Futurist

There are 390 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 18 of 39).

A million times brigher than the sun: Astronomers reveal ‘largest yellow star ever’ | The Raw Story

I love astronomy news!

Astronomers have spotted the largest yellow star ever observed in our galaxy and 1,300 times larger than the sun.The yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is also in the top-10 of the largest stars known and about one million times brighter than the sun, Olivier Chesneau, whose team made the discovery, said Wednesday.

Despite its great distance of nearly 12,000 light-years from earth, the object can just about be seen with the naked eye.“
The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise,” said Chesneau, of the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, in Nice, France.

“The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut.”

via A million times brigher than the sun: Astronomers reveal ‘largest yellow star ever’ | The Raw Story.

Fiber letter runs in N&O

I wrote a letter to the editor last week after being amazed at all the buzz that was going around about Google considering the Triangle for Google Fiber. It created huge buzz, even though we’re not a sure bet to get it and whatever fiber Google does lay down won’t be lit for at least a year.

Here’s my short-but-sweet letter:

News that Google Fiber might bring gigabit Internet to the Triangle brought to mind the stir that must have accompanied the arrival of the railroad. Sure, a horse and buggy will get you there, but the future rides on fiber optics.

Mark Turner
Raleigh

N&O spreads flawed password advice

Courtesy Davide Restivo

Courtesy Davide Restivo


In today’s Connect section of the News and Observer, reporter John Bordsen asked a panel of technology experts about how to protect oneself from online hackers. I have a few beefs with this article which I’ll describe here.

The first is from Dr. Magdy Attia, dean of the College of STEM at Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University:

Change your passwords and make them long. “Your password should be changed every month or every two months – and make it hard to guess,” Attia said. “Some people use kids’ names, birthdates or whatever. But there are software packages that can scan a large number of passwords to find out what can work. A hacker can use these tools to scan for possibilities.”

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Time Warner Cable raising Internet rates 40%

Time-Warner-Cable
As a customer of Earthlink’s cable modem service, I’ve been happy being relatively immune to the frequent and outrageous price hikes imposed by Time Warner Cable on its customers. I’ve heard grumblings recently from my friends unfortunate enough to still be Time Warner Cable customers that their Internet rates were going up. Thinking I was once again free from this nonsense, I chirped at how my rates weren’t rising.

Then a friend pointed out the insert in this month’s bill, clearly stating that, yes, my rates would be going up. How much, you say? By thirty-eight percent!

That’s right: Internet service that has been $41.95 per month would now be $57.99, an almost 40% jump in one month.
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5 reasons why you shouldn’t work too hard

Nice look at what we Americans are losing in our insistence in becoming slaves to work.

The first time the commercial aired during the Opening Ceremonies in Sochi, the slight pause after those two questions made me hopeful. I sat up to listen closely.

Was he about to say – we should be more like that? Because Americans work among the most hours of any advanced country in the world, save South Korea and Japan, where they’ve had to invent a word for dying at your desk. Karoshi. Death from Overwork. We also work among the most extreme hours, at 50 or more per week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American works about one month more a year than in 1976.

Was he going to say that we Americans are caught up in what economist Juliet Schor calls a vicious cycle of “work-and-spend” – caught on a time-sucking treadmill of more spending, more stuff, more debt, stagnant wages, higher costs and more work to pay for it all?

via 5 reasons why you shouldn’t work too hard.

Everyone In The Tech And TV Industries Is Passing Around This Speech By Kevin Spacey – Business Insider

House of Cards star Kevin Spacey explains why the traditional TV model is quickly going extinct. This five minute excerpt of one of his recent speeches is well worth watching.

Everyone in the tech industry is passing around this video of Kevin Spacey talking about how Netflix and other tech companies will blow up the traditional TV industry. In an edited version of Spacey’s speech below, he touches on how Netflix, which has produced a handful of excellent original series this year, has the potential to disrupt the traditional cable and network TV model of forcing content creators to make a pilot before accepting a show.For example, Spacey says there will be 146 pilots made this year at the cost of $300-$400 million. Only 56 of those will actually be made into a series. "That makes our ‘House of Cards’ deal for two seasons really cost effective," Spacey says in the speech.

via Everyone In The Tech And TV Industries Is Passing Around This Speech By Kevin Spacey – Business Insider.

Official Blog: Exploring new cities for Google Fiber

Google Fiber coming to Raleigh?

Google Fiber coming to Raleigh?


Google is considering the Triangle area for its next rollout of Google Fiber! As a veteran of the broadband fights here in North Carolina and the founder of the Bring Google Fiber to Raleigh! Facebook group, I am thrilled that we’re being considered for this.

Last week’s snowstorm provided me a perfect use case for Google Fiber. I was itching to organize a musical jam session with a few neighbors only travel conditions were too dangerous to all get together in one place. While one can do video chats with our current, abysmally-slow broadband connections, playing in time with others remotely requires highly-synchronized connections. These could be done with low-bandwidth and exorbitantly-priced ISDN circuits or on high-bandwidth, uncompressed fiber networks like Google Fiber.

I think adding Google Fiber to our area’s mix will benefit our musicians as much as our techno-geeks, pharmaceutical scientists and our other traditional area jobs.

Over the last few years, gigabit Internet has moved from idea to reality, with dozens of communities PDF working hard to build networks with speeds 100 times faster than what most of us live with today. People are hungrier than ever for faster Internet, and as a result, cities across America are making speed a priority. Hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. have stated PDF that abundant high-speed Internet access is essential for sparking innovation, driving economic growth and improving education. Portland, Nashville PDF and dozens of others have made high-speed broadband a pillar of their economic development plans. And Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, declared in June that every school should have access to gigabit speeds by 2020.

We’ve long believed that the Internet’s next chapter will be built on gigabit speeds, so it’s fantastic to see this momentum. And now that we’ve learned a lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we want to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve invited cities in nine metro areas around the U.S.—34 cities altogether—to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber.

via Official Blog: Exploring new cities for Google Fiber.

The Open-Office Trap : The New Yorker

Interesting. I’m not a fan of open offices.

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

via The Open-Office Trap : The New Yorker.

Shiny craft in sky

At 7:27 AM Saturday, I was running late to meet my brothers and dad for breakfast downtown. As I hurriedly turned south onto Blount Street from Peace Street, I spotted a very bright object in the eastern sky, roughly above Oakwood Cemetery. It seemed to be stationary and extremely shiny. The bottom half glowed brilliant amber. It could’ve been catching the morning sun that was rising behind it.

Was it an airplane? Normally I’d say so, but in the second it took me to look back at the road and then back to the sky it seemed to vanish. It wasn’t shaped like an airplane but was more spherical, perhaps even oblong or diamond-shaped. It was so reflective to be almost mirror-like. There were no visible navigation lights, either, nor was this airplane on any flight path to or from RDU airport.

There are general aviation planes which are silver but these are rare in my experience. Most small planes are painted. Helicopters are normally painted as well. I don’t ever recall seeing one so reflective – certainly none of the usual TV news helicopters common around here.

Am I a little spooked by the other weird lights I’ve seen recently over Raleigh? You bet. That doesn’t mean what I saw yesterday is anything but some shiny, everyday aircraft. Even so, I sure wish I would’ve had some extra time to investigate it.