emploi-erp.net

But even this bad news might bring with it some good. The technique in the thinking-cap experiments, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, also seems to be helpful in treating depression.

Mirroring the way savants are both brilliant and mentally not quite there (remind you of any techies you know?), the thinking cap’s scientific milliners use tiny magnetic pulses to either deaden a part of your brain or excite it beyond its normal level of stimulus, thereby allowing the excited part to reveal the full glory of its capabilities.

There is, however, a little bad news. The effects of the thinking-cap zap wear off after an hour. This might lead to some very unfortunate occurrences.

Scientists from the University of Sydney have studied brilliant people like Dustin Hoffman. Or, rather, brilliant people like the Qantas Airways-knowledgeable savant Dustin Hoffman plays in Rain Man.

Once the thinking cap buzzes experimentees up for 10 or 15 minutes, some are able to draw in a far more lifelike manner. Others, and this will please many at this site greatly, become far better editors, able to spot mistakes in a text that they could not see before the “OUT OF ORDER” sign has been hung on certain areas of their brains.

At last, some of the world’s finest brains have gotten together to release the finest parts of everyone’s brain.

If you’ve always thought you were a wonderful singer, but somehow failed to produce your best in karaoke bars, scientists may have found a solution.

Professor Allan Snyder’s optimism for your ability to, say, rumba like a Cuban while being an analyst for Mark Cuban, is boundless: “I believe that each of us has within us nonconscious machinery which can do extraordinary art, extraordinary memory, and extraordinary mathematical calculations.”

This is not a thinking cap. But wouldn't it be great if it came in pink?

Yes, soon you may be able to buy your own thinking cap, put it on, and be the person you always thought you could be.

(Credit: CC Breibeest)

You’ve impressed someone over dinner with your ability to simultaneously sing hits from the ’70s and balance a spoon on your nose. You go back to your place. The clock strikes midnight, the spoon falls off and, in the middle of some particularly apposite Barry Manilow rendition, you hit more bum notes than Britney Spears hits live.

The cap looks a little like a hairnet, but please don’t let that put you off. The theory behind the incredible thinking cap is that it will be able to switch different parts of your brain on and off, thereby allowing specific parts of your gray matter to blossom to their full potential.

“All GM brands are candidates to receive this technology,” said Cole.

(Credit:
GM)

Click on the image to see photos of what is said to be the production version of the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt.

General Motors at its centennial celebration in Detroit on Tuesday is expected to showcase the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid electric
car that carries the heavy expectations of reversing GM’s slide and slashing consumers’ fuel use.

In all-electric mode, drivers can expect the equivalent of about 100 miles per gallon, said David Goldstein, the president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Washington D.C.

The Volt will be able to run 40 miles on lithium-ion batteries and get a range of 400 miles from an internal combustion engine that charges the battery. The four-door sedan with a hatchback is set for release at the end of 2010.

That’s because electric motors are more efficient than gasoline engines, said Goldstein. Also, electricity generation is several times more efficient than the energy conversion that happens in a car, said Cole.

“The Volt story has gotten much more interest than other (GM) product introductions because it represents such a dramatic departure. Historically, things were more incremental,” said David Cole, the chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

One business model that automakers are looking at is a leasing option, where consumers would lease a plug-in hybrid electric car’s batteries for 10 years, said Cole. After that, the battery would be replaced and potentially used in less-demanding applications such as power grid storage.

But mileage will improve substantially if a person stays within the batteries’ 40-mile range. GM designers targeted a 40-mile battery range because most people drive less than that in a day.

Cole said that the biggest environmental pay-off from this design will come once ethanol from nonfood sources, called cellulosic ethanol, becomes commercially viable.

From an environmental perspective, plug-in hybrids have the lowest greenhouse gas emissions over their product lifecycle compared with other transportation technologies except all-electric vehicles, according to a recent analysis done on the future of transportation published in August by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Comparing the cost per mile of a gasoline car with a battery-powered vehicle is complicated by the fact that many regions in the U.S. have different electricity tariffs that depend on usage and time of day.

A detail on the Volt's styling.

“Anyway you look at it, out of the box, this is going to be expensive. These are going to be expensive batteries,” Cole said.

Buzz around the Volt picked up last week when photos of the production car were captured, showing a less sporty look than the original concept car. But what are the environmental and cost benefits of the Volt?

GM says the Volt will get the equivalent of 50 miles per gallon on longer trips where an expected four-cylinder engine will be engaged.

Martin Eberhard, the founder and former CEO of Tesla Motors, is one of the first customers of the all-electric Tesla Roadster. After a few months of driving, he reported in his blog that the cost per mile of the Roadster is between 2 and 6 cents per mile.

A drop in the price of petroleum, which has fallen dramatically since earlier this year, could also put the brakes on the investment in engineering to make plug-in hybrid vehicles less expensive.

Plug-in electric cars also stand to reduce, although not eliminate, air pollution.

Recent reports said that GM is planning to charge about $40,000 for the Volt, more than what was originally anticipated. For the price to go down, there needs to be a multi-year ramp-up in battery production.

The biggest technical issue is the reliability of lithium-ion batteries, in which nearly all auto makers are investing.

Compared with a gasoline car, plug-in hybrids like the Volt stand to be cheaper to operate. Goldstein estimates that people will pay between 2 and 6 cents per mile with the Volt, depending on electricity rates.

Road blocks?

But for all the promise of the Volt, there are some real engineering and business challenges.

In a mixed mode, where the gasoline engine kicks in, Golstein thinks that overall mileage for a 100-mile trip would be about 50 miles per gallon, but would go down to 35 miles per gallon for a 200-mile trip because the gasoline motor is working more.

The useful life of these batteries is still not totally clear, as they haven’t already been tested in vehicles for decades.

GM has not offered many details on the Volt’s fuel economy and didn’t respond on Monday to a request for more specifics. But early estimates indicate that the Volt will deliver a significant boost in mileage and be cheaper to operate than a gasoline car.

For GM, the Volt is meant to help change its image as a vendor or SUVs and other trucks, while giving it important technical know-how in fuel-efficient cars.

(Credit:
General Motors via TheCarConnection.)

Similarly, the the Electric Power Research Institute and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) last year concluded that adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles would lower global warming emissions, improve air quality, and reduce petroleum consumption by 3 million to 4 million barrels per day in 2050.

The Volt is a series hybrid, which means that the car’s internal combustion engine only charges the battery, rather than drives the car directly. That means an automaker can design engines that run on different fuels.

That price per mile estimate for the Volt is less than the 15 cents per mile that a typical gasoline car costs, calculated Scott Sklar, an alternative energy consultant at the Stella Group.

A car that uses E85 fuel, a mix of ethanol and gas, could get 400 miles per gallon of gasoline, he said. There are a handful of pilot cellulosic ethanol plants in the U.S., but none are producing at large scale.

In its report, MIT estimated that plug-in hybrids will be commercially competitive with gasoline cars in eight to ten years.

The battery will weigh 400 pounds, be 5 feet long, and be placed under the car, Bob Boniface, GM’s Chevy Volt design director said in an interview. Boniface said GM had to make a break from the initial concept car design to improve the aerodynamics and fuel efficiency.

And that leaves the last device I used: an
Apple iPhone.

After driving through nine Southern states and crossing innumerable borders, Road Trip 2008 has come to an end.

At one point while I was on the base, my host and I were driving around trying to find something, both of us clutching our iPhones. I looked down and noticed that my phone had switched to central time, while his hadn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around. But the point is that both phones were on the same network, and yet were registering different times. I found that very interesting, and neither of us could figure out why.

Luckily, the camera itself still worked fine, and I was able to take at least a thousand or so pictures after this.

I have to say: it was great. It was simple to use, it was fairly light, its batteries lasted forever and, I think, it took great pictures.

As I mentioned, the camera was with me pretty much at all times. It had to be in order to shoot as many pictures as I did.

For my Road Trip 2008 computer needs, I used a MacBook Air, from Apple. At one point, Apple sent me a second machine, so I had two.

I was in Pensacola, Fla., standing on the tarmac at the Naval Air Station there where the Blue Angels make their home, and suddenly, without warning, the camera’s LCD cracked. Not the glass, mind you, but the LCD under it. This made it impossible to see the pictures once I’d shot them or to make any kind of menu changes.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Of course, visuals being as important as they are, a huge piece of this whole project was the thousands of photographs I took. I ran 27 different photo galleries during the trip, and with a couple of exceptions, I shot every single photo with a Nikon D60.

Already, I’ve talked about how I used two different devices for shooting low-fi video. The first was a service called Qik, which runs on a number of smart phones, such as the Nokia N95 I had with me. The second was a Flip Mino, a dedicated video camera that allows for easy shooting and simple–though sometimes slow–uploading to YouTube and other video-sharing services.

What began in Orlando, Fla., ended 4,593 miles later here in Tampa. Along the way, the trip has taken me to a Space Shuttle landing, to the Corvette factory, to watch the Blue Angels practice at their home base, to being banned from Graceland, and much, much more.

The telephoto lens was great. As I wrote early in the trip, I showed up for the Space Shuttle landing, telephoto lens in hand, only to find that some of the pros there were sporting huge lenses. I thought I was screwed. Yet, the lens did just fine, shooting a series of very serviceable shots, maybe nothing that would work in a magazine, but just fine for online.

To be sure, the device–at least the original version–has problems. The AT&T Edge network is painfully slow, as everyone knows.

And, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try them all out. The vagaries of driving hundreds of miles a day on top of reporting stories and writing them left me with little time to test the gear I’d brought, something I knew intellectually after last year’s journey of 4,891 miles through the Southwest on Road Trip 2007.

Yet, the ability to get what amounts to a rich Web experience on the go, as well as to use the mapping tools and the extremely well-thought out iPhone interface won me over.

Sprint’s Compass 597, one of the two EVDO modem that I used on Road Trip 2008.

The Subaru Outback 2.5 XT that I drove around the South on Road Trip 2008. All told, I drove 4,593 miles across eight states.

The Verizon USB727, the other EVDO modem I used on Road Trip 2008.

The D60 has a very satisfying shutter action, an intuitive menu structure, and a satisfying feel in my hand. It is easy to swap lenses on and off, and I did so fairly regularly.

Still, I did manage to use almost every pieces of gear I brought with me, and if you’ve been following the trip, then you’ve seen some of my stories about them.

It is worth noting, however, that one very odd thing happened with the camera.

And I think she’s going to win the bet, especially now that the iPhone 3G is out.

On Road Trip 2007, I had one from Verizon, and I loved it. I would say the same this time around about both the Sprint modem and the new one I had from Verizon.

TAMPA, Fla.–And so it ends.

Nikon lent me the camera, as well as two lenses, a 70-200mm telephoto and a 16-85mm.

Through it all I carried with me thousands of dollars worth of tech gear, aiming to road test it all. The list of gadgets included some of the coolest new toys around, as well as some that have been on the market for many months.

Did I think I’d get hooked? No. But one of my colleagues bet me $5 that I’d return from Road Trip ready to buy my own.

I had been holding out on buying one, but I definitely was interested in trying out the famous smart phone.

Thanks for following along with me. I really appreciate it. And stay tuned for Road Trip 2009. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Geek Gestalt.

And indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

There’s no question that the most important piece of technology I had with me was the MacBook Air I had with me. But rather than go into my experiences with it here, I’ll just mention that I’ve already written a story about that.

To be sure, if I knew a little bit more about how to use it, it would have taken even better pictures, but it did just great thanks.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

One odd iPhone experience I had was at Fort Benning, the Army base in Columbus, Ga. In truth, the base straddles the border between Georgia and Alabama, and thus the dividing line between the central and eastern time zones.

Suffice it to say that overall, I would say that they performed equally well: In most places, they both worked great, while in some one would work well, while the other wouldn’t. Over the course of the 4,583 miles, I’d say it was probably a wash as to which one worked better at any given time.

Ultimately, I used the iPhone constantly, to check e-mail, to figure out where I was, to make phone calls, as my morning alarm clock and more. And yes, I suspect I will be paying off my colleague within a matter of days.

Beyond the computer, though, there’s little doubt that the next most important set of tech I had with me were the two EVDO modems I was carrying, one each from Sprint and Verizon.

But no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of the LCD cracking on a digital SLR, and even now, I really have no idea what happened. My contact at Nikon is looking into it, I believe.

It’s really hard to differentiate between the two of them, though there were clearly places where one worked better than the other. I had all the best intentions of keeping track of where each one worked better, but that was one of the logistical things that fell by the wayside as the realities of the intensity of my daily routine on the trip set in.

And without many of the gadgets I was ferrying around with me, I wouldn’t have been able to share it with you, and that would have been a shame.

And I’m a Canon guy. My own personal camera is a Canon Rebel XT, but this year, I thought I’d try Nikon’s new D60, just to see what it was like.

To be sure, there were places where neither one worked all that well, and when that coincided with poor Wi-Fi reception, that made for some difficult situations, as broadband connectivity is a crucial component of a project that involves sending more than a dozen photos over the Internet every day, as well as tons of Web-based research.

The Nikon D60 and 16-85mm and 70-300mm lenses I used on Road Trip 2008.

It doesn’t really matter, of course, but it is worth mentioning.

In the end, Road Trip 2008 was a success. I visited some of the most interesting places I’ve ever been to, and saw very large parts of a region of the country I’d never been to before.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Of course, none of the trip would have been possible without a good
car, and so the Subaru Outback 2.5 XT I had for every mile of the journey–except for an overnight round-trip flight from Nashville to Houston and back–was a great solution. But you can read my story about that.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Each has a simple software interface. In ideal circumstances, it takes no more than a few seconds to get online and get working.

The last device I had with me was a Dash Express car navigator. Unfortunately, I was never able to find the time to get it set up, and so I wasn’t able to evaluate it. I hope Dash will be willing to let me hold on to it for a little while longer to try it out in my regular life. But I do apologize for not getting around to using it. I truly was looking forward to doing so.

I’ll be happy to return to my Rebel XT, but I wonder if I’m going to enjoy it as much as the D60.

Despite it having a form factor that I think is a little too big to be comfortable–for me, at least–I’m prepared to fork over the $199 for an iPhone 3G, if only because I know that it has become essential in my life to have Internet as often as possible. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but it is what it is.

In addition, because Nikon wasn’t able to provide me with an ultra-wide angle lens, I rented one from RentGlass.com, as I knew that that would be the lens that I’d use more than any of the others.

GoDaddy, the world’s leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners’ names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.

The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China’s sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country’s Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China’s Olympic team prior to the Games’ opening on August 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names anymore; they were forced to give it to the medalist “as a gift”.

If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.

Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:

Who’s next?

In April, Motorola posted a quarterly loss of $194 million. Weeks earlier, under pressure from investors such as Icahn, the struggling company announced that it would split into two publicly traded companies, one handling handsets and accessories, and the other taking on wireless broadband networks and enterprise-level communications services.

The doors of the cell phone maker’s executive offices seem to have been revolving nonstop since activist investor Carl Icahn, who took a leading role in the Microsoft-Yahoo merger fracas late this week, began his successful pursuit of Motorola board seats.

In the wake of Nottenburg’s resignation, according to The Wall Street Journal, Motorola Labs will be directed by Dan Moloney, who leads the company’s home and networks mobility business.

The latest executive to leave Motorola: Rich Nottenburg, chief strategy and technology officer.

“(Nottenburg) left to return to the New York area to be with his family and pursue other opportunities,” Erickson told Reuters.

Nottenburg’s departure, announced on Thursday to employees in an internal memo, according to Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson, follows the replacements of CEO Ed Zander in January, acting CFO Tom Meredith in February, and mobile-devices head Stu Reed and marketing head Casey Keller in March, along with treasurer Steve Strobel and EMEA mobile-devices head Mike Fenger.

Meanwhile, at Time Warner Cable, which Time Warner spun off in May, revenues are up 7 percent, seeing a decline only in television pay-per-view revenue. An additional 214,000 people have subscribed to its “triple play” offering of cable TV, broadband Internet, and telephone service, CEO Glenn Britt said in a release.

This post was last updated at 11:36 a.m. PT.

Once a national mainstay, the provider lost 604,000 subscribers in the second quarter alone and is down 2.8 million from the previous year, leaving it at 8.1 million subscribers. That’s a $200 million loss (29 percent drop) for the company, which had raised fees on the dial-up service in late June.

Time Warner will indeed split its AOL access and media units starting next year, CEO Jeff Bewkes confirmed in a release announcing the company’s second-quarter earnings.

Operating income at AOL dropped 36 percent, to $230 million.

It’s the first time the executive has confirmed that the split will take place soon, though it’s been widely talked about for months since the chief mentioned it speculatively earlier this year. What he hasn’t said yet–and what some are expecting may come soon–is that Time Warner will get rid of AOL altogether, perhaps selling it to a bigger player in the online-advertising market.

It was another tepid quarter for the online-service-turned-media-company, which saw revenues drop 16 percent, to $1.1 billion. Its ad revenues are up 2 percent ($8 million)–though display ad revenues on AOL-owned sites are down–but that business still isn’t big enough to offset the losses from AOL’s sputtering Internet access service.

Reports have suggested that Internet provider EarthLink may be interested in acquiring the access business from AOL.

We’ve clearly heard a very resounding theme: GPL is not the right license from a community perspective because of the implications that it brings to redistribution, especially as it relates to building Web applications and how they are incorporated and downloaded by a Web server…This was a clear indication that our license didn’t match our business and technical goals.

Where Apache is weak, however, is in facilitating direct monetization of software, an issue that Haynie highlights in his blog.

We’ve seen a groundswell of support for the GNU General Public License (GPL) and its variants among commercial open-source companies, including MySQL, Funambol, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and others. But Appcelerator is bucking the trend and changing from the GPL to the Apache Public License for its Rich Internet Application developer tools.

Why the switch? According to a blog posting from Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, it’s all about adoption and matching one’s code (and its license) with one’s community:

I’m a big fan of the GPL, but I completely agree that it’s not always the right tool for every job. Adoption is the first order of business for any company, and Apache-licensed code is going to be more broadly adopted than GPL-licensed code in many instances.

commentary

I would assume that this will therefore lead Appcelerator to turn to commercial extensions for its Rich Internet Application solutions, similar to how IBM marries Apache-licensed projects with proprietary complements. Given the increased flexibility of Appcelerator’s licensing at the core of its product, this may well be a trade-off worth making to ensure that Appcelerator is able to feed its community…and itself.

Vivek Kundra took a leave of absence from his position as federal CIO last week after an FBI raid of the District of Columbia’s office of the chief technology officer. The FBI raid coincided with the arrest of two individuals charged with conspiracy to commit bribery, including one man who worked in the government office while Kundra served as D.C. chief technology officer.

President Obama appointed Kundra as federal CIO earlier this month. In his role as D.C. chief technology officer and also as the federal CIO, Kundra has emphasized the need for transparency in government information technology procurements.

The White House confirmed to CNET News on Tuesday that Kundra has returned to his position as CIO, following various news reports.

The recently appointed federal chief information officer returned to work Tuesday, after temporarily stepping down in response to the arrest of one of his former employees on bribery charges.

The defendant Yusuf Acar allegedly attempted to exploit his responsibility for government contracts in the CTO office to defraud the city government. Kundra is not a target of the ongoing investigation.

“Mr. Kundra has been informed that he is neither a subject nor a target of the investigation and has been reinstated,” said White House Spokesman Nick Shapiro.

The extra release candidate addresses some lingering issues on the
Mac OS X operating system. The changes are internal.

Mozilla on Wednesday released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3. Windows and Linux users won’t likely feel a thing; the new browser is considered stable on those platforms.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT on Wednesday with links to the newly debuted release candidate.

The previous test version, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2, can also be downloaded for Windows, Portable, Mac, and Linux systems.

If you were planning to host a
Firefox 3 launch party this week, keep that bubbly on ice a bit longer.

•  Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand rightly pointed out to The New York Times that while the number of people using search book services is relatively small, it’s an influential lot with researchers and librarians and other earlier adopters. Don’t underestimate the prestige factor.

Reading through Nadella’s blog post, this much is clear: Microsoft wants to put its search marbles into programs like Cashback (the new Microsoft service that rebates people to buy products online) where there’s better potential for a material payback. But the search competition with Google is also partly a popularity test. Consider the following:

Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft’s Search, Portal and Advertising Platform Group wrote in a blog post that “given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.”

I tried getting through to Nadella on Tuesday for a better explanation, but Microsoft pulled up the drawbridge. Left on my own to speculate, it appears that Microsoft was being penny-wise but pound foolish. (After all, the company was ready to buy nearly $45 billion worth of trouble integrating Yahoo.) Memo to Nadella: When you get sick of hunkering in the bunker, let’s talk.

Now Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive is left scratching his head how to replace Microsoft’s financial support for the consortium. A decade removed from its antitrust battle with the government, Microsoft’s not as uniformly dreaded as it once was. Maybe Microsoft believes it’s in a position where it doesn’t need to buy goodwill any more. Still, you can never have enough friends.

• Participation in the project allowed Microsoft to promote itself as being one of the good guys. The Open Content Alliance says it won’t scan books without first receiving permission of copyright owners. Google was sued by authors and publishers over its decision to scan copyrighted snippets without permission. Google argued that the works fell under the category of fair use. Rightly or not, however, Google was pilloried as a bad actor in this novella.

Sullivan sums it up nicely when he writes that “Microsoft got mileage out of the idea it was working with the Open Content Alliance as the “good” book search partner not encumbered by controversy that the Google Book Search service has encountered.

In the middle of a gritty search war, did Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer just commit the mother of all mistakes?

I’ve been wondering about that ever since Microsoft said it would close its Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, thus ceding the field of book digitization to Google. (While both Live Search Books and Live Search Academic are going dark, both Google’s Book Search and Google Scholar continue to operate.)