MCI expands Wi-Fi footprint12/16/2003 04:12 PM The carrier announces that it will more than triple its footprint of
Wi-Fi access points through a partnership with Boingo Wireless.
Cray Expands Its Footprint
Cray Expands Its Footprint03/08/2004 11:20 PM Supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc., which currently sells a single
system aimed at the highest echelon of users, is expanding its
footprint with systems for slightly less expensive HPC applications.
Can iPod stand on its own footprint?
Can iPod stand on its own footprint?09/18/2004 12:52 PM A recent <A
HREF="http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/09/17/cx_ah_0917tente
ch.html">article</A> on Forbes.com about the
Apple/Beatles lawsuit contains an interesting footnote that brings to
light and an more interesting question: Can the iPod name survive
without the Apple brand?
While the reverse is already being tested by Hewlett Packard, it
remains to be see whether any of Apple's products can survive without
their namesake. For all of Apple's unique and unmistakable designs,
what would happen if the Apple was removed from the front of the iMac?
Or the 23-inch Cinema Display? Or the back of the iPod?
Forbes seems to think that a move away from the Apple name and symbol
"would harm its prospects not one bit.
"The iPod brand is turning out to be as powerful a brand name as
that of its corporate parent. By itself, it's also free of any
expensive encumbrances involving musicians who haven't done anything
terribly interesting in the last few years (i.e., The Beatles)."
The iPod name is certainly strong enough to exist on its own, but
would there be any benefit (aside from the Apple/AppleCorps dispute)?
Could Apple create better computers — or better music players
— if the pressure was off to do both under the same moniker?
I'd like to personally think not, and with the unveiling of the latest
iteration of the iMac, it seems that Steve Jobs & Co. can certainly do
both, and do it well, if not borrowing from the other side along the
way. The iPod is as much Apple as it is its own individual namesake,
but splitting the two would likely cause separation anxiety for one
— or even both — parties.
It's not secret that the iPod has brought Apple back to major player
status, and while it may be true that Apple the computer company has
ridden Apple the music company to new heights, they most certainly
need each other to survive.
I mean, just take a look at <A
HREF"www.apple.com">Apple.com</A>…
Regulations For Federal Service For Ecological, Technological And Nuclear Inspection Approved
London Overground: Wi-Fi Footprint and Future06/03/2004 06:30 PM Extensively researched paper describes scope of commercial, free, and
municipal wireless in London, England: Using maps, warflying,
stumbling, and other resources, Julian Priest has released an
exhaustive look at the state of wireless in London. He looks at the
lead that free networking has had in the city due to bans on
commercial deployment until early 2002; still, the commercial
footprint is extensive. Among many interesting facts and discussions
in the paper are the necessary geek per square kilometer density
necessary to fully cover London on average with free networks (about
1.25 geek activits per sq. km). Priest also review municipal projects,
none of which are rousing successes and many of which demonstrate the
limits of straitjacketed civic projects. Priest ends with a call for a
wireless festival in London that would celebrate the city's current
unwired state, while marketing and educating further to increase
density of deployment. [link via James Enck, Daiwa Securities SMBC
Europe Ltd]...
FireFly 4800 RAID tower: up to 1TB in 9-inch footprint
FireFly 4800 RAID tower: up to 1TB in 9-inch footprint05/06/2004 02:45 PM Dynamic Network Factory has released the FireFly 4800 RAID tower.
Sporting a 9-inch footprint, the FireFly 4800 features USB 2.0 and
FireWire 400/800 connectivity. It stripes data across four IDE drives
simultaneously, and it supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 and 5+hot spare.
It's compatible with Mac OS 9.x or OS X v.10.x or higher and comes in
320GB, 480GB, 640GB, 800GB and 1TB capacities for US$1,794, $1,957,
$2,046, $2,290 and $1,995, respectively.
MWH Soft Releases InfoSWMM for ArcGIS, Delivering Unprecedented Power and Reliability for Improving the Ecological Health of the World's Waterways
Global Footprint Stress
Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow
1-3), Low (white <1)
Last month I wrote an article
suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence,
i.e.
the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned
and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what
Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven
aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their
population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall
explains
that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population
of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the
ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when
opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated<
/a>
a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by
multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate,
and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another
blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country.
As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress
index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and
demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has
as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now
computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above,
which is computed as follows:
First, I calculated the Resource Use Index
by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in
hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country's
population), and dividing it by the number of habitable
hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser
of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford's 'arable land area'
data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each
country's citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources
available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An
index
of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability,
it
needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing
per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below
shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
Then I
multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated
annual growth rate of the country's aggregate Ecological Footprint.
For
this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the
EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at
roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth
rate numbers when I could find them online (China's EF is growing much
faster than its population, for example).
Resource Use Index: Sample
Countries
80 Japan
60 S.Korea
40 Israel, Palestine
35 Switzerland
25 Netherlands, Belgium, UK
16 Germany
13 Ireland, France, Italy, Venezuela
11 US, Columbia, Chile, Sweden
9 China, Philippines
8 Congo
6 World Overall
6 S.Africa, New Zealand
5 Brasil, Iran, Mexico
3 Canada, India, Iraq, Russia
2 Australia, Argentina
1 A few equatorial African nations
Footprint Stress Index: Sample
Countries
40+ Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait 30 China 18 Congo 12 Venezuela,
Columbia 10 US 8 Chile 6
India, Netherlands, Belgium, Iraq
4.5 World Overall
4.0 Mexico, Iran, UK
3.0 New Zealand, Sweden 2.0 Brasil, Argentina, Japan,
France
1.5 Canada, Australia 1.0 S.Korea, Switzerland 0.5 Germany,
Italy 0.0 S.Africa, Russia
The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern
nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries
embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China
where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that
are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming
vastly more resources than what they have available domestically,
their
populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning
they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed
the soaring need.
Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource
Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and
because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not
increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they
all
depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural
resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting
countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these
nations'
unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that
will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these
scarcities
become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that
point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress
Index.
What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies
are using resources at more than ten
times
the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find
the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are
not
available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of
the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of
this
article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for
increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right
side of that table then become invasion targets.
We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources
to
finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require
natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources,
that
pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies,
so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate
deficit
spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of
economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives
for having no children, or maybe one.
Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The
corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness
that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for
the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal
force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep
civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur
fast enough to stave off disaster.
Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into
collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from
the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If
the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine
three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth,
global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in
innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a
social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great
Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of
huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market'
isn't going to fix this mess.
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