Technology
gregladen | December 4, 2007
Microsoft Softens Response to Piracy from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Microsoft Corp. is pulling back from a system that disables programs on users' computers if it suspects the software is pirated, opting instead for a gentler approach based on nagging alerts.
[...]
Whenever Microsoft Softens you know something or someone is about to get bit....
gregladen | December 4, 2007... as in the internet address, not the concept of an IT company...
Some web site with an impossible name posts the list, the first few of which are here:
SYMBOLICS.COM in March 1985
BBN.COM
THINK.COM
MCC.COM
DEC.COM
NORTHROP.COM
XEROX.COM
SRI.COM
HP.COM
BELLCORE.COM
IBM.COM
SUN.COM
INTEL.COM
TI.COM
ATT.COM
GMR.COM
TEK.COM
FMC.COM
UB.COM
BELL-ATL.COM in August 1986
revere | December 4, 2007
If you need the antibiotic ciprofloxacin ("cipro") (famous for its use as prophylactic agent for those potentially exposed to weaponized anthrax in 2001), I know where you can find a lot of it. In Patancheru, India, near Hyderabad, one of the world's centers for production of generic drugs. Most of the cipro made there is shipped out, but it turns out a lot of cipro stays behind, in the sewage of Patancheru. A paper by Larsson et al. (Journal of Hazardous Materials 148 (2007) 751-755; hat tip SusieF) found the highest levels in sewage effluent of pharmaceuticals of any yet reported. The…
clock | December 4, 2007David writes:
Community is no longer a dirty or scary word. Sciam, Seed, in the US, Germany and all over the world. Online communities are becoming understood and a valued commodity. When Google bought YouTube I said the price they payed wasn't for the technology (they already had Google Video) what they bought was the community. News organizations realize that creating niche communities is a way to stay relevant to advertisers and readers.
And science journalism, which de-facto covers a "boring" subject to lots of people, can only benefit by creating a vibrant community of people who have a…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
gregladen | December 3, 2007Now and then a program (a "process") will need to be killed. It got annoyingly slow, or got stuck somehow. In Windows, the final solution for killing a process is "alt-ctrl-delete" which may or may not give you the capacity to shut down a process, and if that works, it requires a lot of struggling with dialog boxes, etc. Best case scenario in Windows is that the process dies cleanly. Often, a Windows process will leave messy bits and pieces of itself behind that may affect performance or create security problems, and often, the worst case scenario happens ... you've got to "kill" the…
drorzel | December 2, 2007Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed "helpiness" (in analogy with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness") namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don't want to hear about how I really should've bought a Mac, or ought to be running Linux, or whatever. This is commentary on the specific Tablet PC that I purchased recently, and nothing more.
As noted here a few times, I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which does, in fact, have the touch screen option, though I didn't think it did…
revere | November 30, 2007If you are like most people you probably aren't alarmed about the dangers of nanotechnology. In fact if you are like most people you probably don't even know what nanotechnology is. I'll resist the temptation to say general knowledge of the emerging technology of the very small is even smaller. Despite the fact most of us have no clue, there is a surprising amount of nano products already in the marketplace, incorporated in products from food containers to golf clubs. But there remain doubts about safety. Nanoparticles are so small they don't act in ways we understand, either physically or…
gregladen | November 29, 2007Morons are so annoying. Even the ones that are just passing by, the ones you don't really have to talk to.
These days I often have lunch in a public dining area where most of the patrons are scientists or geeks, or students learning to become scientists or geeks. The other day two geeky scientist guys were walking by my table talking to each other too loudly for me to ignore. So one guy, he says: "You know we can solve this problem. I have a lot of faith in our Open Source solutions." (hmm, cool, I thought). The other guy responded:
"Yea, well, I guess it all depends on how much…
gregladen | November 29, 2007"His cell phone was found in his shirt pocket with its battery severely melted and his chest burned and fractured."
Ouch. Details here.
neurophilosophy | November 29, 2007
The image on the right is a supercomputer simulation of the microcircuitry found within a column from the neocortex of the rat brain.
The simulation is a tour de force of computational neuroscience: a single column is a highly complex structure, containing approximately 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses, and the image is based on 15 years' worth of research into the morphology of many different cell types in the rat cortex, and the unique repertoire of receptors and ion channels expressed by each, as well as their connectivity and electrophysiological properties.
Nevertheless, this is…
gregladen | November 27, 2007RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive [sic] Disks) are considered pretty handy for a number of things. This is an example of productive and practical use of a RAID. Granted, this project does not have the archaic grandeur of a Floppy Disk RAID, but then again, the capacity and performance of this system are utterly superior to those of a Floppy Disk RAID. The following is meant as an instruction sheet of how to build a rock-hard USB stick RAID system and simultaneously transform from an ordinary nerd to a SUPER LINUX GURU.
Get your sticks together and go here.
gregladen | November 27, 2007It could be called the Vista Bounce. Here is how it works:
First, you have to understand that a good desktop computer costs about $3,000 and always will. A good laptop costs the same.
If you believe differently either you have been believing the ads or you do not know what a "good desktop" or a "good laptop" is.
The reason that a computer is said to cost a certain amount, say "$1850.00" or "Under a Grand" but actually costs $3,000 is this: The less expensive computer does not have something important, like memory, or a screen, or enough of a hard drive, etc. When you add that stuff on…
gregladen | November 27, 2007A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like.
[source]