Finding Mu

Just read a story about U.S. goverment warnings to look out for Canadian nanotech spy coins used to track visiting American contractors.

My favourite quote: "'I thought the whole thing was preposterous, to think you could tag an individual with a coin and think they wouldn't give it away or spend it', said H. Keith Melton, a leading intelligence historian."

The Globe and Mail has a great video of the incredible spy coins.

What the story didn't mention was the raid of a London, ON, Tim Horton's, where Canadian intelligence had lost track of one of the coins planted on a target American contractor. Said one officer, "This is nuts, the guy traded our high-tech nanotech spy coin for a small coffee- that thing is worth 20000 large double-doubles and 5 million timbits. Unbelievable!"

Posted by at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday was an announcement that Dell would be making Ubuntu Linux available pre-installed on some of its machines. Technically, this is easy for Dell to do (any Dell PC can already run Ubuntu), but it could have huge implications in the OS world. Businesses in the U.S. buy huge amounts of equipment from Dell for several reasons, but the major one is price. Simply, you can often get an equivalently spec'ed machine from Dell for less.

Now, imagine you can shave off another $X from the elimination of pre-installed Microsoft Windows. A man from Sheffield, UK did just that, and got back £55.23 (over U.S. $100) from Dell based on the fact that he did not plan to use the pre-installed copy of Windows.

You can imagine, at a large scale, the huge gain for business if $100 can be saved on each desktop or notebook purchased. It's this lower price, ultimately, that will drive demand for Dell PCs with Linux pre-installed, and which makes this such a great move for Dell. In the end, businesses using Linux PCs will all benefit from that extra $100 they can put towards R&D, compensation, or a "yay, we're saving lots of money by using Linux" party.

Here's a YouTube clip of Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talking about Ubuntu and Dell:

Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)