Thursday, June 7, 2012

Tech Links: June 7, 2012



Business


11 buses full of strangers have 72 hours to build and launch startups on the road to a meeting with investors at SXSW. StartupBus is a tech industry boot camp on wheels.

Entertainment


Wired Magazine has rereleased their inaugural issue for free in their iPad application.

Gadgets


Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem

The Gas Station of the Future Just Opened

Innovations that will Change your Tomorrow

While reading an e-book copy of War and Peace on his Nook, North Carolina blogger Philip noticed a minor glitch in the text: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern." He ignored it and moved on, but then encountered a similar error shortly thereafter. As it turned out, the word "kindle" had been systematically replaced by "Nook" throughout the whole book.

Internet


ITU Power-grab, or is something else brewing behind the scenes? C-SPAN Video coverage of fascinating proposal to give the United Nations more control over the Internet. The proposal, backed by China, Russia, Brazil and India, is being examined in depth. And some folks aren't liking what they see...

The Internet Society wants to remind you that THE FUTURE IS FOREVER. On or by June 6th, some major Internet sites and services will have permanently enabled their services over IPv6, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, Netflix, and many others, thus helping complete a changeover started as far back as 1998.

Reading & Discussion


The NYT published an article this week covering a new "digital divide" where poor children are spending more time "wasting time" online. The article states that low income children are more likely to waste time online then their peers who have college educated parents. "The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers."

The US has lost a quarter of its high-tech jobs since 2000, the number declining by 687,000. A veteran headhunter opines on the causes: The technical jobs in Silicon Valley are hard to fill with Americans...I get email every day from new grads, asking for help finding jobs, but honestly, most are Indian or Chinese, not many Americans. He cites a NYT article which claims that the reason iPhone manufacturing doesn't happen in the US is that Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

You may remember the sounds your old dial-up modem used to make, but do you know why it was making those sounds and what was happening during each part? The Atlantic explains the Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound.

Science


How Studying Ant Behavior Can Make Social Networks Better

Software


25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web

"If you're clever and sophisticated, you may enjoy my new YouTube series, Computers for Cynics." Ted Nelson talks about The Myth of Technology, The Nightmare of Files and Directories, how It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC, The Database Mess, The Dance of Apple and Microsoft, Hyperhistory, The Real Story of the World Wide Web, and CLOSURE: Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.

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