Local10.com - News - Woman's Dying Wish: Bush Defeated: "A South Florida woman who died this week had an unusual last request. Instead of flower or contributions in her name to a charity, she asked those who loved her to try to make sure President George W. Bush is not re-elected."
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Friday, July 30, 2004
New Scientist | DNA: 50 Year Anniversary
New Scientist | DNA: 50 Year Anniversary: "
By David Cohen
Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began."
New Scientist | Evolution of the Car
New Scientist | Evolution of the Car: "People driving in silver cars were 50 per cent less likely to suffer serious injury in a crash compared with drivers of white cars, the research in New Zealand found."
New Scientist | Evolution of the Car
New Scientist | Evolution of the Car: "The entire functions of a radar system have been squeezed on to a single silicon chip about one fifteenth the size of a penny for the first time.
The miniature system has been created by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, who managed to fabricate all the sensing and communications components out of silicon. Their chip is capable of transmitting, receiving and directing high frequency microwaves."
Article: Simpler pump boosts failing hearts| New Scientist
Article: Simpler pump boosts failing hearts| New Scientist: "Most LVADs attempt to mimic the way the heart works, but their complicated design makes them prone to failure, and they have a tendency to make blood pool and clot, leading to strokes. That means LVADs are usually only used as a last resort for patients waiting for heart transplants.
What makes the VentrAssist different is that it only has one moving part, a spinning impeller that drives a continuous stream of blood. That means the pulse is replaced by a gentle whirling noise that patients describe as similar to the sound of a washing machine. More importantly, the device prevents blood from stagnating, reducing the risk of clotting."
SLOCCount
SLOCCount: "This is the home page of 'SLOCCount', a set of tools for counting physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) in a large number of languages of a potentially large set of programs. This suite of tools was used in my papers More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size and Estimating Linux's Size to measure the SLOC of entire GNU/Linux distributions. Others have measured Debian GNU/Linux using this tool suite. SLOCCount runs on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Apple Mac OS X, Windows, and hopefully on other systems too. To run on Windows, you have to install Cygwin first to create a Unix-like environment for SLOCCount (Cygwin users: be sure to use ``Unix'' newlines, not ``DOS'' newlines, when you install Cygwin)."
Terabyte Storage Solutions?
Terabyte Storage Solutions?: "You can buy a beige box 'upgrade' machine in my locality for $150. All you need is hard drives. I would put in a master drive and a cd drive for booting and loading the system. Then, get 5x250GB drives. Make a software RAID out of them. At ~$150/ea., total for for machine is $900.
Now, for extra security, *make the same machine*, and put it on a buddy's/relative's broadband line for nightly rsyncs (do the first rsync on the home LAN, though ;). Give them free techsupport, or backup space on the box, etc. Total cost, $1800. Offsite backup, esp. on different power grid and internet backbone, is a lifesaver."
Terabyte Storage Solutions?
"I just built a 2 terabyte machine,... Here's how to do it for a lot less:
1. Throw out the idea of the 3ware card. I've used them. They're overpriced pieces of crap. Responsiveness under load is horrible. Linux's software RAID works much better. Savings: $770
2. Use 300-gig drives. Fewer of them means a much cheaper casew ($124 in my case). Savings: $200
3. Two 550-watt power supplies? Stop believing the crap in the overclocking forums. The relatively cheap 400-watt power supply that came with the case easily powers eight 300-gig drives and a dual processer motherboard. Savings: $204
Total savings: >$1,000
If you're thinking of using Windows on this, well, maybe you need the hardware RAID controller. Under Linux, the software RAID implementation is second to none - and I can guarantee that your host CPU will crank out parity in amounts that one of 3ware's cards can't even dream of. Combined with Samba, nothing on your network will know that it's not talking to a Windows machine.
"
Slashdot | Terabyte Storage Solutions?
Slashdot | Terabyte Storage Solutions?: "My server (with a smaller by far RAID) used to be a dual athlon too. I got tired of paying for the electricity, so I switched it to a Athlon-M 2500 and setup all the powersaving stuff. (It took ages to find a desktop board with a PowerNow capable BIOS and voltage regulator...) Kernel compiles are a little slower, but 90% of the time (even streaming data at 100mbit) the processor stays in it's low power mode. What once took 350watts now takes 70. Highly recommended."
::3ware::
::3ware::: "Supporting up to 3.6TB of storage per controller (dependent on drive capacity, 2TB per array maximum.) , 3ware offers the only 12 and 8 port ATA RAID controllers available on the market today. These controllers fit the bill with applications where high levels of sustained read and writes are required, such as enterprise storage, NAS/SAN, web servers, near-line backup and archival, and streaming video."
Saturday, July 24, 2004
ESA Portal - Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites
ESA Portal - Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites: "Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins."
Thursday, July 22, 2004
James LOVELOCK 's Preface on nuclear energy
James LOVELOCK 's Preface on nuclear energy: "'Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy'
by Bruno Comby"
Hawking cracks black hole paradox | New Scientist
Hawking cracks black hole paradox | New Scientist: "After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.
It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This 'Hawking radiation' contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.
But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.
Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this 'fuzzball' does contain information about the insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March)."
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Emails reveal dodgy political funding
Emails reveal dodgy political fundingINVESTIGATORS INTO the Enron scandal have found emails that show that the company was propping up Republican politicians with illegal money.
According to Associated Press, the e-mails were circulated among Enron officials in 2000 and 2001, before the energy company went belly up.
In an e-mail from May 31, 2001, Enron’s Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson discuss a $50,000 contribution solicited by Republican organisations for a dinner saluting President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Start-ups search for hard-drive replacements | CNET News.com
Start-ups search for hard-drive replacements | CNET News.com: "'I can see us doing 20 to 50 times the capacity per (chip) than they do,' said Nanochip CEO Gordon Knight, referring to flash memory makers. His company is a Fremont, Calif.-based start-up that has received a rare venture investment from Microsoft."
Friday, July 16, 2004
Cloverleaf Quasar (H1413 117)
Cloverleaf Quasar (H1413 117): "A quasar, discovered in 1988 and located about 11 billion light-years away in Leo, that appears as four different images because of a gravitational lens effect caused by a foreground elliptical galaxy. Molecular gas (notably CO) detected in the host galaxy associated with the quasar is the oldest molecular material known and provides evidence of large-scale star formation in the early universe."
So you got Windows, there's a critical update required
So you got Windows, there's a critical update required: "As Microsoft explains here, this behaviour is by design.
But is it fair? Of course not. Life's not fair. Fairness and Microsoft don't necessarily sleep together as intimate bedmates either. You may also notice that if you go to a large number of corporate web sites they don't behave properly when using non-IE browsers. Such, as Ned Kelly is rumoured to have said, is life. Especially in the IT sector. ?"
Sharman Networks Cleared to Bring Lawsuit Against Entertainment Industry
Sharman Networks Cleared to Bring Lawsuit Against Entertainment Industry: "n his ruling, Judge Wilson acknowledged that Sharman Networks has every
right to pursue its claims that the record label and motion picture plaintiffs
in the lawsuit have infringed Sharman's copyrights. Unlike the plaintiffs'
claims that third parties are infringing their copyrights, the court has ruled
that Sharman may pursue its claim that these plaintiffs directly and through
their agents infringed Sharman's copyrights. In addition, Sharman Networks
can now also pursue its claims that the industry plaintiffs breached the End
User License Agreement (EULA) for the Kazaa software by:
* Using the Kazaa software to transmit and download spoofed or corrupted files.
* Violating state and federal personal privacy laws and the rights of individual computer users by hacking and exploring files located on their computers.
* Using the Kazaa Software's instant messenger functionality to send threatening messages to other users of Kazaa software."
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Monday, July 12, 2004
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Yahoo! News - U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack
Yahoo! News - U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior House Democratic lawmaker was skeptical on Sunday of a Bush administration idea to obtain the authority to delay the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda,"
Haaretz Article
Haaretz Article: "VERSAILLES, France - A young woman and her baby were attacked in a suburban train near Paris on Saturday by unidentified men who drew swastikas on her stomach with a pen in what police said was an anti-Semitic assault."
Friday, July 09, 2004
Thursday, July 08, 2004
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
New Scientist
New ScientistThis article describes a study carried out by a US researcher and two German academics, who "evolved" algorithms to determine what data should be held at a cache and for how long."
CoolTechZone-The Ultimate Source of Tech News::Evaman worm attacks mail servers::
CoolTechZone- Evaman worm attacks mail servers::: "
Evaman worm attacks mail servers
Written by Gundeep Hora
Monday, 05 July 2004
Symantec is reporting the mail servers of various popular email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo to be bogged down with a new worm, code-named Evaman. Symantec, has given this worm a critical warning and states that this worm could be as as dangerous as the MyDoom virus. Evaman occupies a false email address, sends itself to PC users as an attachment, and once the attachment is opened, the system turns into a host system to send out more emails with the same malicious code.
The headings are common to the ones users encounter everyday in their inbox - 'Failed Transaction' or 'Delivery Failure'. This worm has the potential to take control over Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, NT, and Windows Server 2003."
Monday, July 05, 2004
Internet Archive: FreeCache
Internet Archive: FreeCache: "FreeCache works by moving content 'hot spots' on the web closer to users. This provides several advantages to various parties involved: Users get faster downloads, content providers pay less for Internet-bound traffic, and ISPs pay less for Internet-originating traffic."
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - High-Tech: Activist: E-voting to be a 'train wreck'
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - High-Tech: Activist: E-voting to be a 'train wreck': "SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their homes and offices, a literary publicist has uncovered conflicts of interests and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.
Searching the Web and poring over newspaper clippings, Bev Harris has unearthed obscure arrest records, ties to conservative political groups and other embarrassing secrets of senior executives at voting companies.
Her conclusion: there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000."
Friday, July 02, 2004
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• Key Players in the Plame Affair