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The great irony of technology is it’s ability to benefit one group while at the very same time hindering another. China and Iran have recently discovered the power of technology might exceed their ability to censor their citizen’s Internet activity. All this is very evident in the myriad of news articles released in the past 2 weeks.
Continue reading Censorship Bitten by Technology…  On June 12th, the United States makes the switch from analog to digital broadcast signals for television transmission. This has been in-the-works since the late 1990′s. The switch was origianlly scheduled for February 2009. It was rescheduled to June because our government didn’t think everyone was ready. This is something that has been thoroughly advertised, even over digital TV signals, for more than a year. If you live here, how could you not know?
Continue reading Analog to Digital TV Transition… Yesterday was a sad day for the Aeronautics industry and at least 228 people. An Air-France A330 Airbus was lost over the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between Rio de Janeiro and Paris last night. Air France said the A330 plane sent an automatic message at 0214 GMT indicating an electrical circuit failure. There were no other official details on the possible cause of the crash. Lightning strikes are fairly common but planes built out of metal like the A330 are designed to be able to shake them off. The massive current passes along the metal fuselage and is allowed to arc towards earth without causing harm. The idea is based on a principle known as a Faraday Cage, which protects passengers inside a mesh of conducting material. It appears Faraday’s Cage might not always work. In the worst previously recorded incident blamed on lightning, 113 people were killed in 1962 on a Boeing 707, coincidently also operated by Air France. My heart goes out to the family and friends of the lost loved ones. In the end I hope technology is not to blame on this incident. Unfortunately, it seems pretty obvious technology bites again. Once again a religious nut strikes and kills! The story-line is repeated daily through-out the world. I grow so weary of listening to those purporting to be “Holier-Than-Thou”. The death and destruction, the wasted resources and lives.
Continue reading Religious Zealot Loses Grip on Reality!… Low-Tech solutions are somehow cool! Could something as simple as paint help mitigate Global Warming? Scientist have been exploring solutions, all seemingly grand and high-tech like; green energy, renewable energy, solar solutions, hydro solutions and carbon bottling just to name a few. Politicians get involved to debate costs, financing and various other facets. Somehow special interest groups get involved and manage to dilute the objective with their own self-serving twists. Steve Chu, U.S. Energy Secretary, has delived what appears to be an all too logical solution: Paint your roof white! You’ve gotta love using old technology to solve new problems. Sounds like a great starting point to me. Paint the roads white too if that’ll help. It’s been a long time since someone in the government had a good, simple, cheap idea! What’s really hard to believe is that some people have issues with the notion. Apparently a similar initiative in California to require car roofs to be more reflective sparked political controversy. Some motor-heads don’t want to sacrific their freedom of choice to own a black car. In the end, California may get nowhere on this. Will California politicians have the intestinal fortitude to speak for the good of the many, rather than the good of the few? That’s what I’ll be watching. I love the innuendo in the name. In 2005 I grew very frustrated with Microsoft Windows. Basically I was pissed. I was paying $150-$200 per upgrade copy of Windows XP, plus MS Office, plus A/V, plus Anti-Spyware and I still had to fix problems with the OS “under the hood”. Why should I pay for the privilege of using MS Windows, still have to fix their problems and endure being a target of malice towards Microsoft. ENOUGH! Enter Linux! I’ve been using it as my full-time desktop system at home and work since. Not that there haven’t been growing pains. But, I haven’t contributed a dime to the Microsoft economy since then either. MicroSwamp is a repository of personal technical notes with a slant towards Desktop Linux advocacy. Opened several months ago, technologybites.com is a site I’d like to see grow into a community, based upon the “pitfalls of technology”. The site currently sports;
Everyone can think of at least one incident where technology played a role in causing irritation, anguish or physical pain. Those would be Technology Bites! The Data Recovery Resource Center is now located at dataswamp.com. A variation of this site has existed since 2003. It originally opened as howtorecoverdata.com, re-appeared as data-recovery-hub.com and closed in 2007 as iSwamp.com. This is the one I regret closing the most. Hopefully the site topic is obvious. If not; It’s data recovery! The popular Service Guide section will be rebuilt from scratch and provided on the site in the not too distant future. Those familar know I was layed-off from C.O.I. in April 2007. Around that time I connected with a friend in the data recovery business. He was interested in opening a second branch and I wasn’t exactly getting employment offers at the time. So, we hooked-up to do some data recovery business. Part of my agreement with him was to close iSwamp.com which was a competitor to his website. All things considered, jumping into the new venture, I just closed my entire network of sites. Time didn’t really permit me to run them properly anyway and the sites didn’t generate huge numbers of visitors. But, I was getting in the neighborhood of 30,000 unique visitors each month over the entire network. Individually, no big deal. Not a “barn-burner”, bit collectively not too shabby. Looking back, it was a bad decision (it’s not the first and won’t be the last I make). So for the past month or so, I’ve been rebuilding my little swamp network. You’ll see them listed here under “My Sites”. With any luck someone out there will find the stuff useful. More on the details of each site in future posts. |
 Orlando Ex. Arpt, FL89 °F (88 °F) |
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