t you?” asked Stewart Massey, founding partner of Massey & Quick, a consulting firm.

Few people know the power of compounding better than hedge fund managers. Consider the following calculation done by Financial Engines, a financial advisory and portfolio management firm: A hedge fund manager makes $10 million in fees and defers it for five years, earning a return of 10 percent a year. When he pays taxes at the end, he walks away with $10.5 million. Another manager who makes the same $10 million pays his taxes immediately. He still earns 10 percent on what’s left, but over the same period he accumulates just $8.9 million.

AppleInsider.com - Apple's Leopard still plagued by lengthy bug list

2007-04-13T16:05:00.000-04:00

Holy moley! 5.3GB for a beta OS!!!

According to reports already plastered on Apple-related web sites, Mac OS X Leopard (Client) Build 9A410, which was released to thousands of Mac OS X developers this week, still carries with it a laundry list of nearly three dozen known issues.

Of those issues, the most critical appear to affect the system's installation process, Apple's QuickTime digital media software, and graphics corruption with some graphics hardware, the reports state.

The latest Leopard builds also appear to be plagued by printing bugs and glitches in updated versions of the Mac maker's iChat video conference software and PhotoBooth applications.

At the same time, it's reported that a list of approximately 20 "Miscellaneous" bugs spans across a broad range system components, including iCal, iTunes, Safari, Mail and FileVault.

The 5.3-gigabyte Leopard build release this week, unlike the seeds that preceded it, is said to contain only a handful of notable changes, most pertaining to updates to the software's various underlying frameworks.

MSNBC - China denies exporting tainted wheat gluten

2007-04-06T01:30:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week blocked wheat gluten imports from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou, saying they contained melamine, a chemical found in plastics and pesticides.

Anying produces and exports more than 10,000 tons of wheat gluten a year, according to its Web site, but only 873 tons were linked to tainted U.S. pet food, raising the possibility that more of the contaminated product could still be on the market in China, or abroad.

An official at the Chinese Ministry of Health, who refused to give his name, said the case was not an issue for the ministry and directed questions to the Ministry of Agriculture. An official there, who also refused to give his name, told The Associated Press to stop calling.

Both ministries also did not respond to faxed questions on whether they had concerns about tainted gluten in China.

ChemNutra Inc., the Las Vegas-based company that imported the wheat gluten and shipped it to companies that make pet foods, said Tuesday that Xuzhou Anying had never reported the presence of melamine in the content analysis it provided.

Marketwatch.com: Blackstone files for $4 billion IPO

2007-03-26T21:26:00.000-04:00

The historically secretive firm also shed light on its returns. Blackstone had $2.27 billion in net income for 2006, up from $2.3 billion the previous year. Revenue was $1.12 billion. Blackstone spent $250 million on compensation and benefits.

Its flagship corporate private-equity portfolio returned 30.8% annually since its inception in 1987. Blackstone's real-estate portfolio returned 38.2% since 1991. Investments in funds of hedge funds and mezzanine debt have returned 13% and 16%, respectively.

The private-equity company has $78.7 billion in assets under management as of March 1. The firm has $31.1 billion invested in companies, $1.9 billion in closed-end mutual funds, $1.5 billion mezzanine funds, $17.7 billion invested in real-estate funds, $6.9 billion in senior debt and about $1.3 billion in hedge funds, according to the filing.

Blackstone also has $17.1 billion invested in funds of hedge funds.

Secureworks.com - Gozi Trojan

2007-03-26T16:42:00.000-04:00

Malware gets more and more evil/complicated.

MSDN Kenny Kerr Blog - Balance CPU 1.0

2007-03-26T16:39:00.000-04:00

Windows uses an interval timer to determine the time slices that the CPU allocates to different threads. These are absolute intervals that include time spent in the kernel servicing interrupts. On previous versions of Windows, the thread scheduler simply used these intervals to determine how much time each thread has been allotted even if a thread didn’t actually get its full slice due to interrupt processing and other factors. Well Windows Vista’s thread scheduler now takes advantage of the cycle counter register available on modern processors to accurately measure and provide the most accurate scheduling possible. Although Windows still uses interval-based scheduling, it can now more fairly determine whether a thread actually got to use a particular interval for any reasonable amount of time.

The QueryIdleProcessorCycleTime function, along with the QueryThreadCycleTime and QueryProcessCycleTime functions, provide applications with some insight into the number of cycles charged to different processes. In particular, QueryIdleProcessorCycleTime returns the number of cycles that each processor has spent idle. Think of this as the number of cycles consumed by each processor’s idle thread. As I mentioned, the QueryIdleProcessorCycleTime documentation is very misleading so here is a simple example illustrating how you might use it to display the number of clock cycles used by each processor’s idle thread.

MSDN Blog - Where are we going, and what's with the handbasket? (no 4GB RAM for 32-bit Windows)

2007-03-26T16:32:00.000-04:00

An in-depth look at why you can't access 4GB RAM per process under 32-bit Windows - mostly hardware restrictions, partly driver lameness.

Windows XP originally supported a full 4 GB of RAM. You would be limited to 3.1-3.5 GB without PAE, but if you enabled PAE on a 4 GB system with proper chipset and motherboard support, you would have access to the full 4 GB. As more people began to take advantage of this feature using commodity (read: cheapest product with the features I want) hardware, Microsoft noticed a new source of crashes and blue screens. These were traced to drivers failing to correctly handle 64-bit physical addresses. A decision was made to improve system stability at a cost of possibly wasting memory. XP SP2 introduced a change such that only the bottom 32 bits of physical memory will ever be used, even if that means some memory will not be used. (This is also the case with 32-bit editions of Vista.) While this is annoying to those who want that little bit of extra oomph, and while I would have liked a way to re-enable the memory “at my own risk”, this is probably the right decision for 99.9% of the general population of Windows users (and probably saves Dell millions in support costs).

Side-note: PAE is also related to page execution protection, called "hardware DEP" (Microsoft term), "NX" (AMD term), and "XD" (Intel term). In 32-bit x86 processors, this can only be used in PAE mode. This is why you might see PAE mode used even on systems with less than 4 GB of memory.

Performance note: 3-level page table lookups are inherently slower than 2-level page table lookups. However, the processor has substantial dedicated circuitry that usually eliminates most of the performance impact.

WSJ - O Canada! Black Trial Stirs Interest, Pique Back Home

2007-03-23T15:28:00.000-04:00

Many of Canada's best-known journalists are there, including Lisa LaFlamme, a correspondent for CTV News who has covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami. She was in Chicago for the trial this week but is scheduled to head back to Afghanistan on April 8. "It's a drag that it had to happen at the same time," she said, standing in line to get a courtroom seat.

Recent stories in the media blitz: A Globe and Mail reporter's experience sharing a lobster dinner with Mr. Black in Toronto before the trial and many dissections of the Black family's attire at the trial -- along with detailed explanations of each step of the courtroom drama.

Canadian network CTV Newsnet last week began airing a new program called "The Verdict with Paula Todd" four nights a week, using the trial to launch what it envisions as a long-running show about legal issues.

Asked why the trial is capturing so much attention in Mr. Black's native country, Mr. Genson said in an interview, "possibly not very much happens in Canada."

However, underneath the occasional patriotic sentiment is strong resentment. A recent poll of 1,059 Canadians found that 59% wouldn't feel sorry for Mr. Black if he is convicted.

The phrase that keeps turning up is "tall poppy syndrome." Translation: When a Canadian becomes conspicuously more successful than his countrymen, it's expected he soon will be cut down to size.

Canada isn't alone in this notion. Australians, also members of the British Commonwealth who consider themselves anti-aristocratic, use the expression. And in Japan there is the expression, "the nail that sticks up will get pounded down."

One recent example of this attitude: Last year at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the Canadian women's hockey team was a great source of pride. Then they began beating opponents by 12 and 16 goals on their run to the gold medal. Public opinion began to build -- against them. Canada fans were concerned their team was showing up other countries.

This prompted a joke: "What does a Canadian do when he wins a gold medal in the Olympics? He's so happy he has it bronzed."

WSJ - Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply

2007-03-21T15:32:00.000-04:00

The record labels need to come out with bona fide hits, not the crap that's been pushed out for the past few years. When Britney Spears, et al. are getting more press for what they're doing outside the studio, it's bad.

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.

The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry's salvation.

The slide stems from the confluence of long-simmering factors that are now feeding off each other, including the demise of specialty music retailers like longtime music mecca Tower Records. About 800 music stores, including Tower's 89 locations, closed in 2006 alone.

Retailers and others say record labels have failed to deliver big sellers. And even the hits aren't what they used to be. Norah Jones's "Not Too Late" has sold just shy of 1.1 million copies since it was released six weeks ago. Her previous album, "Feels Like Home," sold more than 2.2. million copies in the same period after its 2004 release.

"Even when you have a good release like Norah Jones, maybe the environment is so bad you can't turn it around," says Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research.

Meanwhile, with music sales sliding for the first time even at some big-box chains, Best Buy has been quietly reducing the floor space it dedicates to music, according to music-distribution executives.

CNet - Start-up taps Flash for online word processor

2007-03-21T15:11:00.000-04:00

Flash is evil for most of the purposes it's used. Inlcuding this lame idea. I hope it's DOA.

A software start-up called Virtual Ubiquity is joining the ranks of entrepreneurs convinced they can make a better online word processor.

Today, Web-based text editors are typically written using a Web development technique called Ajax, which lets people drag and drop items and obviates the need to press the browser refresh button.

Virtual Ubiquity chose to write its application, called Buzzword, to run in Adobe's Flash Player, which is installed in most Web browsers. It is doing the programming in Adobe's Flex 2.0 development environment.

Globe and Mail - Pills bought online likely killed B.C. woman

2007-03-21T15:01:00.000-04:00

Pills bought on the Internet appear to have killed a 57-year-old woman on Vancouver Island, regional coroner Rose Stanton said Tuesday.

She said the woman, who lived in the Campbell River area, bought a sedative not legally sold in Canada and which has been linked to overdose deaths in other countries.

The woman also bought an anti-anxiety medication that's sold in Canada only with a doctor's prescription, Ms. Stanton said.

She said some of the pills also contained heavy metals that can pose a serious health risk.

The coroners service says the pills were bought through a health-related website belonging to a group of companies that change websites and Internet addresses every three or four days.

“These fake sites look very realistic,” Ms. Stanton said

“They would fool a lot of people. And they mention the names of organization and companies that don't exist.”

MSNBC - Dad: Boy Scout was 'homesick'

2007-03-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

I hope they send the family a bill for the search-and-rescue expense. Dumb-ass kid. Better to make the stupid mistakes now than later in life, I guess.

“He was homesick,” said his father, Kent Auberry. “He started walking, and at one point when he was walking he thought maybe he’d walk as far as the road and hitchhike home.”

“We’re going to have our lectures about hitchhiking again,” the father said. “We’ve had them in the past, but with a special vigor, we’ll go over that again with Michael.”

Michael had worn two jackets, one of them fleece, and was believed to have a mess kit and potato chips with him when he disappeared. Searchers found the kit within a mile of the camp site a few hours after he disappeared. The boy also said he lost his hat and glasses in the woods.

Once rescued, the first thing he said to searchers was that “he wanted a helicopter ride out of there,” said Blue Ridge Parkway ranger David Bauer.

He said Michael had been a bit reluctant to go on the trip. The boy had asked his dad if he would give him $5 if he didn’t have a good time. Auberry said he assured his son that if he wasn’t happy on the trip, they would do something fun together the next day.

MSN - Does Liposuction Last Long Term?

2007-03-21T14:54:00.000-04:00

So, before you run off to get lipo, seriously evaluate whether you can improve how you eat and maximize your daily calorie burn. In fact, you might as well start with that; even plastic surgeons say liposuction will not absolve you from having to spend the rest of your life eating better and exercising more.

The reason that some people believe that liposuction is a permanent fat fix is because it used to be thought that you’re born with a set number of fat cells. So, if you get some sucked out, you forever reduce your tendency to store fat. But research shows that this is simply not true. Fat cells that remain will still fill up with more fat if you eat more calories than your body needs. And adults can develop brand new fat cells when more fat needs to be stored than the body has room for. So even if surgery removes a few adipocytes from your thighs, you may later find that your arms or calves—or anywhere else you have fat cells—gets fatter.

A study published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery surveyed 209 liposuction patients—most of whom had undergone the procedure more than two years earlier—and found that 81 percent had not lost any weight, and 43 percent actually gained more! (Most gained five to 10 pounds.) The researchers concluded that for liposuction to be a success, the patient must begin practicing a healthy lifestyle immediately after surgery and should eat a well-balanced diet and exercise regularly.

CNet - John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

2007-03-20T15:19:00.000-04:00

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the IBM team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.

After the war, Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master’s degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Backus wandered by the IBM headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Backus described as math "brain teasers." It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? "As a programmer," Backus replied, shrugging. "That was the way it was done in those days."

Wired.com - Euro Carmakers Build Microhybrids

2007-03-20T14:12:00.000-04:00

For Ford, that's where John Kessels of Eindhoven University in the Netherlands came in. He developed a software tweak that reduced fuel consumption by 2.6 percent when tested on a Ford Mondeo with a 2-liter gas engine and a five-speed manual transmission ("a normal car for the EU," Kessels said).

That doesn't sound like much, but company bosses say such modifications are possible without passing a high cost to customers and without sacrificing performance. It's a small step that can add up over time, kind of like switching to diet soda.

The algorithm improves fuel efficiency by monitoring the vehicle's fuel map and other data to strategically switch the generator off and on, thereby using less energy to charge the battery. Standard internal combustion engines use the generator continuously.

The BMW's 2008 5-Series sold in Western Europe as well as the 1-Series now come with an Intelligent Alternator Control, or IAC, system that collects and reuses energy typically lost to heat dissipation. Unlike a traditional alternator that continually leaches power from the engine to top off a car's battery, this system disengages during acceleration, said Tom Plucinsky, BMW's product and technology communications manager.

Then, it engages during deceleration to reclaim energy from the spooled-up engine. A major component of the system is a special type of high-capacity battery that can power the car's hungriest electronic peripherals, like the air-conditioning compressor and power steering.

Idle-start (or stop-start) technology automatically switches off the vehicle's engine as soon as the car comes to a stop, then restarts the engine when the clutch or accelerator pedal is depressed, using software to link sensors and other components. Kessels estimated that adding idle-start technology alongside his algorithmic fix could increase fuel savings by another 5 percent to 6 percent.

"Delivery vehicles spend up to 60 percent of their time idling," Wagener said. "Whenever a microhybrid vehicle stops at a light or a loading zone, the internal combustion engine is shut down. When the driver is ready, it starts up again within milliseconds."

Idle-stop can be done for every piston-engine car in the world to good effect.

CNN - Bus line appeals to shoestring travelers

2007-03-20T14:03:00.000-04:00

For Internet-savvy travelers on a budget, Megabus.com claims to offer a service that makes mainstream bus travel seem pricey: rides from Pittsburgh to Chicago for as little as $1.

The Chicago-based company, which began operating in a number of Midwestern cities last year, plans to launch new service April 2 in Pittsburgh; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri, and Louisville, Kentucky. It already offers service between Chicago and Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis and Toledo.

Megabus uses online ticketing and sidewalk stops instead of ticket counters and bus terminals. Passengers do not buy tickets, but instead give drivers reservation numbers they receive when booking online.

The low-cost model was imported from the United Kingdom, where Stagecoach introduced a similar service nearly four years ago.

"The demand for this type of service has been outstanding," Moser said before a news conference on a street corner in downtown Pittsburgh.

Advance planning gets you the lowest fares. A limited number of seats are priced at $1, and the fares increase incrementally based on the time between the booking and departure dates, a pricing scheme used by discount airlines.

"But I will tell you that the highest-price seat is still cheaper than all the alternatives to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago," Moser said. The most expensive ticket for such a trip, booked 24 hours in advance, would be $43.50, he said.

Silicon Valley.com - Tech accidentally wipes out info on Alaska's $38 billion fund

2007-03-20T13:41:00.000-04:00

Typically, people get better/faster at a task the second time around - unless they're being paid by the hour - in which case, they could probably take it easy and finish in the same amount of time as the the first time that they scanned in the documents.

While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account -- one of Alaska residents' biggest perks -- and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.

The July computer foul-up, which wiped out dividend distribution information for the fund, would end up costing the department more than $200,000.

And the only backup was the paperwork itself -- stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.

``We had to bring that paper back to the scanning room, and send it through again, and quality control it, and then you have to have a way to link that paper to that person's file,'' Skow said.

The department is asking lawmakers to approve a supplemental budget request for $220,700 to cover the excess costs incurred during the six-week recovery effort, including about $128,400 in overtime and $71,800 for computer consultants.

The money would come from the permanent fund earnings, the money earmarked for the dividends. That means recipients could find their next check docked by about 37 cents.

ThinkGeek.com - LED Faucet Lights

2007-03-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

Just attach to the end of your faucet (universal adapters included), and when the water flows through the magic chamber, it simply turns on the LED array and illuminates the stream with soothingly powerful hues.

But wait, there's more! You get to choose between two different Faucets.

Blue LED - Always streams BLUE LED's
Blue/Red LED - Normally streams BLUE LED's until the water temperature hits 89 degrees after which the LEDs turn RED!

NYTimes - Pet Food Is Recalled After Link to Animal Deaths

2007-03-19T15:16:00.000-04:00

Gotta wonder what was in the pet food that would make animals sick.

More than 60 million cans and pouches of dog and cat food sold under dozens of brand names were recalled on Saturday after being linked to the deaths of 10 animals.

Menu Foods is recalling only certain gravy-style pet food in cans and pouches it made from Dec. 3 to March 6.

The company said in a statement that tests of its food had “failed to identify any issues with the products in question.” But it did associate the timing of the reported deaths with its use of a new supplier for wheat gluten, a source of protein. Sarah Tuite, a spokeswoman for Menu Foods, declined to name the supplier.

Kidney failure is common in older cats; in younger animals it is associated with accidental poisoning, typically by antifreeze, Dr. Weingand said. The condition can be treated through hydration.

Menu Foods says it produces 1 billion cans and bags of wet food a year. Shares of the company’s stock fell by 26 percent on Friday, after it announced that the recall could cost it between $30 million and $40 million.