Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
This Day in Tech - 1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
Inversion occurs when the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, a reversal of normal atmospheric conditions. When that happens, manmade pollutants are trapped, resulting in smog. The physical conditions around Los Angeles, for example, lead to frequent inversion layers over the basin. That, combined with heavy automobile pollution, consistently gives L.A. the worst air quality in the country.
But L.A. has never seen anything quite like that one week in Pennsylvania, in what became known as the Donora air inversion or, more dramatically, the “Donora Death Fog.”
In Donora, an industrial town situated about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, pollution from the nearby U.S. Steel smelting plants and Donora Zinc Works was the main culprit. Trapped in a temperature inversion, the pollutants blanketed the town during the night of Oct. 26.
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn’t until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
To Philip Sadtler, an industry consultant sent to evaluate the disaster and who tried without success to expose the corporate cover-up, U.S. Steel was guilty of murder:
“The directors of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail for killing people,” Sadtler said shortly before his death in 1996.
In the end, 40 percent of Donora’s population of 14,000 became ill as a result of the “death fog” and the town joined a growing list of other places hit hard — and harder — by human pollution.
Seaman 2 Tops Japanese Sales Charts
Illustrating both that the PS2 is still a relevant gaming machine and that the Japanese gaming public adores weirdness, Seaman 2 debuted at the top of the Japanese sales charts this week, edging out DS Bungaku Zenshuu.
One other PS2 title, Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Meteor, cracked the top ten, but for the most part it was a DS party, with six of the top ten sellers being for Nintendo’s portable.
Will Seaman’s success be enough to convince Sega to bring the title Stateside? Probably not, more’s the pity.
We need more virtual pet Neanderthal man sims, don’t you think?
[Via: The Japanese Software Chart]
Google Adds IMAP Support To GMail
GMail has gained IMAP support, one of the most requested features for Google’s web-based e-mail service.
More than storage space or other features, free web-based IMAP access pushes GMail over the top when compared to offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and most other web-based e-mail services.
If you log into your GMail account and head to “settings,” the tab for “Forwarding and POP” should now read “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.”
If it doesn’t, be patient, Google will be rolling out the new IMAP features across the service over the next few days.
If you’re not familiar with IMAP, it’s like POP access, but allows your changes to live on the server rather than just your e-mail client.
For instance, if you move a message in Thunderbird via POP, the movement isn’t mirrored in GMail, but with IMAP it is.
With IMAP you can access your mail via your desktop client, read mail, make changes and have those changes mirrored by any other client accessing the account.
If you access your mail from multiple machines, IMAP allows them all to stay in sync. If you don’t access your mail with a desktop client, then IMAP support won’t change the way you interact with GMail.
To enable IMAP in GMail just head to the settings page and change your access from POP to IMAP.
Then you need to configure your desktop client to connect via IMAP rather than POP — be sure to backup your client’s mail store before making changes.
The Google help center has more details on configuring IMAP settings in both GMail and on the client side.
Apples Estimates 250K iPhones Sold to Unlockers
During the Q&A portion of Monday’s Q4 earnings call, Apple’s COO Timothy Cook made an interesting statement.
Cook said he estimates that 250,000 of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones Apple has sold were “bought with intention of unlocking.”
That’s almost 20 percent of all iPhones sold to date. Can Cook be serious?
The admonition came while Cook was answering questions about the price cuts that happened mid quarter and their effect of iPhone sales.
Here’s what he had to say:
We were very happy with the elasticity we saw. It enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people who had the intention to unlock. And while we don’t know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is that there was probably 250,000 thousand of the 1.4 million that we sold, where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut.
Cook went on to say that AT&T [revenue sharing] payments were obviously dependent on the iPhone being locked to AT&T.
In other words Apple gets squat from AT&T unless the phone is activated through the wireless provider.
Previously Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster and Michael Olson suggested that the AT&T revenue sharing is likely based on the circumstances under which a person bought their iPhone.
At a minimum, the two estimate $3 a month per existing AT&T customer, for the duration of their two-year contract; this figure is said to go up by $8, however, if the person switched to AT&T for the iPhone.
Microsoft Cutting Xbox 360 Price In Japan
Microsoft said it would cut the Japan price of its Xbox 360 game gear by 13 percent to 34,800 yen ($305.00 USD) on November 1 in a bid to shore up demand for the console struggling in a home turf of Nintendo Co Ltd and Sony Corp.
The move follows a Sony announcement earlier this month that it would cut the price of its PlayStation 3 game machine by 10 percent in Japan and launch a new, lower-priced model.
The new Xbox 360 price compares with a 39,980 yen price tag for an upcoming PS3 model with a 40-gigabyte hard disk drive, which will go on sale on November 11.
Although popular in the United States and Europe, the Xbox 360 has been lagging behind Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii in monthly sales in Japan.
ASUS Eee Out In Less Than Two Weeks
Want an ASUS Eee laptop?
The low-spec Linux laptop with the low-set price tag will be on sale in the U.S. on November 1, according to Eeeuser.
PC World reports they sold out within minutes in Taiwan.
Without any big marketing efforts, the same’s not likely to happen in the U.S., but given that $300 tag, who knows?