Intrinsitivity

Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books – New York Times

Two new offerings this fall are set to test whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book.

What bothers me most about the iPhone is that, as far as I know, it does not come with its own document reader. Why Apple does not see this as a staple application, I cannot imagine.

That is, unless of course Apple and, say, Sony are jointly plotting to take over the digital entertainment market. The same day that I noticed Sony Reader posters plastered along BART walls I also discovered that Banana Republic was giving out coupons for their store, GAP, and Old Navy. I knew that Gap, Inc. owns Old Navy, but I had no idea that they own Banana Republic, too. It struck me that, even though this situation is clearly the promotional effort of one gigantic company with three apparently dissimilar stores, it is not beyond reason to suggest that two different companies, in similar markets, partner with one another to tackle different niches of a single common market.

But this is just idle speculation. I love the fact that I will no longer have to lug around heavy books everywhere in the future (or now, if I wanted to pay for Sony Reader).

Physicists establish ‘spooky’ quantum communication

"This linkage between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Professor Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator who did this research while at U-M, but is now at the University of Maryland. "Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing."