O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

I would love to go to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I downloaded most of the audience videos I could find last year and read the write-ups of the speeches. Now to actually place myself in the room and have some great ideas. Call for Participation proposals are due September 24. I will aim towards social software and see where it leads….

Did Blaster Cause the Blackout?

Did Blaster Cause the Blackout? “there is a very good plausibility that the recent East Coast power outage was due to an attack by an MSBlaster variant on the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system at the power plant master terminal, or more likely at several of the remote terminal units (RTUs). SCADA runs under Win2000 / XP and the telemetry to the RTU is accessible via the Internet.”…

Microsoft’s Big Role on Campus

Washington Post covers the molding of campus curriculum by Microsoft. Any language where the IDE is not free or relatively cheap to students will stifle learning. In one of my econometrics classes at UCLA students were offered scaled down versions of Stata for $50. I do not know one person who purchased the program for use at home. The professors were bound by lab hours and available workstations and their curriculum suffered as a result. Visual Studio .Net 2003 Academic is $100 at the UCLA Store. Visual C# .Net is $60. Yes, you could have students write in Notepad, vi,…

Community Books

There is a local San Francisco project where people can share books and videos. “The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Seems interesting and worth checking out. I posted most of my books online tonight. It was pretty simple to enter a ISBN and have the author, genre, and even a review from Amazon filled out for you….

Toyota Prius parks itself

Toyota plans to release an optional feature for its Prius cars sold in Japan, according to Wired coverage. “A car will probably always require a driver for liability reasons.” A lot of people are uncomfortable with parallel parking, especially in tight spots, or a spot on the driver’s side. Although the article mentions the price tag as a downfall, I know some people who pay for a parking spot just so they do not have to parallel park….