I never subscribed to Last.fm as I had already bought music for the keeping and owning. Discovering and streaming were not my thing. But now Spotify has sucked all teh air outta the room and Last.fm is closing up shop. I’m beginning to think now that iTunes has streaming/radio available Spotify is going to have to really kick it up a notch to stay relevant and profitable.
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In Response To Google, Amazon Announces Massive Price Cuts For S3, EC2, ElastiCache, Elastic MapReduce And RDS
The game is on, and I would hope the big players hosting their big web apps (Box.com, Spotify, etc.) will benefit as much as the small guys. I doubt however it’s all that easy to host/de-host once you marry yourself to a particular cloud hosting provider. But this price competition can only be a good thing.
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A Brief History Of Oculus
It’s important to know the full implications of Facebook buying Oculus. Let’s first start with the history lesson,… how did we get here?
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The Creator Of “Doom” Is Now A Facebook Employee
It’s true, John Carmack did take up residence at Oculus. Makes me wonder how long he is for the new mashup. I would like to think Facebook will treat it like an independent subsidiary able to chart its own course. That would be best for everyone.
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Financial Firms Looking To Linux, Windows 7 As XP Support Dries Up
I think the same was true in the era prior to WinXP (2001), when IBM’s OS/2 was the only game in town for the ATMs. They migrated once, they can do it again.
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The next thing
Not to worry, the idea is good, the logic sound. It’s just people being focused on immediate, pragmatic needs and not looking further. Bigger picture may eventually be important to calendar owners when competitors gain advantage and added value by having their calendars be aggregated easily through RSS subscription. When they guy next door starts getting all the traffic, they’ll see the value.
The Elm City project was my passion and my job for quite some time. It’s still my passion but no longer my job. The model for calendar syndication that I created is working well in a few places, but hasn’t been adopted widely enough to warrant ongoing sponsorship by my employer, Microsoft. And I’ll be the last person to complain about that. A free community information service based on open standards, open source software, and open data? Really? That’s your job? For longer than anyone could reasonably have expected, it was.
So now I’m on to the next project, one that you might think even more unlikely for a Microsoft employee. I’m helping Yaron Goland create something we are both passionate about: the peer-to-peer Web. Yaron’s project is called Thali, and I’ll say more about it later.
But first I want to sum up what I’ve learned from the…
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UW Researchers Create World’s Thinnest LED | EE Times
Boron nitride (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The researchers harvested single sheets of tungsten selenide (WSe2) using adhesive tape, a technique invented for the production of graphene. They used a support and dielectric layer of boron nitride on a base of silicon dioxide on silicon, to come up with the thinnest possible LED.
Wow, it seems like the current research in graphene has spawned at least one other possible application, using adhesive tape to create thin layers of homogeneous materials. This time it’s a liquid crystal material with possible applications in thin/flexible LCD displays. As the article says until now Organic LED (OLED) has been the material of choice for thin and even flexible displays. It’s also reassuring MIT was able to publish some similar work in the same edition of Nature magazine. Hopefully this will spur some other researchers to put some money and people on pushing this further.
With all early announcements like this in a fully vetted, edited science journal, we won’t see the products derived from this new technology very soon. However, hope spring eternal for me, and I know just like with OLED, eventually if this can be further researched and it’s found to be superior in cost/performance, it will compete in the market place. I will say the steps in fabrication the researchers used are pretty novel and show some amount of creativity to quickly produce a workable thin film without inordinately expensive fabrication equipment. I thinking about specifically the epitaxial electron beam devices folks have used for nano-material research. Like a 3D printer for atoms these devices are a must-have for many electronics engineering and materials researchers. And they are notoriously slow (just like 3D printers) and expensive for each finished job (also similar to 3D printers). The graphene approach to manufacturing devices for research started with making strands of graphite filaments by firing a laser at a highly purified block of carbon, until after so many shots, eventually you might get a shard of a graphene sheet showing up. Using adhesive tape to “shear” a very pure layer of graphite into a graphene sheet, that was the lightning bolt. Simple adhesive tape could get a sufficiently homogeneous and workable layer of graphene to do real work. I feel like there’s a similar approach or affinity at work here for the researchers who used the same technique to make their tungsten selenide thin films for their thin LED displays.
English: Adhesive tape (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Related articles
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Windows Phone 8.1 shows up on Microsoft’s website, Windows 8.1 Update goes live early
Microsoft?s upcoming updates for both the desktop and phone versions of Windows 8 popped up prematurely on the company?s website.
Microsoft is expected to announce Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update (earlier known as Update 1) in early April, but both have managed to make an …
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