Computing
j7uy5 | December 1, 2007In the book, The Blind Watchmaker,
Richard Dawkins makes a statement that led one reader to feel the need
to check up on him:
I've been reading through Richard Dawkins'
books and am currently half way through The Blind Watchmaker (2006
paperback edition) and on page 119 he writes:
In my
computer's ROM, location numbers 64489, 64490 and 64491, taken
together, contain a particular pattern of contents---1s and 0s
which---when interpreted as instructions, result in the computer's
little loudspeaker uttering a blip sound. This bit pattern is 10101101
00110000 11000000.
Of…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007According to Google, we are heading into a bad season for
Science:
This is from Google
Trends. Every December, there is a steep drop in
the number of searches conducted for "science." Plus, there
has been a year-to-year decline. What could it possibly mean?
j7uy5 | November 13, 2007In his article about
href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2209837,00.asp">what
is wrong with Windows Vista, PC Mag's John Dvorak
unintentionally disrespects northern Michigan:
Until now, Microsoft could sell code
better than anyone, but it seems the company would rather sell
services: software as a service, ads, search engine
results—you name it. This is like the local storefront that
opens as a knife-sharpening business and is soon selling junk jewelry,
moose heads, toaster repair, and cheap chocolate. In the meantime, the
knife-sharpening business goes by the wayside.
There…
terrasig | November 11, 2007I've been giving a fair bit of thought to moving my laboratory back to Mac computers. I had a superb, Windows-savvy postdoc in the late 90s who convinced me to go to PC machines because the choice made our grant money go further. But I miss the elegant simplicity of Macs and, as an amateur musician, would love to give GarageBand software a whirl.
So, I read with great interest that jazz saxophonist, Branford Marsalis, will be speaking tomorrow (12 Nov, 6:30 pm) to the Triangle Macintosh Users Group at the NC Mutual Life Building in Durham, North Carolina.
The program format will be similar…
j7uy5 | November 8, 2007Neil Bush's "COW" is probably the
closest the
Bush family ever has come
to real ranching. Now the COW may be going the way of the
href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo.html?dinos"
rel="tag">Dodo This may turn out to be one of the
best things that could happen to public education in the USA.
The COW, for those of you not familiar, is the
href="http://www.ignitelearning.com/COW/index.html">Curriculum
on Wheels. It is a proprietary computer designed
for instructional use.
Of course, it uses proprietary
software. The machine
href…
j7uy5 | November 2, 200711/11 is to be the new 9/11, according to the jihad-watchers at
href="http://www.debka.com/" rel="tag">DEBKAfile.
href="http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4723">DEBKAfile
Exclusive: Al Qaeda declares Cyber Jihad on the West
October 30, 2007, 9:23 AM (GMT+02:00)
In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked
up DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden's followers
announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On
Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda's electronic experts will start attacking
Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On…
j7uy5 | October 31, 2007This is a
href="http://www.digitimes.com/displays/a20070404PD212.html">pico-projector
from Texas Instruments. The idea is to have a device that can
project an image onto a screen, using a very small device such as a
PDA. Right now the usable image size is about 15 to 20
inches. They hope to scale it up to 40 inches.
I suspect that they envision this as a solution for small sales
presentations and the like. Personally, I'd like to see it
investigated for use in mainstream computing. Imagine the
typical usage of an office computer: word processing, email, maybe a
small spreadsheet. …
j7uy5 | October 25, 2007One of the occasional problems with commercial software is
the need for
"activation." One problem with any software is the potential
for inevitability of bugs. Both problems are
illustrated
in the screenshot.
So I only have 12,209 years to act.
I would like to be able to trust Symantec to have reliable software,
but this calls their QA into question.
j7uy5 | October 24, 2007Most people expect a wait when they call tech support.
Knowledgeable users arrange to have something to do to kill
some time: a book, magazine, something like that.
This is the story of Timothy Scott Short, who is going to have to wait
a very long time.
Short stole a specialized printer, used to make driver's licenses.
When he got it home, he realized he'd need the printer
drivers. So he called tech support.
Two days after the theft, Digimarc's tech
help line got a call from someone named "Scott" who wanted to buy
software for the same model of printer that was stolen from the…
j7uy5 | October 19, 2007
Steve Ballmer tells reporters that
href="http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/ballmer-microso.html">Microsoft
will buy 20 companies a
year for the next 5 years, paying "between 50 or 100 million
to a
couple hundred million each." He also gave his email address,
for
anyone to use if they have something to sell.
So, I went out to my garage to see if I had any old companies laying
around. Nope.
Then it struck me: we could sell ScienceBlogs!
What would Microsoft get in the deal?
A modicum of favorable attention (nobody has ill will toward
ScienceBlogs), some positive…
j7uy5 | October 14, 2007This is not a traditional review, in that I am not going to
discuss the
distro in any systematic or comprehensive fashion. There
already are several reviews out there in the
href="http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=suse">usual
places. Rather, I am going to outline my
experiences with installing and using
href="http://www.opensuse.org/">OpenSUSE 10.3,
with an emphasis on my particular hardware.
My machine originally was purpose-built to be an office machine, with
an emphasis on being quiet foremost, and inexpensive, secondarily; now
it is a hobby device. It has an…
j7uy5 | October 2, 2007We all had some laughs when the two-bladed razor was
improved with the
addition of a third blade. Late-night comedians joked about
razors coming with four or even five blades.
Then, we all had a few more chuckles when the four-bladed Schick
Quattro actually made it to market, soon followed by the five-bladed
Gillette Fusion. This led to speculation about the natural
end-point:
href="http://agrumer.livejournal.com/414194.html">
class="inset" alt=""
src="http://www.grumer.org/lj_images/razors.gif" border="0"
height="256" width="264">
The same thing is happening inside our…
j7uy5 | September 29, 2007One of their flagship products, Excel , has been caught
making errors doing simple multiplication.
href="http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx">According
to a Microsoft Developer blog:
Yesterday evening we were alerted to an
issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of
numbers around 65,535. The first example that we heard about
was =77.1*850, but it became clear from our testing as well as
additional reports that this was just one instance where Excel 2007
would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535.
You have…
j7uy5 | September 28, 2007The government is finally moving the legal system into the 21st
century, with wiki-based laws. The idea is that the people
are
the customer, and the customer should have a say in the rules.
This is, oddly, a government-sponsored revolution.
Of course, this would not be possible in a government where
corporations have sway over the legal process. It could only
happen in a true democracy, not a fascist state.
href="http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9079">New
Zealand to Pioneer Wiki-based Laws
Daily Tech
September 28, 2007 4:55 AM
New Zealand will allow citizens to…
j7uy5 | September 25, 2007
In response to customer demand, computer manufacturers pressured
Microsoft into offering an easier way for users to "downgrade" their
new machines.
Business customers who feel that Vista is too bloated and slow, or who
find it doesn't run what they need it to run, now can get Vista taken
off, and XP put in its place. Meanwhile, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and
HP have joined Dell in offering new machines with XP installed instead
of Vista.
(
href="http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Provides+XP+Downgrade+for+Unhappy+Vista+Users/article9027.htm">source)
j7uy5 | September 22, 2007Some people are amazingly creative...or thirsty.
(
href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=854&num=5">Source)
j7uy5 | September 15, 2007If you are willing to settle for a two-dimensional desktop
experience,
and you love The Matrix, this might be fun.
The image is an animated GIF, so it is big. (Sorry
to the
dial-up users.) The real thing works much better than the
animated GIF shows.
The howto is
href="http://geekhacks.com/2007/09/13/screensaver-as-a-desktop-wallpaper/">here.
If you want the three-dimensional version, you'll have to use
href="http://compiz.org/">compiz fusion.
It is not for Windows, even Vista, and not for Mac OS X.
You have to use Linux. What are you waiting for?
Anyway, here is the…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007This is good.
href="http://www.getfirefox.net/">Firefox now has
an extension that makes it simple to store all your bibliographic
information from online research.
It is at release candidate 3 stage now, well-developed and
fully functional. It is called
href="http://www.zotero.org/" rel="tag">Zotero.
It is bundled with the "
href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/">Campus
Edition" (the best thing since ramen noodles) of Firefox, but
it can be installed easily into any version on Linux, OS X, or even
Windows machines.
From an article at
href="http://www.…
j7uy5 | August 21, 2007
style="border: medium solid rgb(204, 204, 255); padding: 5px; text-align: center; background-color: white;"
cellspacing="5" height="351" width="500">
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2007-08-19"
title="Wikipedia:Picture of the day">Wikipedia Picture of
the day
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bezier_3_big.gif"
class="image" title="Bézier curve">
alt="Bézier curve" longdesc="/wiki/Image:Bezier_3_big.gif"
src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Bezier_3_big.gif/300px-Bezier_3_big.gif"
height="125" width="300">
An
title…
j7uy5 | August 3, 2007That
is the conclusion of the most review review of the security of the
Dielbold voting machines in California. Most damning is the
finding that many of the previously-reported vulnerabilities have not
been fixed.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">...Although we present
several previously unpublished vulnerabilities, many of the weaknesses
that we describe were first identified in previous studies of the
Diebold system (e. g., [26], [17], [18], [19], [33], [23], and
[14]). Our report confirms that many of the most serious flaws that
these studies uncovered have not been fixed in the…