In an article from the New Scientist, Nobel Price Winner Robert Richardson discusses the reasons for a shortage of Helium which may run out within 25 years from now for purely politial reasons. In summary, Helium is used in technical applications like MRI scanners where it cools superconducting magnets....
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Globalization works…
According to the German newsletter “Der Spiegel“, quoting the “Financial Times“, the salaries in the U.S. have declined to such a degree that Indian Call Center operators displace jobs from India to the U.S. where wages have gone down so dramatically that they can actually compete with those in...
Continue reading...Intel acquires McAfee
By now, everyone has heard about this story. It could have come in as a surprise, which in fact it isn’t. The more technically oriented know that any “Windows” system they’ve had the complete lack of a pleasure not to be able to avoid using (or having had to...
Continue reading...U.S. Military afraid of their own personnel knowing the truth
According to The Huffington Post, the U.S. Military has banned their own personnel from accessing WikiLeaks even from their private computers. Money quote: USMC Personnel (Marines/Civilians/Contractors) are hereby cautioned and directed to NOT access the WIKILEAKS website from a personally owned, publically owned or US Government computer system. By...
Continue reading...Craig Venter: ‘We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome’
The german magazine “Der Spiegel” has an interesting Interview with Craig Venter. Money quote: SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far? Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely.
Continue reading...A Case for an SSD
I’ve just had another occasion to compare directly two pretty similar machines: A recent off-the-shelf MacBook Pro (I5, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA) with my normal working MacBook Pro (I7, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD). Falling back to the slower machine, and not using all the RAM...
Continue reading...New OCR Wrapper published on Sourceforge
I’ve shared a small project I’ve recently written on sourceforge: pdfocrwrapper.sourceforge.net This tool serves as a wrapper around the excellent ABBYY OCR engine which also exists as a Linux variant. The wrapper recursively iterates a directory structure and submits all PDF that it finds (and that it has not...
Continue reading...Reuse another computer as a secondary display on your MacBook
I just came across an immensely useful piece of software: ScreenRecycler (www.screenrecycler.com). It is basically a display driver mapping to a VNC server that allows your primary MacBook pro to provide the VNC server to another computer, and to use that VNC served display as secondary display on the...
Continue reading...Attention when upgrading to Firefox 3.6 on Linux and using VMWare Server Console
When upgrading e.g. to Ubuntu 10.4, Firefox will get its current version updated to 3.6. Unfortunately, the VMWare Server Console plugin will refuse to work with Firefox 3.6. For this reason, if you need to use the plugin, you can download Firefox 3.5.9 e.g. from mozilla.cdn.cacheboy.net/firefox/releases/3.5.9/linux-i686/de/firefox-3.5.9.tar.bz2 and install it...
Continue reading...Who counts – Some thoughts that could apply to a consultant…
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat...
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