Topics

226

Living Room / 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes

« on: December 01, 2007, 03:15 AM »

1.Kryptos

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. It continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.

http://historycus.bl...uncracked-codes.html

227

Developer's Corner / Ideas vs. Inventions

« on: November 24, 2007, 09:16 AM »

I was recently contacted by someone and asked how to patent an idea. He was quite upset when I told him that you can't, that you can only patent an implementation of an idea...an invention. He didn't want to believe me, saying lots of companies do it every day and get rich off of those ideas. (he wants to get rich too)

He has a lot to learn, beginning with what the difference is between an idea and an implementation of an idea.

He, just like many, also has everything backwards in his head, thinking you come up with a great idea, rush to make something, then go get it patented before someone steals your idea. That's not how it works, not at all.

That would be like rushing to create a solution to a problem without knowing what the problem really is, then go look for a problem your solution works for to try to sell your invention, rather than coming up a great way to solve a known existing problem...the best way possible to solve that problem, taking your time to do it well, revising it and making it better till it is the best it can be, then patent it, market it, and sell that solution to people that already want it. (kind of how the coding snacks here work)

There are a gazillion inventions every year and the patent office is overloaded with some of the worst stuff you have ever seen...silly stuff...poorly designed stuff, all in the hopes of getting rich. Most inventions never make a dime and have cost their inventors a fortune by the time they have finished and given up.

I went in search of some good reading material for this guy, since he wasn't going to take my word for it when I told him he was going about it all wrong, and found this fantastic article that will explain in greater detail what the invention process is really about. I figured I would share it and possibly save someone a lot of money & heartache in the process.

Just remember this: Real inventors create solutions to problems, they don't dream up crazy ideas. That's what dreamers do. Real inventors are thinkers, problem solvers...not dreamers.

http://www.tenonline.org/art/9010.html

228

Living Room / The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time

« on: November 22, 2007, 01:20 AM »

Some things were just never meant to be, but that doesn't mean that investors won't pile millions of dollars upon a bad idea — or even a good idea gone bad. Whether they crashed and burned or sucked investors dry, these ventures just didn't work out. Check out our graveyard of dreams and money to get a look at VC (venture-capital) investments that just weren't wise.

http://www.insidecrm...-investments-111907/

229

Living Room / Hey, Zaine...your Holodeck is almost ready!

« on: November 22, 2007, 01:05 AM »

This 360-degree ultra-high-definition military simulator allows you to drive a Humvee and fire real weapons with absolute precision, including machine guns and rocket launchers, anywhere you want. The 10-projector system achieves a perfectly seamless panorama thanks to Mersive's Sol system; a calibration, warping and sub-pixel image blending technology that may jump from military sims to your living room in the near future. Sol can get any number of projectors and project a single huge image over a surface of any shape and size. We talked with Mersive about how it works and how this may work for game enthusiasts.

http://gizmodo.com/g...ep-closer-325237.php

230

Living Room / Recycling: Old Typewriters = New Humans

« on: November 21, 2007, 11:02 PM »

Jeremy Mayer is quite an artist...

I disassemble typewriters and then reassemble them into full-scale human figures, sometimes encasing them in clear casting resin. I do not solder, weld, or glue; the process is entirely cold, mechanical assembly. I also do charcoal drawings based on ideas about biotech and nanotech.

http://www.saatchi-g..._profile//23860.html

more pics

231

Living Room / Odd Little Stars

« on: November 21, 2007, 08:18 PM »

It seems as though every time astronomers point their telescopes at the night sky, some weird new finding forces them to revamp their theories. And so it is with nine newly discovered white dwarfs. The stars defy their expected chemical makeup and by rights shouldn't even exist. An explanation could open up a new branch of astronomy.

http://sciencenow.sc...ent/full/2007/1121/1

232

Living Room / What can you do with a PhD in robotics?

« on: November 21, 2007, 12:54 PM »

Write a book, of course!

Daniel H. Wilson discusses his book "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips On Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion".  (time: 44:16)

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=IcA8STwMHn8

^{/me waits for mouser to get his PhD and write a book.} 

233

Living Room / TED announces their 2008 winners

« on: November 21, 2007, 10:04 AM »

The TED Prize was introduced in 2005, and it is unlike any other award. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, the real prize is that they are granted a WISH. "A wish to change the world." There are no formal restrictions on the wish. We ask our winners to think big and to be creative. The goal is that it creates an incredible sense of excitement and common purpose. It inspires the TED community, and all those who hear about the wish, to offer their help in making the wish come true.

Three winners are chosen each year. They could be anyone with world-changing potential: inventors or entrepreneurs, designers or artists, visionaries or mavericks, story-tellers or persuaders. But they must be people who the judges believe have the ability to inspire others to do something great for the world.

http://blog.ted.com/.../announcing_2008.php

234

Living Room / How good are you at spotting spyware, spam & phishing traps?

« on: November 21, 2007, 06:18 AM »

Mcafee has 2 little quizzes to test your abilities to spot websites with unsafe downloads and those that will share your email address with spammers.

These quizzes are based on real sites.

Using whatever methods you normally use, take the 2 quizzes and see how good you really are at protecting yourself.

Spyware Quiz (average score: 59%)

Spam Quiz (average score: 55%)

And there is one additional phishing quiz, similar in nature to the 2 by McAfee, using real emails samples, but the links are disabled and you can't hover to see the real target.

Phishing Quiz

235

Living Room / Virtual Eve: first in human computer interaction

« on: November 20, 2007, 11:32 PM »

The near-human performance of a virtual teacher called Eve created by Massey researchers has drawn the attention of scientists across the computing world.
Eve is what is known in the information sciences as an intelligent or affective tutoring system that can adapt its response to the emotional state of people by interaction through a computer system.

The system “Easy with Eve” is thought to be the first of its type.

The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

http://www.physorg.c...m/news114704050.html

236

Living Room / When children design laptops

« on: November 20, 2007, 11:27 PM »

When I saw Amy Tiemann’s blog post on CNET two months ago about a children’s “laptop club,” I asked her to send me some samples. Many permission slips later, a package arrived in the mail bursting with construction paper—a wonderfully crafty collection of laptops designed by seven- to nine-year-olds in North Carolina that are both heartwarmingly personal and frighteningly tied to pop culture. A close study reveals keyboard buttons assigned to “Barbie.com,” “best friends” next to “friends,” “HP [Harry Potter] trivia,” and “werd games” as well as “rily werd games.” I asked Tiemann to explain a little bit about the program, where it came from and what it says about how children (girls in particular) think about computers these days. There are also interviews excerpted below that I conducted with some of the laptops’ designers.

http://www.themornin...ies/the_laptop_club/

237

Living Room / Infringement Nation: we are all mega-crooks

« on: November 20, 2007, 11:17 PM »

John Tehranian's paper, "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap," from a forthcoming symposium issue of the Utah Law Review on "Fixing Copyright," is a great, tight little essay on the way that the growing gap between what technology allows us to do and what copyright tells us not to do is turning us all into mega-crooks. Just by doing the normal, everyday stuff -- chatting with friends, sharing the moments of our lives -- we commit billions of dollars' worth of infringements...

How Much Do You Infringe On A Daily Basis?

http://www.boingboin...ingement-nation.html

238

Living Room / 'Smart Closet' Tells You What To Wear

« on: November 20, 2007, 11:08 PM »

If you've ever stood in front of your closet trying to figure out what to wear for an important meeting, a new high-tech wardrobe invention might be just the thing for you.

The "smart wardrobe" keeps track of when you wore an item, where you wore it, and can even tell you when your clothes need to be dry-cleaned.

Developed by Australian researchers, the garment gizmo is being touted as a dress-for-success solution that could give busy people the edge to get ahead.

"The wardrobe can tell you that you have a meeting this morning with Joe Bloggs, that you have worn the same shirt the last three times you met him and that maybe you should wear something else or he will think you only have one shirt," says Prof. Bruce Thomas, director of the wearable computer laboratory at the University of South Australia.

http://www.businesse...cfm/newsID/16674.cfm

239

Living Room / Traffic Growth Could Choke 'Net by 2010

« on: November 20, 2007, 05:12 AM »

One of the great things about technology is that it's surprisingly easy to underestimate how strong the demand for it can become. Remember IBM CEO Thomas Watson's purported 1943 remark, "There's a world market for maybe 5 computers," and Bill Gates' supposed 1980 comment, "640 kbytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone"?

Interestingly, there's no evidence that either is an actual quotation -- and Gates in particular has emphatically denied the words attributed to him. However, they linger in the public consciousness as a way of reminding ourselves of a greater truth: The appetite for technology can surprise even seasoned veterans.

That certainly happened to me recently. Awhile back, my colleagues and I decided to look at how demand for Internet capacity might change over the next five years, and see whether the existing and planned infrastructure is adequate. To do so, we modeled user consumption of bandwidth over time, validated it against the best available data and then projected that demand forward. It's essentially a Moore's Law model of Internet demand, in that it looks at the rate of increase in a commodity (processing power in the case of Moore's Law, and bandwidth use here). Then we compared that demand to existing and planned infrastructure capacity...

http://www.pcworld.c...94-pg,1/article.html

240

Living Room / IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?

« on: November 20, 2007, 05:02 AM »

In a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court judgment concerning the prosecution of a cinema owner, Associate Justice Potter Stewart completely failed to define what is obscene by deciding that, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." In other words, pornography is - community standards notwithstanding - in the eye of the beholder.

A reasonable (to me) definition of pornography is "that which appeals to base human desires and is contrary to the established moral code of the society." It is with this in mind that I deem the IT industry to be pornographic.

http://www.pcworld.c...93-pg,1/article.html

241

Living Room / Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

« on: November 19, 2007, 06:58 PM »

There is also a related video that goes along with this.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

from Lockergnome

242

General Software Discussion / Looking for a special RSS reader

« on: November 18, 2007, 07:31 PM »

Does anybody know of a free RSS reader that is (or has) a ticker that can be docked at the bottom of my screen? (this location is important, as I already have too much at the top of my screen)

I would want the ticker to be quite thin and not take up that much screen space.

I would also want it to scroll, cycling through the headlines (10 most recent) of all my feeds and not just a single feed. And it needs to be able to handle a LOT of feeds.

It should show a snip of the content for an entry on hover, and go to the page related to it in my default browser when clicked.

What I am looking for is something resembling this:



The problem with the one shown is that it doesn't dock, it just stays on top...and it only shows a single feed...and it closes itself if I close my browser. 

243

General Software Discussion / Hey Grisoft: I love AVG but I hate popups!

« on: November 16, 2007, 03:43 PM »

AVG is a great product. And Grisoft has done a wonderful service by offering a free version for all these years.

But...

They have recently resorted to WinFixer-like marketing tactics. Evey other day, when AVG updates itself, my browser opens to an ad for AVG.

The first time it happened it scared the crap outta me because I didn't touch anything that should have opened my browser. I waited, holding my breath, to see what evil thing was going to load, to give me some clue as to what had infected my pc so I could remove it. I was quite surprised to see an ad for AVG.

It's not like AVG hasn't opened a window with an ad for their full product before, just this time they decided to use the browser to do it. They used to use their own application to popup the ads.

Now before you decide to flame me for bashing a great product from a company that has been kind enough to give away a free version, consider this:

On a newer, faster machine...this is just an annoyance. You can just close the window...no harm done.

That being said, there is another issue that isn't just a mere user annoyance...

I have always liked how light AVG was and how well it ran on older low end machines without causing stability problems...liked it enough to publicly endorse it.

I am going to have to revise my endorsement for AVG for older slower PC's, due to the fact that many of them can't handle having more than 1 or 2 browser windows open at a time.

If AVG is going to open browser windows this frequently, this will cause problems on those PC's when their owners already have browser windows open.

I can't endorse a product that has a known issue that has a high potential to make your machine unstable every other day when it's updating. I can't endorse a product that has a high chance of causing your machine to lock up in the middle of you doing something important, leading you to lose whatever you were working on.

244

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2007 / My challenge and how I propose to do it

« on: November 15, 2007, 03:50 PM »

I decided to pick one of my neglected projects that is more than worth doing and get it done.

I have designated a personal pest to bug me every day to make at least 1 post to my ebook site until all 460 posts are made to transfer the content from the old site to the new.

For each day that he bugs me but I still don't make a post, I will donate $1 to someone on the forum, that he chooses. (but not himself)

There is only so much procrastinating I can do before I am broke, so I'll have to get it done.

The following people are the lucky recipients of my penalty $1's:

• skrommel (even though my pest failed to bug me to make a post, I thought it was only fair to pay up any way)
• mouser
• mackal

245

Living Room / Free Rice: Increase your vocabulary while you feed the hungry

« on: November 15, 2007, 04:21 AM »

Click on the answer that best defines the word.

If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.

For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance...

Corporate sponsors pay to have their ads shown. This money goes to buy the rice. You play the game and they make more money from the sponsors to buy more rice.

http://www.freerice.com

246

Living Room / Phoenix Technologies Announces Plans to Assault Windows with Hyperspace

« on: November 13, 2007, 08:38 PM »

BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies' plans to market a new application platform the company claims will solve a number of problems endemic to Microsoft's Windows platform might be taken as a provocative gesture at their longtime partner. But Redmond's immediate reaction was nonchalant.

On Monday, the Milpitas, Calif., software maker announced Hyperspace, a Linux-based virtualization platform that will let OEMs bundle cut-down versions of popular open-source software that end-users will be able to access instantly, even without booting Windows.

"We call this embedded simplicity, or PC 3.0," said Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix in an interview.

Phoenix has for many years been the leading maker of BIOS, which enables a PC's Windows operating system to communicate with the hardware. But BIOS is being slowly supplanted by a newer technology called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

http://www.infoworld...lt-on-Windows_1.html

247

Developer's Corner / Serena to offer free apps prototyping tool

« on: November 13, 2007, 08:26 PM »

Serena Software plans Monday to release Serena Prototype Composer, a free tool intended to make it easy to prototype business applications.

Prototype Composer is a requirements visualization and prototyping tool designed to simulate how applications will look and function before a developer writes any code, Serena said. The intent is to ensure that an application will meet business requirements from the onset, thus avoiding costly, time-consuming rework.

With the Prototype Composer product, Serena is attempting to solve the problem of business users not always describing everything they want in an application, or being cryptic about it, Nathan Rawlins, Serena senior director of product marketing, said.

http://www.infoworld...rena-composer_1.html

248

C / C++ / Free Course: Computer Programming I (using C)

« on: November 13, 2007, 03:15 AM »

University of Washington CSE 142 - Computer Programming I

This is a complete basic introductory course (using C) for beginners that have no previous programming experience, that was offered at the University of Washington during the fall of 2000 (taught by Martin Dickey).

If you have never studied programming, this course was designed for you.

Access to slides, homework assignments & solutions, exams & solutions (everything except the lectures and quizzes): http://www.online.cs...shington.edu/cse142/


Here are the lecture videos. It may seem as if I have listed them out of order, but they are actually in the proper order in which they should be viewed. Whoever uploaded them numbered them wrong. The entire set of videos is Closed Captioned.

Lecture 1: Overview and Welcome:
http://video.google....-1715462554446360061

Lecture 2: Problems, Algorithms and Programs:
http://video.google....=4233558706920958797

Lecture 3: Variables, Values and Types:
http://video.google....-6270226769534661340

Lecture 4: Arithmetic Expressions:
http://video.google....-4012488959082539986

Lecture 5: Input and Output (I/O):
http://video.google....-3530829117801479537

Lecture 23: Style:
http://video.google....=5312594019069945032

Lecture 6: Conditionals:
http://video.google....-5644762755800059527

Lecture 7: Functions:
http://video.google....-5817164837086461135

Lecture 8: Function Parameters:
http://video.google....=1417951682209894569

Lecture 9: Iteration:
http://video.google....-3196532431429468258

Lecture 10: Loop Development and Program Schemas:
http://video.google....-6681611693257587151

Lecture 11: Complex Conditionals:
http://video.google....=4474644278071725056

Lecture 12: Functions and Design:
http://video.google....-1157181642585477208

Lecture 27: Switch Statement:
http://video.google....-8851692950135894858

Lecture 24: Structuring Program Files:
http://video.google....=6301599051455260607

Lecture 13: Pointer Parameters:
http://video.google....-4753534994884333178

Lecture 14: Arrays:
http://video.google....-8400251513260474506

Lecture 15: Linear & Binary Search:
http://video.google....id=58946135744842823

Lecture 16: Sorting:
http://video.google....=3181596482608619298

Lecture 17: Multidimensional Arrays:
http://video.google....=3737379017318942565

Lecture 18: Structures:
http://video.google....=4655338131907415046

Lecture 19: Strings:
http://video.google....-3715305332680104509

Lecture 21: File Input/Output:
http://video.google....=4094768230297917471

Lecture 20: Nested Data Structures:
http://video.google....=5205501216392527823

Lecture 26: Recursion:
http://video.google....-3715305332680104509

Lecture 25: Recursive Binary Search:
http://video.google....-5158979852046160121

Lecture 22: Course Wrap-up and Review:
http://video.google....=3431535226574067197


If you want to download them for offline viewing, you can use this site with the URL's I provided above.

The textbook they used in this course is Problem Solving and Program Design in C (Hanly and Koffman)

249

Living Room / Tales of Mere Existence

« on: November 12, 2007, 01:00 PM »

I discovered a great comic/film site today while procrastinating.

The artist, Lev Yilmaz, is great at taking the ordinary and mundane and making it hilarious....from the things he thinks about when trying to sleep to a typical conversation with his mom to selecting a video to watch with his girlfriend.

Be sure to visit his Youtube page for more.

http://www.ingredientx.com/

250

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2007 / How to not get stuff done

« on: November 12, 2007, 12:21 PM »

This is just like a day out of my life. 

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=4P785j15Tzk

Now if you will excuse me, my keyboard needs cleaning...so I can get my stuff done.