Category: Technology

iTunes = Green and Vista = Pollution?

Two interesting takes on software popped up on the interweb recently. I find it interesting the potential that using software has for reducing pollution thanks to digitization.

First, we have a blogger arguing that iTunes saves the environment because less people are buying CDs (and the CDs don’t need to be shipped).
“Steve Jobs also announced that Apple is currently selling 5,000,000 songs per day. This is about 416,000 CD’s per day. By buying your music from the Apple Store, you are helping to prevent a stack of CD’s 2.6 miles high from having to be manufactured PER DAY.”

Apple uses DRM (Digital Rights Management, which is bad), and so does Microsoft Vista. Vista, the new windows, will harm the environment thanks to DRM (see why it’s bad?).
“There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards, and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista — except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That’s an offensive cost to the environment. Future archaeologists will be able to identify a “Vista Upgrade Layer” when they go through our landfill sites”

Be lazy and don’t upgrade to the awful Windows Vista.

Cheap Laptop

buyolpc.jpg
I have been interested for years with the OLPC $100 laptop. Primarily for the role it will play in reshaping the socio-economics of developing countries, secondly for its technological accomplishments in low power draw. My only remaining question is….why can’t I get one? Well there have been hints that I can buy one for $100 bucks as long as I buy one for someone else in the developing world.
Its not the most powerfull laptop, but the cost and low wattage (4 watts browsing the internet, 1 watt reading a document) make the OLPC a gadget intriging. Especially since you charge it by pulling a string (exersice anyone?).

Robothink: Japanese Robot Museum

robotThis a fun thing for this Friday. Japan now has a robot museum.

“Finally, scholars have a place to conduct Astro Boy studies. Robothink, Japan’s first bot museum, opened its doors this fall. The 28,000-square-foot facility is housed in a former used-car dealership in Nagoya. From Robby to Aibo, the droid depository features dozens of actual automatons, plus replicas of real and fictional bots.”

Psiphon Fights Censorship

Earlier this year we covered that Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto was creating some software called Psiphon that lets people bypass firewalls. Psiphone is designed to let people access sites that are blocked for censorship reasons like in China where there is a lot of online censorship.

“psiphon is a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere.”

Ancient Computer Hacked

A bizarre looking device that was used to chart and predict moon cycles. Researchers had to use the most modern of today’s technology to understand this 2,000 year old device.

“Using 21st-century technology to peer beneath the surface of the encrusted gearwheels, stunned scientists say the so-called Antikythera Mechanism could predict the ballet of the Sun and Moon over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that would bedevil Isaac Newton himself.

Built in Greece around 150 to 100 BC and possibly linked to the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, its complexity was probably unrivalled for at least a thousand years, they say.”