Technology
gregladen | March 7, 2008Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!
But waitaminnit... What's this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don't, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?
That's just dumb.
[source]
Hat Tip TUIB Guy
purepedantry | March 5, 2008How do you track the relative contributions of a plant species in an ecosystem? When you are talking about thousands of square miles of land area this can be an incredibly daunting task, but it is very important because it provides important information related to invasive species that may be displacing their native counterparts in an ecosystem.
I remember in a biology course a Stanford we were shown how you perform experiments like this using trees in a nearby nature reserve. In order to a get a sense of the geographic distribution of different types of tree, we would walk around the park…
gregladen | March 3, 2008ESP is a new organization formed for the purpose of putting an end to the madness. The madness, of course, is the new corporate business model of patenting something utterly absurd, such as "click on something and something happens" or "computers can store data" or "tell the user there has been an error" ... then you get a team of lawyers in expensive suits to take down all of your competitors by suing them for having the audacity to steal your ideas.
ESP will be the ACLU of the software world. I hope they have a lot of money.
Here is their press release, in part:
Boston, Mass., February 28…
gregladen | March 3, 2008The developers of Firefox ran into an interesting situation with Firefox 3.0 (in production). There are reasons for it to have run faster than Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, but in some ways it ran more slowly.
After a great deal of research, they figured out why. Essentially, there is a thing that happens to software running on a Mac that does not use certain native Apple system software ... causing it to run much more slowly. But a very simple change (which is somewhere between undocumented and very very poorly documented) in the software can fix it easily.
When this article was picked up on…
gregladen | March 3, 2008
The Asus Eee Laptops being sold by Best Buy come featured with an Intel Celeron M Processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, 7" widescreen display, 4GB solid state drive, built-in webcam, and the Linux operating system. Weighing in at only 2lbs, the laptop is great for day-to-day traveling. The hardware might not seem much, if you're used to the high demands of a Windows-based PC, but for Linux, 512 MB of memory and a 4GB hard drive is plenty. You won't be using the laptop for much server-based work or playing any 3D accelerated games, but that's not what the laptop is about. It's about having e-mail…
jlynch | March 2, 2008Things I can do that I no longer need to do (from here by way of here). Examining this list will no doubt tell you a lot about what I spent the past nearly forty years doing with technology.
Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a TV
Adjusting a television’s horizontal and vertical holds
Adjusting a television’s color and hue adjustments
Adjusting the tracking on a VCR
Adjusting the head azimuth of a Commodore’s Datassette
Archie AT commands for dial-up modems
Autoexec.bat editing
Backing up a PC using QIC-40 or QIC-80 tapes
BASIC Booting off a floppy disk
Burnishing a cartridge connector with a…
gregladen | March 2, 2008What is your favorite scripting language?
(I don't think I can do polls on this site ... but if you click on this picture of a poll, you can go to that site and take the poll)
pontiff | February 29, 2008Happy Leap Friday! For your enjoyment, some ferromagnetic fluids jiving to a piano piece:
purepedantry | February 29, 2008That is amazing:
The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It's inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.
On both the top and bottom…
clock | February 29, 2008Watch to the end to see how just huge this thing is!
From Frischer Wind, via Page 3.14
pontiff | February 28, 2008Technology tidbits of assorted flavors:
I think I just made myself dizzy.
Multi-touch to the max, dude!
What does it take to build the next Silicon Valley (besides Gallium Arsenide?) Via John Cook's Venture Blog comes this report.
Bill Gates uses LinkedIn and asks: "How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?" (Is it wrong that my knee jerk reaction is "eliminate middle school?" :) Oh and look I have more LinkedIn connections than Bill Gates! He has more dollars, though, I guess. I bet I have more joke-like "Bacon" paraphernalia though!
pontiff | February 28, 2008Coming soon to a desktop near you: Your own digital Jesus. (Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who's there. As much as a collection of bits representing the image of a sheet can be there, I guess that is.)
Yeah I just wrote this post because upon reading the article I couldn't get that damn Depeche Mode song out of my head (or the Johnny Cash version.) Begone you fowl occupier of my neurons which could actually be doing some work!
pontiff | February 27, 2008Quick, Batman! To the trademark-mobile along with a stack of three or four letter company names:
Feb 27 (Reuters) - On-demand business phone service provider Nuvio Corp said it filed a lawsuit against Garmin International Inc...alleging Garmin's Nuvifone infringes on Nuvio trademark, which it uses on its phones and telephony services.
gregladen | February 27, 2008Because the Garmin GPS system ...
... is leading some drivers ... straight into a dead end. ...
The electronic maps don't show a gate that separates residential and industrial areas. It's only opened for a couple hours on weekdays in the northern New Jersey city.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says residents on Fifth Street started complaining about trucks clogging their street about a year ago ... Some drivers have to call police to open the gate because their trucks are too big to turn around.
[source]
This has led to a call for Open Source GPS databases.
revere | February 25, 2008I hate writing posts like this almost as much as people hate reading them. But write them I must. It's the cell phone issue again.
Health risks from cell phones aren't supposed to happen because the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation involved is not energetic enough to ionize molecules. The damage done by ionizing radiation is related to the chemical changes that ensue from the ionizations. Those chemical changes don't occur with exposure to non-ionizing radiation. The most non-ionizing radiation is supposed to do is heat of up the tissue (as in a microwave oven), and the thermal…
gregladen | February 25, 2008Microsoft has paid the Library of Congress a huge bribe so that they will adopt some of their software, and use hardware running Vista in public areas. This is, of course, a travesty. As Boing Boing says, "Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 mil" ... You know this is George Bush's fault.
For Microsoft's part, this is a move on Google (because it will involve a major search facility) and on The Gutenberg Project and all other open access publication projects (because this is a bald faced effort to control access to key, old, not copyrighted documents such as the…
gregladen | February 25, 2008During the 2006 holiday shopping season, in a desperate attempt to boost weak sales of their totally sucky operating system, Microsoft engineerd the branding of zillions of PC's with the slogan "Windows Vista Capable."
Those computers were only able to run a very stripped down version of the senselessly bloated operating system, called, laughingly and absurdly, "Vista Home Basic."
People bought the computers, and felt ripped off (because, well, they Microsoft had really stuffed it to them) and somebody sued.
Now, the suit is elevated to the level of a class action suit.
At a hearing…
gregladen | February 24, 2008That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a Linux box.
These images are about 200 K or so in size, and they come to us courtesy of The R Project for Statistical Computing
drorzel | February 22, 2008A reader writes in with a literary query:
I was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined. Naturally, Stephenson's Diamond Age and Crichton's Prey come to mind. You know of other examples that would make for meaty discussion by a bunch of engineers? [...] I want to stress that most of the course will focus on technical content, so whatever work we pick has to have *some* basis…
gregladen | February 21, 2008And they are paying for it.
Google is funding work to ensure the Windows version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop and other Creative Suite software can run on Linux computers.
For the project, Google is funding programmers at CodeWeavers, a company whose open-source Wine software lets Windows software run on Linux. Wine is a compatibility layer that intercepts a program's Windows commands and converts them to instructions for the Linux kernel and its graphics subsystem.
Story here.