Last Typewriter Factory in the World Shuts Its Doors

India-based company has just a few hundred machines left in stock

 

Standing the test of time: The keyboard might not have changed in 100 years, but the typewriter itself has been superseded by the computer

It's an invention that revolutionised the way we work, becoming an essential piece of office equipment for the best part of a century.

But after years of sterling service, that bane for secretaries has reached the end of the line.

Godrej and Boyce - the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters - has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.

Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India  - until recently.  Demand for the machines has sunk in the last ten years as consumers switch to computers.

The company's general manager, Milind Dukle, told India's Business Standard newspaper: 'We are not getting many orders now

 

The last in a long tradition: Godrej and Boyce's Prima typewriter is the last machine of its kind to be manufactured

The company is now down to its last  200 machines - the majority of which are Arabic language models.

The firm began production in the 1950s - when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru described the typewriter as a symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialisation. It was still selling 50,000 models annually in the early 1990s, but last year it sold less than 800 machines.

The first commercial typewriter was produced in the U.S. in 1867 and by the turn of the century had developed into the  standardised format - including a qwerty' keyboard - that we know today.

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SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes

 

Forty-two radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, Calif. point to the skies collecting scientific data in the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe on April 29, 2008. Each dish is about 20-feet in diameter. The dishes at right are pointed straight up. Scientists can control the direction of each individual dish

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. "... This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle.

"We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds," he added. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

The SETI Institute's mission is to explore the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. This is a profound search, it believes, because it explains our place among the stars.

The program, located on U.S. Forest Service land near Mount Lassen, uses telescopes to listen for anything out of the ordinary -- a numerical sequence of "beeps," say, or crackly dialogue from an alien version of a disembodied "Charlie" talking to his "Angels." The entire program was set up to prove what once seemed unthinkable: In the universe, we are not alone.

Lack of funding

But funding for SETI has long been a headache for E.T.-seekers. NASA bankrolled some early projects, but in 1994, Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada convinced Congress that it wasn't worth the cost, calling it the "Great Martian Chase" and complaining that not a single flying saucer had applied for FAA approval.

However, successful private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.

Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working

 in concert. But what's lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.

This is the responsibility of UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university's major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support. Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.

About $5 million is needed over the next two years, according to Tarter. She hopes the U.S. Air Force will help, because the array can be used to track satellite-threatening debris in space. But budgets are tight there as well.

View Allen Telescope Array in a larger map

Astronomers mourn

The Allen array is not the only radio telescope facility that can be used for SETI searches. But it is the best; elsewhere, scientists have to borrow time on other telescopes.

Meanwhile, other SETI projects will continue, such as the "setiQuest Explorer" (www.setiquest.org), an application that allows citizen scientist volunteers to look for patterns from existing data that might have been missed by existing algorithms. Through a new partnership with "Galaxy Zoo" (www.galaxyzoo.org), this project runs in real time, so discoveries can be followed up on immediately.

Bay Area astronomers mourned the hiatus of the SETI program and expressed concern about the future.

Rob Hawley of the Peninsula Astronomical Society called it "unfortunate. The Allen scope was a wonderful experiment. "... Hubble gets all the press, but there are lots of limitations."

Amateur astronomer Sarah Wiehe of Palo Alto said, "just knowing SETI is there was significant for us. This is a setback."

"If we miss a distant signal," she added, "it would be a terrible loss."

what it means

SETI's mission to explore the prevalence of life in the universe, including about 1,235 possible planets recently discovered, is compromised, according to scientists.

what's next

The program needs about $5 million over the next two years to support the telescope facility.

To learn more about SETI and its programs, go to www.seti.org.

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iPhone Off? You're Still Being Tracked

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Microsoft also collects locations of Windows phone users

Like Apple and Google, Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile operating system.

Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude.

Microsoft does say, however, that location histories are not saved directly on the device. That's different from Apple's practice of recording the locations of visible cell towers on iPhone and iPad devices, which can result in more than a year's worth of data being quietly logged. Google's approach, by contrast, records only the last few dozen locations on Android phones.

The privacy practices of mobile software companies have come under extensive scrutiny after a researcher at a conference last week in Santa Clara, Calif., described in detail how the iPhone's location logging works. however, law enforcement and forensics analysts had been aware of and relied on the undocumented feature since at least last year.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) today asked Google and Apple to appear at a Senate hearing scheduled for May 10, and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has asked for a meeting. A lawsuit seeking class action status was filed today in Tampa, Fla.

According to a Web page in the "Help and How-To" section of the Windows Phone site, Microsoft has assembled a database with the "location of certain mobile cell towers and Wi-Fi access points" so a mobile device can determine its location more quickly, and with less battery drain, than if only GPS was used. Relying exclusively on GPS would have a negative "impact on mobile phone users by increasing data charges and draining the battery," the company says.

To make applications like maps work, of course, it's necessary for a smartphone or tablet to transmit its GPS coordinates to a remote server--and, in exchange, receive nearby restaurant reviews, or driving directions, and so on.

Privacy concerns begin to arise when a unique device ID is transmitted, which allows a company to track a customer's whereabouts over an extended period of time. Randomizing the device ID frequently would alleviate some concerns. (Microsoft says that in the case of Windows Phone 7, location information is transmitted to its servers only if Wi-Fi and location services are turned on. It also points out it offers a global switch to turn off all location-based services.)

"The user is identifiable if you have a series of events" that can be linked together, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Microsoft says its operating system transmits the MAC address of the Wi-Fi access point (but not the name), signal strength, a randomly generated unique device ID retained for an unspecified limited period of time, and, if GPS is turned on, the precise location and direction and speed of travel. That happens when the "application or user makes a request for location information," the company says.

One privacy concern is that location databases can be a gold mine for police or civil litigants: requesting cell phone location information from wireless carriers has become a staple of criminal investigations, often without search warrants being sought. It's not clear how often legal requests for these records have been sent to Microsoft, which said it could not immediately answer that question, or whether its lawyers require a search warrant signed by a judge.

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year by contacting AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and other mobile carriers, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. The Obama Justice Department has claimed that no warrant is required for historical location information, a claim opposed by a coalition of companies including Google and Microsoft but not Apple.

Apple acknowledged (PDF) to Congress last year that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours, but has declined to elaborate. Google has confirmed that it collects location information from Android devices, but downplayed concerns about privacy by saying the information is not "traceable to a specific user."

 

 

 

 

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Facebook Deals Launching Tonight In United States

A leaked embargo notice posted by the New York Times is claiming that Facebook Deals is in the process of launching in the United States, a move that could be realized in all initial launch locations by Monday night.

The program which launched 3 months ago in Europe is seen as a direct competitor to Groupon, Living Social and Google Offers among other social buying platforms.

According to the report the program is first launching in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco with other cities to follow in the near future.

Much like their competitors, Facebook will offer deep discounts to customers of their service, discounts provided by company’s around the country who want to sell their products quickly and introduce new users to their offerings.

While there is no certain future for Facebook Deals, the company does have some huge advantages against their competitors which in turn could signal major trouble for Groupon. For example, rumors are circulating that retailers may not have to pay for the service. Under current business models businesses must pay social buying sites a percentage of their sales in order to secure their services, however Facebook may decide to profit only when Facebook Credits are used to buy products, allowing retailers to keep more of their upfront profits when users pay with credit cards and other payment services outside of Facebook’s virtual currency.

According to the report, Facebook Credits will be allowed to be used as payment and let’s be honest for a moment, how many users who meant to buy “in-app” products are going to unload their virtual real world cash on a really cool deal they see on Facebook Deals before they buy that next Farmville add-on they were planning to grab. Impulse spending is the name of the game and with their Facebook Credits making a huge splash for the company Facebook can already tap into users who with a few simple clicks may be willing to buy products from their deals platform.

The Facebook Credit platform may also provide an added benefit. For example, a company may be willing to offer 45% off a product, however Facebook could offer to take a smaller percentage of their Facebook Credits cut on that offer, allowing for a 50% or higher cut in pricing. This type of Facebook control could lead to deals that even Groupon and LivingSocial can’t compete with.

The big advantage however is obvious, with over 600 million users Facebook can quickly provide their new products to users around the country while attaching their own name recognition to the product, while their own ad platform (the largest in the world) could help them promote deals to gain a wider audience very quickly.

Groupon, LivingSocial and various other social buying programs rely on word-of-mouth and social sharing to spread the word about their products and no one does social media better than Facebook.

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Giant Penis Graffiti Wins Prestigious Russian Art Prize.

Remember the Russian art terrorists painting this on the drawbridge in St petersburg ,this has now won a prize only in Russia.

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Every fifth German has a drinking problem

 

 

One in five Germans has an alcohol problem, a leading health expert has estimated at the launch of a “dramatic” new report into addiction on Tuesday.

Germans are smoking less but still drinking too much, according to the German Center for Addiction Issues. Launching the center's Annual Addiction Report 2011 in Berlin on Tuesday, director Raphael Gaßmann, estimated one in five people aged 18 to 64 had a drinking problem.

“Alcohol consumption remains conspicuously too high, too risky, with too many consequences,” he said.

The report, a compilation of figures from 2009, showed that although the average amount of booze consumed, measured in pure alcohol, did fall slightly compared with 2008, it was too negligible to have any health benefit, Gaßmann said.

Moreover, the effects of binge drinking have become noticeably worse in recent years. The number of alcohol poisoning incidents climbed by nearly 112 percent between 2000 and 2009. Most disturbingly, such incidents rose 194 percent among people aged 20 to 25.

The results on binge drinking were “dramatic,” Gaßmann said.

The deaths of 73,000 people aged 35 to 65 could be traced back to “alcohol-related health problems” each year, which is about one fifth of all deaths, Gaßmann said. For men, the figure was roughly one in four.

On a brighter note, tobacco consumption has been dropping. It fell by 1.6 percent in 2009 and 3.8 percent in 2008. About 29 percent of Germans aged 18 to 64 smoke.

Among men, the figure is 32.8 percent and among women it is 25.5 percent. Between 110,000 and 140,000 people die each year from tobacco-related causes, the center said.

 

The Local/djw

 

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