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Sumsung just announced their Cannes line of plasma TV’s. The color depth for this new series is good at 18-bit color, and the contrast ratio can go up to 15000:1. No word on pixel response time, but the product announcement does talk up all the good stuff Samsung is doing re color temperature, white balance, gamma correction and black level performance. They must be trying to improve their rankings on Plasma Television Best Sellers.

The top of the line model 63-inch SPD-63P71FHD supports full high-def at 1080p, and will sell for over $9500 USD.  

Samsung PAVV and PDP TV new product – Samsung Press Release, February 27th 2007   

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The Virgin Galactic public relations machine must be working overtime, as they have 3 new items to report. In a new article in The Times, Richard Branson informs us that about 200 people have paid a deposit of at least 10% of the $200K fee required to ride into space starting in 2009 on SpaceShipTwo, which is the stretch version of SpaceShipOne.

He also advises of plans for a space hotel in orbit around the moon. Patrons would not actually get to spend time on the moon, but rather skim over the surface of the moon in a small 2-seater craft before returning to the hotel.

And in the problematic-and-dubious yet whimsical-and-escapist category, Branson puts forth an idea for a manned giant craft with solar sails that would make it’s way into the cosmos to search for life and never to return. Presumably VG would not offer refunds on these 1-way tickets.        

The Race For Space, The Times, February 24 2007

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Well, Star Trek XI, the motion picture is on it’s way. Paramount Pictures Corp, who owns all of the rights to all things Star Treky, has just officially signed J.J. Abrams to direct/produce the latest movie.

Fans of Star Trek will no doubt welcome the news about this new flick, and be grateful that neither JJ Abrams nor Brad Grey have come to regard the Star Trek body of work as an oeuvre complet, a tired franchise consisting mostly of retreads, a spent force having shot it’s bolt, rife with lame actors reading from screenplays cobbled together from previous Final Draft works by screenwriters whose main qualification seems to be a singular lack of imagination. ..Just kidding/perhaps.

Semi-seriously though, it seems that science fiction has run it’s course as a genre, largely because science has caught up with fiction, giving us cloning, quantum computers and the 5-blade razor…all that’s missing are aliens and and warp drive, and SETI is working on the former and NASA on the latter.

Abrams Takes Holiday ‘Trek’ – Hollywood Reporter, Feb 28 2007

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SED display technology, which promised so much, seems to be in more trouble than usual. After many tech delays in getting the product to market, Canon and it’s nascent SED TV line seems to have hit a legal brick wall. Reuters is reporting that Nano-Proprietary Inc has revoked Canon’s license and is seeking more/same/other partners.

Shame really…while SED is said to provide high picture fidelity and contrast, Canon and it’s partner in crime, Toshiba, seemed to have trouble ramping up to full production (it must be tough to keep 6.2 million electron emitters in sync), not to mention underestimating NPI, who gives the impression of becoming a vexatious patentor. 

Canon’s U.S. court loss could cost it millions – Reuters, Feb 28 2007

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Daylight Saving Time gives us the opportunity to enjoy sunny summer evenings by moving our clocks an hour forward in the spring.

Yet the implementation of Daylight Saving Time has been fraught with controversy since Benjamin Franklin first conceived of the idea. Even today, regions and countries routinely change their approaches to Daylight Saving Time. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

Canon has just announced a digital SLR camera that’s larger than this poor woman’s head! …well actually, the new EOS-1D Mark III while large-ish is a bit smaller than the previous model, the Mark II. The Mark II was a very well reviewed and highly recommended camera, and this new model improves on it.

While smaller, the Mark III is better & faster than it’s predecessor in all respects - it shoots 10.1 megapixels at 10 fps, the larger sensor supports an ISO range of 100-3200, and the color depth has been improved to 14-bit + there’s a whole bunch of other changes too…

Expected in April at $3999+ 

Canon Releases the EOS-1D Mark III Digital SLR – Canon Press Release, February 21 2007    

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Ars Technica was at the launch of that Quantum Computer by D-Wave Systems last week & apparently was not very impressed. While A/T, it seems, did attend the event in body (they’ve got the pix to prove it), they weren’t there in spirit (they brought along a rebuttal witness). Ars’ analysis makes note of a number of D-Wave sci papers that have failed peer review, and they advise us of the skecticism of many, including one Professor Hans Hilgenkamp towards all this putative tomfoolery by D-Wave.

Countering all (er, some of?) the negativity is an article in EDN that describes how the D-Wave SQUID device works, how it was used to solve some Sudoku puzzles, and what the future might hold.

We’ve no idea what this all means, but while we patiently wait for our copy of “Quantum Computers for Dummies” to arrive, we’ll have to make do with this Wired interview, with David Deutsch, who is alleged to be the father of quantum computing.            

D-Wave demonstrates quantum computer… or a black box in a fridge – Ars Technica, February 18, 2007 

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Microsoft has released the next group of Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The latest group are different from those released at the end of last month. The new templates offer additional functionality and can still be used to create a sub site. For more background on what templates are you can read my earlier post. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

A growing number of Ivy League and other colleges and universities are posting a selection of their courses online for all to use. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems to have started the trend back in 2003 and now have on offer materials for more than 1500 courses. The MIT courses can be found at MITOpenCourseWare. Ditto for Stanford and UC Berkeley. And even that poseur, Yale, will have a selection of undergraduate lectures available in the fall. No degree for now, but that may change in the future.

Other educational institutions that offer similar distance learning courses include Carnegie Mellon, Utah State, Tufts and Johns Hopkins.       

Yale On $0 A Day – WSJ, Feb 15 2007  

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 Kiichiro Toyoda founded Toyota Motor Corp in 1933, and the company has gone on to great success, with indications that it will become the world’s largest automobile company in a year or 2 or so, bypassing GM.

 The New York Times has a new article describing how Toyota did it, attributing their winning ways to the fabled Toyota Production System, that features Kaizen, Jidoka, Just-in-Time and to the corporate culture, which includes ways of thinking about teamwork, products and efficiency.

 It’ll be interesting to see how long Toyota can keep it up, what with rising pension costs, healthcare obligations, forex exposure and the risks inherent in offshoring and outsourcing. A translation of Toyoda can be found in the title of this post. 

From 0 to 60 to World Domination – NYT, Feb 18 2007

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