One small mistake for a woman, One giant stepback for womankind

From the DailyTech, comes a story about an astronaut blunder on the ISS:

A NASA astronaut accidentally lost her toolbag while conducting a spacewalk

Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper suffered an astronaut blunder after she mistakenly let go of her tool bag in space after a grease gun inside of her backpack-sized bag exploded.

"Uh, we have a lost tool," Stefanyshyn-Piper said as she watched the bag float away.

It seems that the grease gun began to leak inside of the bag, which inadvertently lubricated everything inside the bag. The bag floated away as she tried to manage the mess, but the lack of gravity proved too much.

This is why you don't let woman near tools, cars or International Space Stations.

Microsoft's Obstacle to Growth

Microsoft's greatest weakness will make itself increasingly felt as the software world moves to cloud computing and the SaaS (Software as a Service) model. The weakness? Microsoft is stuck using Microsoft Windows Server for its cloud computing servers, while its competitors use Linux.

There is simply no way Microsoft can maintain its integrity (by continuing to use its own OS on its servers) and be able to compete on a level playing field with firms using open source OS's on their server farms.

Wikipedia currently uses Linux for its 500 servers. Google uses Linux for all of its servers. Digg uses Linux for all of its servers. Open source, particularly Linux, is the market choice for running large server farms. This has come to be because Linux is more stable than Windows Server, on account of having millions of coders editing and contributing to its source code, whereas Microsoft's closed source approach limits the number of eyeballs that can edit and improve its software, and ensures that it can never be as robust as Linux.

Microsoft earns billions of dollars every year on sales of Windows Server and SQL Server, so it will resist doing any thing that could jeopardize the market share of these products, and therefore it will almost certainly sacrifice the efficiency advantage that adopting Linux for its server farms would give its SaaS initiatives, in order to support its own server OS.

This means that while Microsoft continues amassing billions of dollars via its established product lines, it will be hampered in its efforts to expand into the fastest growing sector of the software market: SaaS.

Intel speculates on possible Singularity

There has been much attention given to Intel's recent statement that computers' reasoning ability may exceed humans' in 40 years:

The firm predicts in just over 40 years machines may have the reasoning power of humans, though stopped short of saying they will become our masters and we will be forced to do their bidding.

"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," said Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel said.

"There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future." source

But the most profound part of Intel's statement has been overlooked, and that is the tacit speculation of an impeding Singularity. From the last paragraph:

"there is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate"

The Singularity is a hypothetical event where the rate of technological progress accelerates to the extant where it can no longer be defined, similar to the mathematical singularity that results from dividing 1 by 0.

Leading AI theorist Ray Kurzweil has spoken and written much about this theoretical event:



The Singularity is in some ways more like a religious subject, rather than a technological subject as it has enormous implications for the fate of man, the universe, mortality, and consciousness, by predicting that absolutism, infinite creation and infinite consciousness is our destiny. This kind of world view is something we are accustomed to hearing only from the religious perspective.

For the world's largest semiconductor company to speculate that it could occur, suggests we live in a much more interesting and dynamic world than those who understand the world through the prism of science and observable reality, versus faith and religion, are accustomed to believing in.

Earth's core and mantle could be nuclear fission reactor

Geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon and nuclear engineer Daniel F. Hollenbach believe that the earth's core could contain billions of nuclear fission reactions.

A Washington Post article discusses their theory:

Is Earth's Core a Nuclear Reactor?

The view held by most Earth scientists is that iron and nickel migrated downward, taking with them all the trace elements that readily combine with these metals. The rest of the trace elements, including uranium, combined with oxygen to form oxides that remained in the Earth's mantle and crust.

These scientists use common meteorites as their model, but Herndon used a rare meteorite with a small amount of oxygen as his example, arguing that the uranium would remain metallic and, as the heaviest element in nature, would migrate to the Earth's core, forming a sphere about five miles in diameter -- a natural nuclear fission reactor.

"It's a self-sustaining critical reaction," said nuclear engineer Daniel F. Hollenbach of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a longtime collaborator of Herndon's until the two parted ways last year. "Depending on how much it fissions, that's the power."

Hollenbach explained that the core would be composed primarily of two uranium isotopes. Atoms of the isotope U235 would split, giving up neutrons, which would be absorbed by the isotope U238, transforming it into an isotope of plutonium -- Pu239. The numbers signify the number of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus, known as the atomic weight.

This reaction, the same produced in some nuclear power plants, eventually creates radioactive waste isotopes much lighter than uranium. These migrate upward and outward from the core, "like fizz from a soft drink," Hollenbach said. The heat from the reaction is what drives the Earth's magnetic field.

It is an intriguing theory and it is backed up by the fact that a self-sustaining natural nuclear fission reaction is known to have occurred before on earth:

Natural nuclear fission reaction

A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where analysis of isotope ratios has shown that self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. The existence of this phenomenon was discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin. The conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist were predicted in 1956 by P. Kuroda[1]. The conditions found at Oklo were very similar to what was predicted.

At the only known location, three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, sixteen sites have been discovered so far at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place approximately 1.5 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW of power output during that time.

Geological Situation in Gabon leading to natural nuclear fission reactors

1. Nuclear reactor zones

2. Sandstone

3. Uranium ore layer

4. Granite

If this theory is correct, it would mean that the two greatest sources of energy on earth, geothermal and solar radiation, are both produced by nuclear reactions; a nuclear fusion reaction in the sun, and nuclear fission reactions in the deep earth.

Review of Chrome

Google's new browser, Chrome, is an excellent addition to the browser mix, with innovative new features and blinding fast speed, but it lacks important features that prevent people from making it their main browser.

The positives:

Chrome is lightning fast. It opens up without any noticeable load time, and quickly displays the most viewed pages from your history. This innovation is a real improvement in browser convenience.

Its viewing area is huge, with a noticeable lack of clutter (e.g. there is no 'file, edit, view' navigation toolbar). It has a user friendly, attractive, interface, making it easy to do things like open new tabs. Other features like the new incognito mode are also convenient for clandestine porn-viewing.

The negatives:

By far the most annoying thing about Chrome is that when I have my windows taskbar set to autohide mode, the taskbar remains hidden while Chrome is open even when I put my mouse over the area that usually triggers the taskbar to become viewable. This prevents me from accessing other applications while the Chrome browser is open and this alone prevents me from using Chrome on a regular basis.

I also don't like the fact that Google's own toolbar cannot be installed on Chrome. This is something that Google ought to fix right away.

Prognosis

Overall, I think if Google can fix the above mentioned problems, I will use Chrome a lot more, maybe even replacing firefox with it as my main browser.

My first day with Ubuntu

I installed the server edition of Ubuntu with a desktop GUI on my old laptop yesterday and I wanted to share with you my impressions of it, particularly how it contrasts to my other computer which runs Vista.

Aesthetically it looks and feels primitive, like it came from the era of Windows 2000. It doesn't have the smoothness of movement of XP, let alone Vista, and its look is far inferior to the two Windows OS's.

Booting up, I noticed that it gives the user more technical details of what the machine was doing, and more options, than Windows, which gave me the impression that it was less convenient, but more robust and versatile.

As I used it my initial impression was reinforced as I found Ubuntu to not be nearly as convenient as the out of the box Vista machine. I had to search on Google to figure out how to install various applications and the applications themselves were less polished looking and user-friendly than their Windows counterparts. Some of the inconvenience has to do with the fact that I'm less familiar with non-Windows applications, but a lot of it was due to Windows applications simply being better developed for visuals and user-friendliness.

On the positive side, Ubuntu seemed to offer far greater customizability. It takes longer to get to a certain setting in Ubuntu than in Windows, but all of the incremental steps that Ubuntu makes me take also assure me that the new setting will not have an irrevocable effect on the OS like Windows' greatly feared blue screen of death. As soon as something went wrong with Ubuntu, I was able to go back and undue that option that led to the problem, whereas with Windows, since the OS does much of the changes to the system automatically, to save the user the trouble of having to tinker with minute settings, if something does go wrong, it's hard to know what it is and fix it.

For my most common computer pursuits, which are digesting multimedia and interfacing with websites (reading and interacting with discussion forums and blogs), Vista is the better system for me, as it is prettier, smoother and more convenient, but for more demanding tasks that push the computer's hardware, I think Ubuntu, with its flexibility and cadre of free software, is the only way to go.

If I were to make an analogy, I would describe Vista as a beautiful marionette controlled by only a handful of strings and capable of graceful movements thanks to an intricate set of gears and levers which are out of sight, residing inside the body of the marionette. It is very easy for the puppet master to learn to control but if something goes wrong with the gears and levers, or if the puppet master wants to conduct a new motion that the marionette was not predesigned for, it is exceedingly difficult for him to access the inner machinery and rearrange it.

The Ubuntu marionette on the other hand has all of its gears and levers showing to the world, and has hundreds of strings with which the puppet master can control each one. It is difficult to learn which strings to pull to make the marionette conduct a particular movement, but its range of possible movements is limitless.

Microsoft's 5GB virtual hard drive, Skydrive

Microsoft's 5GB online virtual hard drive, known as Skydrive, has not been talked about much since its global launch in May 2008, but it is an important evolution in the online services world, as it is the first free online storage service from one of the big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) online players.

It is significant that Microsoft has launched a general purpose free online file storage service before Google. Google, despite having a much vaunted and impressive array of data centers, constituting the largest in the world, for hosting terabytes of user information, has not yet been able to create a service such as this that it feels is good enough for mass consumption.

How does Microsoft's service perform?

Surprisingly well. I say surprisingly because I have grown accustomed to only experiencing a seamless web 2.0 experience with Google, but there are no weak links in Microsoft's Sky Drive service. It provides an intuitive AJAX interface, doesn't show any glitches, and has all the storage space I could want online.

If there was something that Microsoft doesn't do as well with Skydrive as Google does with its services is augment it with a complete set of complementary services. With Google, I get the whole package at one central location, my Gmail account, from where I can easily access Google Docs and Google Calendar. Microsoft right now simply doesn't have a set of online services as good as Google's that can serve as a central pit stop for all of my online data management needs. This is not due to any fault of Skydrive, but it does affect Skydrive's usability nonetheless.

The next big challenge for Microsoft is increasing the number of useful online services it provides in order to 1) create "the package" for users and 2) improve its reputation so that users like me come to associate Microsoft's online service with exceptional utility and convenience like they currently do with Google's.