Newspaper and Magazine Publishers Already Having an iPad Crisis Moment [Apple]

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As expected, the tricky question of "How we gonna get paid?" has reportedly become a sticking point in Apple's negotiations with newspaper and magazine publishers. Put simply, subscriber information is deeply valuable, and Apple doesn't want to to share it.

Demographics are everything to magazine (and blog) publishers. It's how you sell ads. Under the iTunes model, content producers receive sales numbers, and the money that goes with them. No credit card numbers, no addresses, no hint whatsoever of who's buying what. This does not sit well with publishers.

Also, while the 70 percent split makes book publishers giddy that they're controlling their own destiny since they can set prices (good luck with that, guys) newspaper dudes are understandably less thrilled about giving away a third of the subscription, since it's an ongoing payment. "Thirty per cent forever changes the economics," one exec told the Financial Times. Apple won't move on this point at all, apparently. Magazines are basically like apps to Apple. I'm sure the homogenization of content, conceptually speaking, sits very well with publishers and their precious, glossy pamphlets.

Since both the NYT and Conde Nast's Wired are both officially on board with launching iPad content, I'm curious if they've agreed to the terms that other publications are supposedly balking at, or if they have a different kind of deal—or if their deals are in fact still up in the air. (Update: The New York Times' is working through the same crisis, Gawker's discovered. Are they selling an app, for $10 a month, or a newspaper, for $30 a month? These are not merely financial questions, but existential ones, less than easily resolved.)

In the end, it'll get worked out. The glistening trickle of slobber sliding out of their lips gives the publishers away. They can't not be on Apple's glossy slab of the future. And then they'll privately grumble about how unhappy they are with the crappy deal they were forced into. But whatever, because they're just one app out of 140,000. [FT]


Solar Egg Charger Dangles From Your Belt Loop, Juices Your Gadgets [Solar Chargers]

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Not every gadget comes with an inbuilt solar charger, like the Puma Phone. XPAL's Solar Egg can do the job just fine, dangling from a keychain or belt-loop (if you dare) and charging to 90 per cent in four hours.

It doesn't even need a hot summer's day to do so, with XPAL claiming it works just as well in "medium levels of natural light." It's compatible with all types of gadgets with (presumably) a few cables included, and will be out in March. [XPAL via Engadget]


From Eternity to Book Club: Chapter Six | Cosmic Variance

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Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Chapter Six is entitled “Looping Through Time.” It’s about both the logical paradoxes presented by time travel, and some of the obstacles to actually building a time machine (closed timeline curves) in general relativity.

Excerpt:

Everyone knows what a time machine looks like: something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those of a younger generation, a souped-up stainless-steel sports car is an acceptable substitute; our British readers might think of a 1950s style London police box. Details of operation vary from model to model, but when one actually travels in time, the machine ostentatiously dematerializes, presumably to be re-formed many millennia in the past or future.

That’s not how it would really work. And not because time travel is impossible and the whole thing is just silly; whether or not time travel is possible is more of an open question than you might suspect. I’ve emphasized that time is kind of like space. It follows that, if you did stumble across a working time machine in the laboratory of some mad inventor, it would simply look like a “space machine”—an ordinary vehicle of some sort, designed to move you from one place to another. If you want to visualize a time machine, think of launching a rocket ship, not disappearing in a puff of smoke.

There might not be too much new to say about this chapter, as part of it appeared as an excerpt in Discover and we’ve already talked about that. But maybe you weren’t reading that post, in which case, it’s new to you!

There were three main goals in this chapter. The first was to explain what time travel would and would not be, in the context of general relativity — in particular, it would be just another form of travel through spacetime, not involving any disappearing and rematerializing at some other point in the past. The second was to go through some of the possible ways to make closed timelike curves (with wormholes or cosmic strings) and see how difficult it really was.

But the third and most interesting goal was to connect time machines to the arrow of time and entropy. At this point in the book we’ve only introduced these concepts somewhat casually — the careful exploration of entropy is in Part Three, which begins next week — so one could argue that a more logical presentation would have delayed this discussion for later. But sometimes there are considerations beyond logic; in particular, once we built up momentum with the entropy discussion, a digression on time travel would have seemed like wandering too far afield. That was my feeling at the time, anyway.

This is a really interesting aspect of time travel, which I think is dramatically under-emphasized in discussions about it: the real reason why traveling backwards in time makes us nervous is that it becomes impossible to define a consistent arrow of time. The arrow is very ingrained in how we think about the world, including the sense that the past is set in stone while we can still make choices that affect the future. In the presence of a time machine part of our personal “future” is already in the “past,” which seems to compromise our free will.

So be it! Our free will was always an approximation, if we are good materialists who believe in the laws of physics. But it’s a highly useful approximation. It’s always worth emphasizing, when you start talking about the paradoxes of time travel: the simplest and most plausible way out is to imagine that the universe doesn’t (and won’t ever) actually have any time machines.


BlackBerry Loves AT&T More Than It Loves You [BlackBerry]

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Even as Windows Phone has emerged from the Dark Ages, there's still a gaping chasm between BlackBerry and consumers, which RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis makes clear as he warns that people's phones need to use less of them internets.

"Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this."

"If we don't start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States."

"That is pretty fundamental to a carrier as that means you can have three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer."

"That has a huge advantage for the carriers if you think about the many billions of dollars the carriers have invested over the last five years in spectrum auctions and infrastructure rollouts."

Worrying more about carriers than people? You sound like AT&T.

Guess what? People want to do stuff with their phone, cool stuff like stream TV, download photos, upload a video of that crazy homeless guy saying crazy things in that crazy part of town. You know, the wonderfully awesome and connected future carriers have promised for years in pretty promos. There is no going back.

Fake Steve pretty much nailed it a few months ago, when AT&T was talking incentivizing people to use less data:

We've got people who love this goddamn phone so much that they're living on it. Yes, that's crushing your network. Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It's not. It's a good thing. It's a blessing. It's an indication that people love what we're doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can't believe I'm explaining this to you. You're in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you're right in the sweet spot.

Why would you even think about giving that up? Because carriers will like you more? RIM's bread-and-butter is corporate dollars, but you know what, so was Windows Mobile's. Keep thinking that way, and see how far it gets you. [Economic Times via 9to5Mac]


Fisher-Price iXL: An iPad For the Kindergarten Crowd [We Love Toys]

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Fisher-Price's iXL is a learning tool for young'ns that lets them read interactively, draw, look at pictures and play games—pretty much everything your kids currently do on your iPhone but without you having to worry about jam-hands.

OK, the chunky clam shell gizmo doesn't owe much to the iPad in terms of physical design, but the applications it contains line up pretty closely with those of Apple's tablet. While Apple has evolved past the use of any input devices besides the ones attached to your palms, the iXL is a stylus-based gadget, geared towards three- to six-year-olds.

There are six programs that come loaded on the device: story book, game player, music player, art studio, note book, and photo album. All of them are geared towards learning and interactivity: the story book reads out loud and lights up words as they go along; the note book helps little ones hone their handwriting by providing upper case letters to trace; the art studio offers easy options for drawing with brushes or stamps on a variety of cartoon backgrounds.

Some of the programs are intended for landscape orientation and others portrait, with a little monkey chiming in when the mini-user is supposed to turn it.

All of the programs work snappily and have some neat features, and while they're intuitive to an adult, it still seems like this device offers an awful lot for a four-year-old to get the hang of. Adding to the complexity, more officially-licensed programs will be downloadable in months following launch. These, as well as audio files and pictures, can be loaded via USB or with the built-in SD card slot.

But maybe I'm selling kids short. In any event, if you're hoping to get your kid started on the gadget-obsessed track early, the iXL is a toy to check out. It will be available in October for the nice price of $79.99

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.


Wait, how big is NASA’s budget again? | Bad Astronomy

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I have mixed feelings about NASA, as is obvious if you’ve read my posts about it. But I think that they have done a simply fantastic and amazing job given how small their budget is. You might think NASA gets a huge amount of money — a lot of people do — but in fact they get only a tiny fraction of the federal budget.

The New York Times made this very very clear recently when they posted an interesting graphic depicting the national budget allocations. Take a peek:

fy2011graphic

[Click to enporkbarrelate.]

Can you find NASA on there? It’s actually listed under General Science, near the bottom right. That rectangle’s not very big, is it? And NASA is only a part of that section, so the space agency’s lion’s share is starting to look more like a kitten’s nibble.

Now, wanna have fun? Close your eyes and click randomly on the graphic. Did you click on NASA? No? Shocker. But this gives you another way to think of the amount of money NASA gets, compared to, say, the military*. Statistically speaking, your chance of randomly picking NASA’s footprint on that graphic are about 1 in 125.

I’m still working out what I think about Obama’s new plans for NASA. I’m happy about the increase he plans to give them, but we can easily afford to increase NASA’s budget by a lot more. We spend more on pet food every year in the US than we do on NASA. What we spend every year on tobacco products is five times NASA’s annual budget, so I’m thinking the money is out there.

It’s not a matter of finding the money. It never is, and never has been. It’s a matter of finding the money in a way that isn’t political suicide for a politician. And that, I suspect, is because those of us who support space exploration haven’t made it politically expedient for everyone else to support it, too.

I don’t have a remedy for that. I’m just a guy with a blog, so I blog about it, trying to show people that space is exciting, interesting, and worth a few more tax dollars a year. The more people who know that, really know that, the better off we are.

Tip o’ the change purse to Fark.

* Not to pick on the military, except to say that it gets a lot of money. I actually like to confuse my opponents by telling them truthfully that I support a strong military, since I know there are bad guys out there. Unlike political ideologues, I try to judge things on their merits, and make up my mind on a case-by-case basis. So you can try to peg me as a left-wing liberal on some issue if you want, but you’ll be wrong a lot of the time.


Smart Plant Instrumentation Training

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Res,Sinours What is chance of fresher of geting job after undergoing Smart plant Instrumentation Training if not ,Then which profile should he look to get some exp.which will become handy to get good job after taking Smart plant Instrumentation Training

Fact Checking on Campaign Promises

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Obama's budget reshapes the U.S. space agenda, PolitiFact.com

"This change of plans clearly breaks Obama's promise to "endorse the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars." But the president's budget for NASA does keep five other campaign promises. It proposes working with international allies to extend the life of the International Space Station at least through 2020; it supports access to space for private-sector companies; it supports increased investment in research and development related to space; it supports increased spending to prepare for longer space missions; and it establishes school programs to highlight space and science achievements."

Election 2008 postings

Brick Lamp Takes Apple Minimalism to a Whole ‘Nother Level [Design]

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You think that your MacBook embodies the essence of simplicity because of it was painstakingly machined from a single slab of aluminum? Well, the Brick Lamp by HC Wang is pretty much just that slab of aluminum.

The Brick Lamp's controls couldn't be simpler. You want light? Place the lamp on one of its edges. You want dark? Place the lamp on its back.

Of course, while HC Wang may be on to something here, I'm pretty sure that I can take the design to the next level. How?

I'm going to remove the light. [HCWang via mocoloco via OhGizmo!]


Dr. Bruce Ovbiagele

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Born in Nigeria, Ovbiagele came to the United States in 1995 to pursue specialist training in stroke, the second-leading killer of Africans and the single most deadly neurological disease. He plans to return to Nigeria in the future to set up stroke centers.. He also hopes to help train new Afric

Datel Space Dock Adds External Hard Drive to PS3 and Xbox 360 [Storage]

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Adding a USB hard drive to your PS3 or Xbox 360 isn't as simple as plugging it in (and on the 360 especially, it's pretty much a hack). But Datel's new Space Docks make the process simple.

Their Space Dock, available in PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, accepts 2.5" or 3.5" SATA HDDs (up to 1TB) just like cartridges before what we can only assume is an automatic formatting and file install process that allows stock drives to be instantly compatible.

Once installed, the drive mounts in your system to backup saved games (a feature that looks exclusive to PS3 version), play movies, etc, plus you can always plug the drive back into your PC to transfer more files since the formatting structure is really just FAT32.

$40, available soon and kind of neat. (Datel is free to use that catchy sales pitch, if they'd like.) [Datel via Maxconsole]


Flanges for Fittings

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Hi,

Is it possible to go for a no of pieces for flanges instead of a single piece of flange. If possible from what dia . Kindly provide the respective code which says that.

Thnaks

Dhanya

Space Rock Contains Organic Feast

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From BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition:

Scientists say that a meteorite that crashed into Earth 40 years ago contains millions of different carbon-containing, or organic, molecules. Although they are not a sign of life, such organic compounds are life's building bloc

Anchor Bolt Design

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hi..

right now we have job to design the steel tank that using anchor bolt type M24,M32 & M 42 but we doesnt have the specification about that ( the lenght detail dimension and the allowable tensile, please help us

best regard

Noise Standard

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Maximum noise levels at any location

an employee can reasonably be expected to occupy while

carrying out normal process or mechanical work functions shall not exceed 115 dBA at any time. Is this a "reasonably" noise level for a welding shop? Wich one is the noise standard in Europe?