Computing

In 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 course, this…
According 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?  
In 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 are…
I'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…
Neil 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="…
11/11 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…
This 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.  …
One 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.  
Most 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 Missouri…
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 press,…
This 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…
We 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…
One 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 to…
The 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 LawsDaily Tech September 28, 2007 4:55 AMNew Zealand will allow citizens to decide what…
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)
Some people are amazingly creative...or thirsty. ( href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=854&num=5">Source)
If 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 video…
This 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.…
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="…
That 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…