有熊式: technology-computing

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We love Apple. Apple knows more about "clean" design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned? A cutting edge company shouldn't be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That's why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple.

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[03/May/2007]

A Greener Apple:
Steve Jobs updates the state of Apple’s environmental record.

2006/11/03

Good rules for e-mailing

The inventor of World Wide Web - Tim Berners-Lee has mentioned some good rules for e-mailing on his World Wide Web Consortium page:

What not to email

Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus.

Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents.

If you are sending text, please send it as plain text or HTML. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on. .

If your email is sent from Microsoft Outlook, and contains an attachment, I will be more likely to discard it as I understand that a famous series of viruses in 2001 resulted from Outlook's tendency to execute scripts in email, and used up a huge amount of my and my colleague's time.

What you can email

These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML (sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files, PNG, GIF), SMIL, RDF/XML N3 and so on. All these can be sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses, unless there is a serious bug in the code I use to read them. If you don't need anything else, then use plain text.

These are good rules when emailing anyone.

Tim Berners-Lee's Blog
BBC: Web inventor fears for the future

2006/08/31

Guide to green electronics

{image} Your guide to green electronics @ Greenpeace

2006/08/22

Real-colour display technology

Arrays of thousands of tiny "super prisms" controlled by robotic muscles could bring real colour to TV screens for the first time, scientists say.

The devices, known as electrically tunable diffraction gratings, have been built by researchers in Switzerland.

They manipulate light to reproduce the full spectrum of colours on screen, impossible using existing technology.

The team say the devices could also be used to make computer displays with the same resolution as high-end LCDs.

"Today's displays can only reproduce a limited range of colours," said Manuel Aschwanden of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and one of the team behind the work.

"The main advantage of this technology is that it can display all colours."

Full article @ BBC: Artificial muscles light up TVs