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2008-03-12

Physicists Successfully Store and Retrieve Nothing

"... begin with a normal light wave. Classically, this is a smooth wave of electromagnetic fields with equally spaced peaks and dips. But throw in quantum mechanics and things get more complicated. The precise height of the wave becomes uncertain, so the wave gets fuzzy (see figure). Physicists have learned how to manipulate that inevitable uncertainty--for example, making it smaller at the peaks and larger in between. That makes "phase-squeezed light." Now imagine turning down the intensity of the phase-squeezed light to zero. The wave itself goes away, but the waxing and waning uncertainty remains, creating a squeezed vacuum."

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/229/1

Spitfire heroine's joy over medal

"A woman who was among the pilots who flew replacement fighters to RAF bases during World War II has spoken of her joy at the recognition for her work."

"The parson's daughter from Bwlchllan, near Lampeter, Ceredigion, flew spitfires, hurricanes and mustangs."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7261667.stm

Amanda: Open Source Backup

"Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more than half a million of servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide."

http://amanda.zmanda.com/

Life after Windows, Day 1

"Last year I moved my family computer environment to be completely Apple Macintosh based. There are no copies of Windows on any of the machines that we own, but I do have a machine dedicated to Ubuntu Linux. Thus the work laptop was the sole remaining Windows installation. I’ve wanted off of that for some time for various reasons, some “political” but most of them technological. I love my Mac but I don’t have a Mac for work when I’m on the road. If I was going to get off Windows on the laptop, it meant I was going to get on Linux."

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=2105

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.

"One year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html?em&ex=1205294400&en=16c93380cf8296d8&ei=5087%0A

Clarify and Emphasise data in an Excel chart

"You can choose different options in an Excel chart to emphasize your data in different ways. For example, when you're measuring sales revenue along with number of units sold, you can add a second axis to measure a portion of values differently from another portion. Here are some examples of the different ways you can measure and display data in Excel charts."

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010346081033.aspx

Web Developer

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60