Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Thursday, June 12, 2014

iPhone Battery Life

Why Does My iPhone Battery Die So Fast? Here’s The iPhone Battery Fix! - David Payette
The vast majority of iPhone battery issues are software related.

And if you don’t believe me, read on.

Apple has created a website that explains their official stance on how to “optimize” your iPhone battery. Unfortunately, their instructions are rather wordy and don’t really get to the heart of the issue. In case you’re interested in checking that out, here’s a link to the official iPhone battery page on Apple’s website.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Technology and Global Markets

As 2012 Comes To An End, The World Has Never Been Better - Ralph Benko
In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.
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Let it not be thought, however, that the laws governing Hippie Capitalism are somehow kinder, gentler, or more renewable, than that of Republican Square Capitalism.  To most everyone’s surprise it turns out that the laws of economics, being laws of nature, apply to all equally.  The law of supply and demand, like the law of gravity, applies to Progressives as well as conservatives.  (This is a fact mostly unnoticed, or at least unforgiven, by Progressive policy makers.)

Some years ago, Kvistad noticed that international suppliers were beginning to sell chimes almost as good as Woodstock’s, and more cheaply. The necessary response, as it turned out, did not involve redeploying to the city dump in search of more discarded lawn chairs.  “We had always manufactured our chimes right here, near Woodstock,” Kvistad told me.  “It was very gratifying to be able to provide work to skilled artisans here in my home town.  Yet it was clear to me that if we continued to make them here we soon would be out of business and providing no jobs at all.  So I sought out and found reliable, high quality, ethical suppliers — in China and Indonesia — and… between natural workforce attrition, people moving on or moving away, and retraining my team to handle the complexities of managing an inventory built abroad, I was able not only to keep jobs here in America but to generate more highly skilled, better paying, jobs right here.  It was a positive, not a negative, sum game.  (Emphasis added.)  We also sell in Europe, Canada, and are opening up a distribution center in the UK.  All of that goes to create more American jobs.”

Kvistad’s action provides empirical proof, as if more were needed, of Tamny’s Law (named for the editor of Forbes.com Opinion who has reiterated this observation ad infinitum, and, one hopes, will continue to do so until the policy elites come to grips with reality): “Technology erases unnecessary work so that we can constantly migrate toward more productive pursuits. We destroy jobs to create better ones.”

Michael Saylor Channels Joseph Schumpeter In His Vision Of An Abundant, Cyber Future - John Tamny
Saylor writes of an agricultural revolution that was thousands of years in the making, and that smothered productivity for so much individual effort geared toward growing and finding food. The United States used to be very much an agrarian society, yet Saylor writes that agriculture workers as a percentage of the U.S. labor force today are less than 1%. Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.

So while Americans were the certain beneficiaries of farming advances that freed up their labor, Saylor writes that 36.7% of the worldwide labor force is still stuck in agriculture. That sad number is about to shrink, however. As Saylor puts it, “I believe that mobile computing is the tipping point technology for the larger Information Revolution.” In our pockets in the form of smartphones is increasingly powerful software that will drive “an explosion of start-up companies that will enter markets that previously had high barriers to entry.”

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Frontiers in Computing

Super-Small Transistor Created: Artificial Atom Powered by Single Electrons
A University of Pittsburgh-led team has created a single-electron transistor that provides a building block for new, more powerful computer memories, advanced electronic materials, and the basic components of quantum computers.

The researchers report in Nature Nanotechnology that the transistor's central component -- an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter -- operates with the addition of only one or two electrons. That capability would make the transistor important to a range of computational applications, from ultradense memories to quantum processors, powerful devices that promise to solve problems so complex that all of the world's computers working together for billions of years could not crack them.

Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves - Rebecca Boyle
The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.

“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said.

IBM Launches Five-Year Effort To Develop Quantum Computing
- Rebecca Boyle
IBM is breathing new life into a quantum computing research division at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center, reports New York Times. The computer giant has hired alumni from promising quantum computing programs at Yale and the University of California-Santa Barbara, both of which made quantum leaps in the past year using standard superconducting material.

Groups at both universities have been using rhenium or niobium on a semiconductor surface and cooling the system to absolute zero so that it exhibits quantum behavior. As the Times reports, the method relies on standard microelectronics manufacturing tech, which could make quantum computers easier and cheaper to make.