May 2002
Friday, 31 May 2002
There’s no ignoring Doom III: “I mean, it’s great to be a hotshot programmer and all that, but the best programmer in the world cannot make something faster than the hardware is capable of going. It’s possible now to do new kinds of stuff, and I think it is worthwhile to go ahead and take that step”
Namnlös Normal sida: “The Toaster is a large picture, 5 meter wide and 4.5 meter high, totally made from slices of bread toasted in different lengths of time to reach the nuances between black and white, ochre and rust.”
Monday, 27 May 2002
Ice reservoirs found on Mars: “They had expected to take a year to gather enough evidence but managed to do so in just a few weeks.”
Saturday, 25 May 2002
Supernova poised to go off near Earth: “But do not panic yet. ‘Very soon’ could mean hundreds of millions of years in the future.”
Wednesday, 22 May 2002
Your Stolen Art? I Threw It Away, Dear: “French police officers had given her a rough estimated of the art’s value at between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion”
Cornell News: Cat talk?: “Seven thousand years ago, when we think the ancestors of our domesticated cats began wandering into Egyptian granaries and offering to trade rodent-control services for shelter, it was probably the pleasant-sounding cats that were selected and accepted into human society.”
Its Creator Says Kazaa Benjamin Worm Means Well: “We do not want to affect the exchange of legal programs and legal music files. Only users who are looking for and sharing copyrighted files could be infected”
Our Conscious Mind Could Be An Electromagnetic Field: “The theory explains why conscious actions feel so different from unconscious ones - it is because they plug into the vast pool of information held in the brain’s electromagnetic field”
Tuesday, 21 May 2002
Stanford researchers establish link between creative genius and mental illness
Review: Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones: “Responding to criticism over the total annihilation of the planet, Vader stated, ‘There is no middle ground in the War on Terror. Those who harbor terrorists are terrorists themselves. Alderaan was issued ample warning. The fight for continuing Freedom is often burdened by terrible cost.’”
Naked Chicken Plan May Make Feathers Fly: “Cahaner has already produced several dozen featherless birds but hopes to perfect the still diminutive fowl so they stand as tall as the normal boiler chickens that are the mainstay of the poultry industry.”
Study: IBM edges Oracle in database field: “The overall database market includes software for Unix and Windows operating systems, as well as for mainframe computers.” - Unbreakable
Monday, 20 May 2002
The Royal We: “Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn’t considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race - or of no one at all.”
Wednesday, 15 May 2002
NASA’s ‘frozen smoke’ named lightest solid
Monday, 13 May 2002
Docs: ‘Nonoxynol-9 Doesn’t Work’
Strangelets from outer space attacking Earth: “Strangelets were formed in the Big Bang. They are predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about 10 trillion (10 million million) times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-sized fragment is believed to weigh several tons.”
Sunday, 12 May 2002
In Final Twist, Ill Pavarotti Falls Silent for Met Finale: “I’m Tosca, you’re Cavaradossi, don’t worry about the staging, we’ll just live it.”
Thursday, 9 May 2002
Wild Palms - Jaron Lanier’s Mild Qualms: “In all fairness, paranoia was invented before television, and it won’t go away with the introduction of the web. The proto-cyberpunk story has got to be Hamlet, which is the creepiest paranoia tale of them all.”
Death Does Them Part (Wives Make Sure of That): “Under Japan’s complex burial customs, divorced or unmarried women were traditionally unwelcome in most graveyards, where plots are still passed down through the husband’s family and descendants must provide maintenance for burial sites or lose them.”
Developers speak on the death of OS 9: “Any developer who hasn’t already figured out that Mac OS 9 was end-of-life, and who consequently has been delaying or refusing support for Mac OS X, is going to become a grape in the path of the steamroller of progress”
Wednesday, 8 May 2002
Five Worlds: “Whenever you read one of those books about programming methodologies written by a full time software development guru/consultant, you can rest assured that they are talking about internal, corporate software development. Not shrinkwrapped software, not embedded software, and certainly not games. Why? Because corporations are the people who hire these gurus. They’re paying the bill.”
Tuesday, 7 May 2002
Enron Forced Up California Energy Prices, Documents Show: “we have sold the trading unit and the people with the knowledge of trading practices are no longer with the company, we do not know what the true facts are, and we do not know which parts of the memoranda are correct and which parts are incorrect”
Sunday, 5 May 2002
Respuesta a Microsoft en idioma Ingles: “In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one’s own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietry software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity). “
Saturday, 4 May 2002
I’d like to thank Paul and Damien for helping me test the CSS layout issues on this site.
Sara Lee Rolls Out Crustless Bread: “baking’s biggest breakthrough since sliced bread”
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes: “Will someone please send this man to business school? No one is forcing Turner to use their free broadcast airwaves. Turner is perfectly free to stick with subscription cable revenues. If they don’t like the characteristics of a particular medium, they don’t have to use it. No medium can force their readers to pay attention to advertisements (newspaper, radio, movies, etc.). What makes television different?”
Truetype embedding-enabler : DMCA threats: “To illustrate how simple this program is (in the style of Dave Touretzky’s Gallery), I leave you with the following haiku explaining how it works: The OS/2 chunk / has a bit for embedding. / Set it to zero.”
Friday, 3 May 2002
Wealth Distribution and the Role of Networks: “The finding suggests that the basic inequality in wealth distribution seen in most societies may have little to do with differences in the backgrounds and talents of their citizens. Rather, the disparity appears to be something akin to a law of economic life that emerges naturally as an organizational feature of a network.”