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- HOWTO choose a typeface
- Restaurant turns "B" grade into "BEST"
- Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock
- Read This: The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck
| Posted: 19 Sep 2010 12:44 AM PDT  Wayn3w sez, "Useful and funny graphic (poster available) on choosing fonts. Look at the path to 'Comic Sans' for instance." So You Need A Typeface (Thanks, Wayn3w, via Submitterator)
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| Restaurant turns "B" grade into "BEST" Posted: 19 Sep 2010 12:44 AM PDT  Cer Té, a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, received a "B" grade from the city health inspectors; but when life gives you SARS, you make sarsparilla. So they turned their "B" into a "BEST." Restaurant Makes Best Out of 'B' Grade (via Super Punch) (Image: Thumbnail derived from a larger photo by Zach Seward for The Wall Street Journal)
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| Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock Posted: 19 Sep 2010 12:49 AM PDT  Intel's latest business-model takes a page out of Hollywood's playbook: they're selling processors that have had some of their capabilities crippled (some of the cache and the hyperthreading support are switched off). For $50, they'll sell you a code that will unlock these capabilities. Conceptually, this is similar to the DRM notion that I can sell you a movie that you can watch on one screen for $5 today, and if you want to unlock your receiver's wireless output so you can watch it upstairs, it'll be another $5. I remember the first time someone from the studios put this position to me. It was a rep from the MPAA at a DRM standards meeting, and that was just the example he used. He said: "When you buy a movie to watch in your living room, we're only selling you the right to see it in your living room. Sending the same show upstairs to watch in your bedroom has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge money for it." This idea, which Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "If value, then right," sounds reasonable on its face. But it's a principle that flies in the face of the entire human history of innovation. By this reasoning, the company that makes big tins of juice should be able to charge you extra for the right to use the empty cans to store lugnuts; the company that makes your living room TV should be able to charge more when you retire it to the cottage; the company that makes your coat-hanger should be able to charge more when you unbend it to fish something out from under the dryer. Moreover, it's an idea that is fundamentally anti-private-property. Under the "If value, then right" theory, you don't own anything you buy. You are a mere licensor, entitled to extract only the value that your vendor has deigned to provide you with. The matchbook is to light birthday candles, not to fix a wobbly table. The toilet roll is to hold the paper, not to use in a craft project. "If value, then right," is a business model that relies on all the innovation taking place in large corporate labs, with none of it happening at the lab in your kitchen, or in your skull. It's a business model that says only companies can have the absolute right of property, and the rest of us are mere tenants. If there's one industry where "If value, then right," is a dead letter, it's computing. The first processors Intel ever sold went into PCs did practically nothing. It was only the addition of unlicensed, unauthorized, independent third-party innovation -- software, peripherals, networks -- that made them valuable enough to send more business Intel's way. Intel is a direct beneficiary of our property rights in our computers: the company's best customers are hobbyists who buy Intel processors directly in order to upgrade their PCs. What if Dell asserted "If value, then right," and told its customers that they had only purchased the right to run their PCs as-is, an if they wanted a faster processor, they'd have to pay Dell to unlock this latent value? One thing remains to be seen: will Intel try to sue people who figure out how to unlock their processors without paying Intel? Under the more exotic interpretations of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, showing your neighbor how to unlock her Intel processor is a copyright violation (though a recent court decision went the other way). Just this week, Intel's spokesman sang the praises of the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules and promised to use them to club down its competitors. Let's hope that this anti-property mania doesn't extend to attempts at shutting down websites that distribute software that let us unlock our own processors. Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do (via /.) (Image: Engadget/Brian)
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| Read This: The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck Posted: 18 Sep 2010 06:43 PM PDT  Physics can seem a lot like a dirty trick. You spend most of junior high and high school being told that there are rules to this thing, that the Universe functions in predictable and rational ways. Apples always fall down from the tree onto Newton's head. Cars traveling at different speeds crash into each other with a force that you can sit down and calculate on a TI-86. And then they pull the rug out from under you. Suddenly, it's all photons, antimatter, and cats that are simultaneously alive and dead. Even the Universe itself might be just one of many, with every outcome that has ever been possible playing itself out somewhere. It's confusing. And into that gap in popular knowledge tumbles everybody who bought into What the Bleep Do We Know? If you're lost, Marcus Chown can help. His book, The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck, explains how science got from the macro, everyday world of Newtonian Laws to the far-out, quantum reality we know today. More importantly, he makes the latter relevant, piecing together science history, sub-atomic particles, physical cosmology and everyday life. If you read one physics book after graduating from high school—hell, if you read one physics book while in high school—this should be it. When I say that Chown makes quantum physics relevant, I mean more than simply praise for his ability to connect complex theory to brilliantly simple real-world analogies and mental pictures. Although, that's awesome. One of the frustrating things about the way physics is taught in school is the way it disconnects Point A from Point Z. You learn to draw a model of the atom in some random lower-level science class. Somewhere, and some when, else, you learn that the sun is 93 million miles away from us, a miasma of incandescent plasma burning at temperatures of millions of degrees. Completely separate from the first two, you learn about nuclear energy and E=mc^2 Chown connects those dots—and adds in the fascinating history of generations of scientists trying to explain how the sun could possibly keep itself burning hot enough, long enough, for us to exist at all. Mix it all together and you come away with not only an intensely improved understanding of the structure of atoms and how nuclear fusion works, but also why it matters ... and what a wonder it is that we know any of this. That's just one example. Chown has a real knack for creating, "Oh, I get it now!" moments, and The Matchbox That Ate a Forty Ton Truck is full of them, building up from the basics of quantum theory, to the fire at the heart of the sun, to the Big Bang and the apparent absence of alien life. In fact, it's hard to pick one simple fact from the book to tell you about, precisely because Chown does such a good job of tying everything together and making physics understandable as a system, not just separate parts. And if that's not enough to make you want to read it, I'm not sure what else to say. Marcus Chown: The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from the author. That said, I receive a lot of free review copies of books. I only tell you about the ones I think you really need to read. Image: Some rights reserved by the mad LOLscientist
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