Bests both BlackBerry (and the hardware front) and Microsoft (on the software front). Microsoft is now 4th in the mobile OS vendor table. Which is nice given that Windows Mobile is an abomination to use!
Apple swiftly jumped in second place, grabbing a 17.3 percent share with the iPhone 3G. Apple even bested sales of RIM’s popular BlackBerry models, but the firm is not far behind, taking 15.2 percent of the smartphone market.
More at: Apple leapfrogs RIM for #2 slot on smartphone sales list
Amid many promises about futuristic automobiles, an unlikely one seems to be coming true: hydrogen fuel-cell cars.
From: SciAm Test Drives Two Street-Legal Fuel-Cell Cars: Scientific American
Botheration. It’s going to take at least 8 months to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
Officials at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, say that the time is needed to overhaul a sector of the 27-kilometre-long machine, after an electrical failure on 19 September caused some 6 tonnes of ultra-cold liquid helium to leak into its tunnel. A preliminary report issued on 16 October says that as many as 29 of the nearly 10,000 magnets used to guide the accelerator’s proton beam will need to be replaced. Further magnets may need to be removed and inspected, and modifications must also be made to prevent future accidents. “It’s a serious incident,” says James Gillies, a spokesman for the laboratory.
A team of European physicists has developed an integrated circuit that can build itself. The work, appearing in this week’s Nature1, is an important step towards its ultimate goal — a self-assembling computer.
Nature have a nice web site section on the LHC.
Specials : Nature News: “The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. As the first proton beams zipped around the LHC’s massive 27-kilometre ring on 10 September 2008, it marked a new era of physics that could pin down the identity of the dark matter that shapes galaxies; find the Higgs boson, believed to confer mass on the other particles of the quantum bestiary; and recreate conditions that existed a split-second after the Big Bang. In this online Special, Nature asks how it works, what it will find, and why we should be excited.”
(Via Nature Journal.)
There is an excellent response on the BBC site to those questioning the expense of the LHC in general, and by the current head of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in particular. The LHC is a marvellous endeavour and suggesting that the money would be better spent on climate change, or medical research is missing the point. We need to do both, and more. Humanity needs to explore. We need to probe the quantum realm. We need to explore the cosmos. We need to research for new medical advances. We need to find new cleaner energy sources. We need to do lots of things, but not at the expense of basic research into the way the Universe functions. The money spent on the LHC is not that much in comparison to other national expenditure. The UK contribution is equivalent to the cost of a pint of beer per head per year. It’s peanuts. Both figuratively and in a real sense. More is spent in the UK on peanuts every year than the UK contributes to the LHC. Maybe we should stop pouring money down the Iraq rat hole if we want to save. I’m looking forward to many years of interesting data and results from the LHC.
Wow. Just Wow! Stunning pics of The Large Hadron Collider.
Was out at lunch today to get cash. Dandered into a Carphone Warehouse.
“Have you any iPhone’s left?“, I asked, “Or are you all sold out?“
“We’ve got some 8GB ones here, but they are reserved for people. If you come
back after 2 we’ll have released any that haven’t been collected yet.” said a
sales representative sporting an iPhone 3G t-shirt.
“You’ve no 16GB ones then?“
“We have about 1000 in the warehouse. We can order you one if you like.“
“Can you do upgrades for existing O2 iPhone customers?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Lets do that then!“
I pick it up from the store on Tuesday. It’s a holiday weekend in Northern
Ireland this weekend. £59 + £20 for a Griffin hard shell case. Painless.
VirginMedia sent me a letter a while back saying that my cable internet connection would be increased to 10Mbps at some stage in over the summer. Looks like it’s been done. I don’t know when it happened but in the last day or so I’ve noticed much faster downloads. I’ve just done a speed test using Speedtest.net. Here are the results:
Yeah. 10Mpbs download and 512kbps upload.
I sold my Iliad. It was just to small to use for A4 PDFs and too big to use for fiction. Plus the Sony eReader is perfect for fiction and I have that. So the iLiad is off to a new home in sunny England!