1. Preparedness and Work Ethic. Baseball is unlike almost all other professional sports in that games are played six or seven times a week. A baseball player has to be ready to perform at a professional level every day.
2. Concentration and Focus. this category specifically concerns the manner in which a player conducts himself during the course of the game.
3. Competitiveness and Self-Confidence. “Is there a desire to succeed to the degree that there’s a failure mechanism kicking in? Is there a fear of failure? Is the desire to succeed significant enough to overcome the fear of failure?”
4. Stress Management and Humility. In baseball even the best hitters fail a majority of the time. The ability to cope with this failure requires a short memory and a certain sense of humor.
5. Adaptiveness and Learning Ability. How successfully is the player able to process new information during a game? Listen to advice from his coaches? How does he adapt when his life situation changes?
(WSJ. July 18, 2012). More than seven years before Apple Inc. AAPL -0.08% rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen—all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad.
"Oh my God," Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. "We had it completely nailed."
Consumers never saw either device. The gadgets were casualties of a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.
Nokia engineers' "tear-down" reports, according to people who saw them, emphasized that the iPhone was expensive to manufacture and only worked on second-generation networks—primitive compared with Nokia's 3G technology. One report noted that the iPhone didn't come close to passing Nokia's rigorous "drop test," in which a phone is dropped five feet onto concrete from a variety of angles.Not surprisingly, Nokia's patent portfolio is worth more than its business operations.
Microsoft also is lavishing attention on businesses that have weighed switching to Google Apps, a corporate-software bundle that includes versions of Gmail and the Google Docs document, spreadsheet and presentation software.Microsoft was making so much money on Office that they fell asleep at the steering wheel and missed the beginning of the transition to a new S-curve.
To counter Google's momentum, Microsoft is using a "Google Compete" team, whose mission is to keep Office customers from buying Google Apps.
In a May report, Gartner said Google is winning one-third to half of new corporate users that are paying for Web-based software. In 2009, Gartner predicted that Microsoft by now would be outselling Google Apps by at least 4 to 1.
(7/12/12) MIT Technology Review:tags: control, storage, energy, distribution, synthesis, 3x3
Yesterday GE officially opened a sprawling, $100 million battery factory in Schenectady, New York. The factory, which will eventually employ 450 people, makes a new kind of battery—based on sodium and nickel. GE says the technology, which is more durable and charges more quickly than lead-acid batteries, will make off-grid power generation more efficient and help utilities integrate power from a wide range of sources, including intermittent ones such as wind and solar power.
The first applications will be somewhat less ambitious. GE's first customer is a South African company—Megatron Federal—that will use the batteries to power cell-phone towers in Nigeria. Those are usually powered by diesel generators. Pairing the generators with the new batteries can help them run far more efficiently. "You save 53 percent on fuel, 45 percent on maintenance, and about 60 percent on diesel generator replacements," says Brandon Harcus, division manager for telecommunications for Megatron Federal. "For our Nigerian application, the savings are substantial, about $1.3 million over 20 years per cell tower. You use a lot less fuel and produce a lot less carbon."
(MIT Tech Review, June 8, 2012). Diesel is a major source of power in south Asia and Africa, where many areas lack access to the grid and frequent blackouts prompt those who can afford it to install backup generators. These markets could help a solar industry that’s struggling with low profit margins due to an oversupply of panels. In turn, the lower prices for solar power could speed up deployment in poor countries by providing a more economical alternative to diesel-powered pumps and generators, and a much faster path to electrification than waiting for grid infrastructure.
One of the first economical applications for solar is replacing diesel-powered irrigation pumps, Gopalan says. These pumps don’t have to run at night, so batteries aren’t needed, keeping costs down. “The total available market in India alone is 15 to 20 gigawatts, and irrigation pumping is a massive application in all of Asia and Africa,” he says. For perspective, the current total installed capacity for solar power is 65 gigawatts, according to the management consulting firm McKinsey.
This switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most ambitious ever attempted by a heavily industrialized country: it aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by midcentury.
This is a much better designed economic stimulus than we've seen in the US over the last three years. It invests into a future infrastructure built with new electric grid technologies. Even if the project fails it has a chance to create a industrial base for an export economy that targets fast growing Asian countries.
To help replace nuclear power, they are racing to install huge wind farms far off the German coast in the North Sea; new transmission infrastructure is being planned to get the power to Germany's industrial regions. At the same time, companies such as Siemens, GE, and RWE, Germany's biggest power producer, are looking for ways to keep factories humming during lulls in wind and solar power. They are searching for cheap, large-scale forms of power storage and hoping that computers can intelligently coordinate what could be millions of distributed power sources.
Until large-scale, cheap storage is available, gas power plants, which can start up quickly and efficiently, will be the most practical way to cope with these situations. But there's little incentive to build such plants. Owners of gas plants meant to meet peak power needs can no longer count on running for a certain number of hours, since the need will no longer fall on predictable workday afternoons but come and go with the sun and wind.
Now energy companies are planning to install 10,000 megawatts of wind power as far offshore as 160 kilometers, at depths of up to 70 meters. Several 10,000- to 20,000-ton offshore substations will convert gigawatts of AC output to DC, which can span such distances without large energy losses.
Various economic think tanks predict that the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and $250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP.
Zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs), as they are known, are arriving on the coat-tails of touch-screen gadgets such as the iPhone that have popularised zooming to magnify graphics. With ZUIs (pronounced zoo-ees), information need not be chopped up to fit on uniformly sized slides. Instead, text, images and even video sit on a single, limitless surface and can be viewed at whatever size makes most sense—up close for details, or zoomed out for the big picture.
Feb 10, 2012. VBeat -- In the first quarter of 2012, for instance, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and just 5.2 million Macs.
It’s not quite the death of the desktop, but mobile devices are gaining ground on their traditional brethren, at least within the Apple-centric world.
“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there’s much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Cook said
Intel (INTC) focused its efforts on what’s called the “clock speed” of CPUs, rapidly increasing the performance of computer chips to handle desktop operating systems and processor-intensive applications better. Less thought was given to reducing the power consumption requirements of these chips.The companies' IP models are also very different. Intel develops and makes its chips, maintaining a quasi monopoly in the high-performance PC and server markets. ARM designs chips and licenses its architecture to third party manufacturers.
...ARM chips have used a “bottom up” [low-power] approach. Early ARM chips weren’t capable of running complex software but could run for days between charges. Once the power requirements of the silicon were effectively managed, ARM chips began to ramp up performance, most recently with quad-core chips that can offer 16 hours of high-definition playback on a tablet.
Однажды Чукча принес в редакцию свой роман. Редактор прочитал и говорит:
— Понимаете ли, слабовато… Вам бы классику читать. Вы Тургенева читали? А Толстого? А Достоевского?…
— Однако, нет. Чукча — не читатель, Чукча — писатель.
NEW YORK, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Anti-Wall Street protesters' plans to camp in a New York park throughout the city's harsh winter were dealt a blow on Friday when the fire department confiscated generators and fuel because they posed a danger.
But Occupy Wall Street spokesman Ed Needham said the removal of the generators was "certainly a directed effort to thwart our situation." He said solar powered generators were being brought in to replace those taken.Facebook and Twitter proved that social networking technology can help people organize in a totally new different way. Now, it's the green tech's turn to prove itself. If it works out, this might become the Occupy's movement's greatest contribution to the world.
(26 October 2011. New Scientist. )Known as the Facebook Immune System (FIS), the massive defense network appears to be successful: numbers released by the company this week show that less than 1 per cent of users experience spam.
The system is overseen by a team of 30 people, but it can learn in real time and is able to take action without checking with a human supervisor.
It took just three years for FIS to evolve from basic beginnings into an all-seeing set of algorithms that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update– indeed, every click made by every one of the 800 million users. There are more than 25 billion of these "read and write actions" every day. At peak activity the system checks 650,000 actions a second.
The efficiencies of the virtual world are totally unprecedented in human history. The Matrix is turning out to be a very cool place.The only network bigger, Larus suspects, is the web itself. That makes Facebook's defense system one of the largest in existence.
...the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”
[Operating System] fragmentation alone is plenty reason to abandon the platform--I'm not buying a new phone every year just to keep up, and I'm tired of the guessing game and bullet lists about what's coming when and to whom, and what apps support what version of the OS, down to the second decimal place.
Smartphones are complicated devices, running complicated software. Android is further complicated by, as I mentioned, fragmentation, and also the introduction of wild-card apps from multiple sources. ... when something goes wrong with my phone, I want someone to call, and Verizon (or AT&T, or T-Mobile, or Sprint) isn't in the business or habit of supporting software. The manufacturers seem well out of their depth, in terms of support. And Google is no help at all.
