Lots of interesting numbers from a recent ComputerWorld survey on IT-related jobs. One thing that sticks out:

The new report shows that currently employed IT professionals see application-development, support, security, and analysis as the important skills to acquire. According to the report, the top five skills that hiring managers are expected to seek are:

— App Development: 49% — Support/Help Desk: 37% — Security: 29% — Network Administration: 28% — Business Intel: 24%

NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.

Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:

11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours

Cool.

In this issue, Jim Dalrymple talks about his experience with the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s at Apple’s event; Jim also discusses the iTunes Festival being held in London, England this month; Christopher Russell looks at how iPads help in education; Matt Gemmell remembers retro gaming consoles; and Tom Ellis gives you some tips on what you need to make music on your Mac.

Learned a lot from this piece.

Capacitance readers are more complex, instead creating an image of your fingerprint by measuring the differences in capacitance between the ridges and valleys of your fingerprint. They leverage the electrical conductivity of your sub-dermal skin layer, and the electrical insulation of your dermal layer (the one where your fingerprint is). Your fingerprint is effectively a non-conductive layer between two conductive plates, which is the very definition of a capacitor. The fingerprint reader senses the electrical differences caused by the varied thickness of your dermis, and can reconstruct your fingerprint.

The Touch ID sensor in the iPhone 5s is a capacitive reader, embedded in the home button. That was a good choice on Apple’s part, since capacitive scanners are more accurate and less prone to smudgy fingers, and can’t be faked out with a photocopy of a fingerprint.

The question I have is, are capacitance readers susceptible to Play-doh copies of your fingerprints. This is a technique used to defeat some fingerprint technologies.

UPDATE: And the answer is, a resounding no. Need a live finger for capacitance to work.

Not quite a new Harry Potter story, but I’ll take it.

Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for seventeen years, ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.

I predict big box office here.

Here’s a quote from Samsung Mobile boss Shin Jong-kyun:

“Not in the shortest time. But yes, our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,” Shin said, adding he followed the media coverage of Apple’s new iPhone.

I’m sure, in context, this is a reasonable response to a reasonable question. But as soon as I read this quote, in my mind I heard the followup, “and fingerprint scanning, too, we’ll have that, too.”

Just me?

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, wants to bring you into space. Their first goal is to provide a supersonic suborbital spaceflight for space tourists. Ultimately, their goal is to offer orbital satellite launches and, following that, human orbital flights.

After a successful sound-barrier-smashing test flight, Virgin Galactic has released footage from a camera on its prize spaceship’s tail. The view, though not as extraordinary as the one that future ticketed passengers can expect to see as they float at the craft’s windows, is a white-knuckle-inducing one of a plume of fire and a distant desert below.

Here’s said footage. And sign me up, please.

I grew up in New Jersey and have been a fan of The Boss since I was a kid. Though his best stuff may be well behind him, Springsteen is a hero to many and carries a large legacy of good deeds and great music. Now that legacy has a permanent home. The Bruce Springsteen archive at Monmouth University is open to the general public.

Though there have been a number of devices that incorporate fingerprint scanning technology (most notably, niche laptop models), the iPhone 5S is the device that will bring this technology to the mainstream. And, in doing so, will inspire other device manufacturers to rush their version of this technology to market.

With its move, Apple could end up making the technology commonplace, as rivals might feel compelled to follow suit. It could be only a matter of time before passwords and passcodes are relegated to yesteryear.

Interesting.

In case you missed it.

The iPhone 5S is based on Apple’s own 64-bit ARM A7 System on a Chip (SoC). This is a major step up in raw processing power.

Biometric authentication requires a significant amount of CPU horsepower to pull off without being sluggish, as would strong end-to-end VPN encryption, both of which are likely necessary for the iPhone to continue to attract corporate attention.

The inclusion of so much horsepower is more than just a nice win for the iPhone line. It’s also a win for the next iPad, as well as a sign that iOS platforms are stepping up in class, rivaling desktop machines and game consoles. More fodder for the folks who champion the opinion that we’ll someday see a convergence of the iOS and Mac OS X platforms. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon. I love my MacBook Pro and can’t imagine using my iPad or iPhone in the same way. But I do see the possibility of that changing over time.

Terrific piece on Ben Sliney, the FAA National Operations Manager on September 11, 2001.

On September the 11th, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American commercial jets with the intention of crashing them into large, visible buildings in both Washington, D.C., and New York City. As we all know, the terrorists were successful in three of the four cases; the fourth plane’s assault on the United States Capitol — the presumed target — was thwarted by the heroic passengers on board. While we now believe that no other planes were targeted, at the time, each of the other 4,000-plus flights scheduled to be in American air space at the time were at risk. But Ben Sliney, the Federal Aviation Commission’s National Operations Manager on duty that morning, prevented future harm.

How? He made an unprecedented decision, making the call to ground every single commercial airplane in the country.

Read the piece to the end (it’s short). The last line is the payoff.

If you like your beverage to stay cold, this is a great solution. So clever.

Worthwhile read, especially if you have a daughter interested in technology.

Ever find yourself in a situation where a web site is loading on one device and not another? Or, perhaps, you just registered a new domain name and your browser is not finding it? One possibility is that your DNS cache needs to be flushed.

DNS is the phone book of the Internet, translating the human-friendly domain names (like loopinsight.com) into IP addresses, then back again. When domain names change, it takes some time for those changes to propagate through all the routers, devices, and browsers. Flushing your DNS cache gets rid of remembered DNS information and forces your device to retrieve new DNS.

The link above tells you how to flush the DNS on your computer. You’ll need to use Terminal, so ask a friend if you’ve not used it before. On your iOS device, turn on airplane mode, then turn it back off. That should do the trick.

Seagate’s Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the latest technology to squeeze every last bit of space out of your hard drive platter. SMR seems to be more of a clever trick than an actual increase in data density.

According to Seagate, its latest 1TB platter 3.5″ drives have shrunk read/write heads as small as they can physically go. Similarly, tracks on those platters are placed as close together as physically possible. Pushing areal density is important to increase overall capacities (no one wants to see more platters per drive), but if we’re at physical limits today then it’s time for some architectural changes to push capacities going forward.

Seagate’s solution is something it calls Shingled Magneting Recording (SMR). The process is pretty simple. Track size is traditionally defined by the size of the write heads, as they are larger than the read heads. The track width is larger than necessary from the perspective of reading data back in order to decrease the chances of reading data from adjacent tracks. Seagate’s SMR exploits this reality.

Interesting article.

Cal Worthington was one of the true icons of Los Angeles. He sold cars and there was just no avoiding his commercials and his ubiquitous catchphrase, “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal.” Every one of his commercials featured Cal and his dog Spot. Spot turned out to be one of an ever-changing menagerie of animals, sometimes an elephant, sometimes an alligator, sometimes a camel. It was all part of the show.

We’ll miss you, Cal.

Thanks to Global Delight, maker of Voila – A Powerful Screen Capture Tool for Mac, for sponsoring this weeks’s RSS feed. Give it a try.

Love it.

An Ohio man named Noam Lazebnik is suing Apple for splitting the final season of Breaking Bad into two individual seasons and charging a separate price to purchase each “Season Pass”.

Two sides here. Apple clearly lists each of the episodes included with the package, so does not appear to be misleading in any way. But the Season Pass description on that same page, says:

This Season Pass includes all current and future episodes of Breaking Bad, The Final Season.

Certainly open to interpretation.

There have been a number of posts discussing the impact of the release of the Samsung Galaxy Gear and, to a lesser extent, Qualcomm Toq smart watches. Some coverage hails the start of a revolution. But I found Mike Elgan’s ComputerWorld piece much closer to reality.

Press and pundits are treating these new entrants as the beginning of the revolution. But they’re not. They’re throwback, unserious relics from the past. They will both fail in the market. And they don’t represent the awesome smartwatch lineup to come.

If Apple chooses to enter this market, you can bet the farm that it won’t be with a product that looks anything like the Samsung and Qualcomm offerings.

This page sorts all TV shows available to stream on Netflix, sorted according to IMDB rank. A nice alternative to Netflix’s own rating system, this list is hand curated by http://suggestashow.com, so be sure to click the Suggest a Show link on the IMDB page if your favorite show is missing.

Have a favorite TV or movie recommendation site? Post it in the comments.

A seminal moment for special effects, the Alien chestburster scared a lot of people and was a marvel of mechanical engineering. The video below shows how it was built, and the post’s title link will take you to a page filled with all sorts of goodies.