Technology

Stormy Weather Brewing

This entry was posted in Astronomy Technology on by

Get out your umbrellas,.. well, they might not help for this storm:

A strong dose of space weather is forecast to hit Earth Friday, potentially disrupting satellite communications and posing a threat to power grids on Earth.
The storm of charged particles was unleashed by a dark region on the solar surface called Sunspot 484. The huge spot, about the size of Jupiter’s surface, has been growing for several days and rotating into a position that now points squarely at Earth.
….
The sunspot let lose a storm of energetic particles, known as a coronal mass ejection at 3 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The expanding cloud is expected to arrive midday Friday. It could produce a geomagnetic storm rated G3 on a scale that goes up to G5.

it will probably cause a little chaos with your cell phones as well.
Update: The Apostropher has some more links including this sweet up close and personal look at a sunspot.

Electonic Voting

This entry was posted in Democracy Election 2004 Technology US Politics on by

Ken MacLeod doesn’t have a high opinion of unverifiable touchscreen voting:

Touchscreen voting with no verifiable paper trail is to real voting what McJobs are to real jobs. You don’t have votes, you have McVotes.
This is something that you wouldn’t put in a science fiction novel, unless it was a blatant knock-about satire – you know, some squib about a world where Mickey Mouse runs for Governor of Florida, or Arnold Schwartznegger for Governor of California. It’s too unbelievable. A good editor would call it a plot hole.

You shouldn’t either.

A Problematic Outlook

This entry was posted in Technology on by

Well, this does not give me much reason to take a look at Outlook 2003:

When you have the Outlook 2003 program window open for a long time, Microsoft Outlook may stop responding. Also, if you view the Processes tab in the Windows Task Manager dialog box while Outlook 2003 is running, you may see that Outlook is using an unexpectedly large amount of memory.

I think I’ll just continue on as a happy Thunderbird user.
Via Faraway, So Close.

Reading Away Messages

This entry was posted in Technology on by

The Shifted Librarian asks librarians:

Does your library understand the growing significance of instant messaging and real-time chat?

How many of you bloggers or blog readers are using some form of IM today?