Links for Sunday, October 21, 2007

• David McInnis: Building Noah’s Ark – “I believe that fractional manufacturing could be one of the most significant advancements in manufacturing for the last 20 years or so“
• Mike Whitney: California Falls Into the Sea – “*Decreasing demand and mushrooming inventory are only part of a much larger problem; the financing mechanism has completely changed. The banks don’t want to lend money. And, when banks don’t lend money—bad things happen. *“
• Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Document Scanner – “In one step, the ScanSnap S510 scanner digitizes both sides of a document in a single pass, in color, and at an amazing speed of up to 18 pages per minute.“
• LanguageLab.com – “Learning takes place in immersive, realistic and relevant virtual locations. With full voice and visual interactions, students and teachers from all over the world converse, socialise and learn.“
• Design News: Second Life: A Virtual Universe for Real Engineering – “Broviak manages the Second Life Public Works Resource Center, one of the first destinations in the metaverse focused on applying SL to real-world engineering. The Center serves as a clearing house for information related to engineering and public works in SL. It also functions as a meeting area for users affiliated with in-world engineering organizations and it hosts a museum where engineering information is exhibited for visitors. Broviak built the Center in her spare time using the suite of SL building tools.“
• Infected Project: Set-up a Ubuntu Webcam Security System – “Have you ever wanted to spy see on what is going on in your home while you are away? Motion is a piece of open source software that acts as a motion detector. It enables you to set-up a webcam server that you can have all your cameras connected too, so you can view them remotely and also upload them to a remote server.“
• David Petar Novakovic: The Sorry State of Technology Education – “The thing with a startup is, no matter how much business prowess you may have, you will need some form of technical element created for your business. This is particularly true in web startups, where without the website, you have no business. If you don’t have working capital to pay programmers, you are stuffed and without a product demo you are stuffed too.“
• Office Nomads: Individuality Without Isolation – “Smaller companies were more nimble, and able to capitalize on new markets and utilize the newest technologies. Success came quickly, and with success came growth. Established companies with hundreds or thousands of employees clung to the idea of the startup, but the original soul was lost. Again, individuals broke away to go it alone, and live in the age of the contractor.“