Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Example of MSN Spaces Sucking: "Server Application Unavailable The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the 'Refresh' button in your web browser to retry your request. Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur."
WSJ.com - Case of the Vanishing X-rays: "When Judge Jack brought this troubling fact up again in last week's hearing, Mr. Laminack shocked everyone by explaining that he doubts his clients ever had asbestosis. Put another way, so eager was Mr. Laminack to support the credibility of his silicosis claims that he admitted in federal court that he believed his clients had previously filed fraudulent asbestos claims. His admission is all the more notable because Mr. Laminack was indicting some of the lions of the asbestos bar -- Dickie Scruggs, for instance -- who (according to defense attorneys) were among those filing 'Alexander' asbestos claims."
Urban Legends Reference Pages: Politics (Katrina and the Waves): "Louisiana isn't a major U.S. supplier of coffee in the sense that beans for the popular beverage are grown there, but New Orleans is a major port of entry for coffee (about a sixth of the coffee imported into the U.S. is stored there), and supplies of the product warehoused in New Oreleans may have been damaged by Hurricane Katrina. (The Chicago Board of Trade has said there were almost 733,000 bags of coffee, each weighing 132 or 150 pounds, in storage in New Orleans on the day Katrina moved ashore.) However, rumors about coffee price increases remain largely speculative until coffee-storing New Orleans warehouses are inventoried and assessed for damage." Truely disturbing news.
Creation Magazine Archive

Monday, August 29, 2005

Andyco.com: "PowerHouse: Breaking the cycle of PowerPoint addiction."
WSJ.com - What Women Want: "When it comes to single-parent families, Everybody's Doing It. That, it seems, is the received wisdom -- but it's not true. As Charles Murray noticed decades ago and demographers have known for some time, the structure of families has diverged drastically by social class. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women with no more than a high-school education has skyrocketed since the 1960s but remains very low among college graduates. Divorce has declined among the well-off but is climbing among the unskilled. Although almost all college graduates still marry eventually, marriage rates are dropping steadily among those without a high-school degree."

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Frames of Reference Interesting Biblical reference.
"Law is whatever is RIGHT, not what lawyers say. Business is that stuff that gets in the way of doing what is RIGHT. Economics is what interferes with doing the RIGHT thing, which is giving everything away." Anonymous Slashdot post. I think this sums up left wing politics.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Blogger BuzzBlog about blogging from blogger, errr

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Ariz. High School Trades Books for Laptops: "'Because most schools are not starting from scratch ... most districts are using a blended approach now and will phase out their printed textbooks,' he said. For example, in the Henrico County school system near Richmond, Va., students in 23 middle and high schools will be using laptops for the fifth straight year, though teachers still use textbooks, said spokesman Mychael Dickerson. Many publishers of traditional textbooks are offering digital formats to address the growing use of computers, and that provided some of the material for Empire High's curriculum. Teachers also used subscription services and free Web resources. Students get the materials over the school's wireless Internet network. The school has a central filtering system that limits what can be downloaded on campus. The system also controls chat room visits and instant messaging that might otherwise distract wired students. Students can turn in homework online. A Web program checks against Internet sources for plagiarized material and against the work of other students, Baker said. 'If you copy from your buddy, it's going to get caught,' he said."

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

USATODAY.com - 'I'd leave here broke': "In a letter to the homeowners' lawyer a year ago, the development corporation justified its behavior by saying, 'We know that your clients did not expect to live in city-owned property for free.' Well, they might have expected not to be bullied for exercising their right to be heard in court."
BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Bombs explode across Bangladesh
New worms hit U.S. media outlets, companies
Pardon for 'sex slave' executed for killing her abusive captor: "The trial of Ms Baker was set for 14 August 1944. On that day, an all-white, all-male jury was picked, the trial was held, a verdict of murder was reached, and the judge pronounced the death sentence. No forensic evidence was presented, Ms Baker's state appointed lawyer called no outside witnesses in her defence, and hearsay evidence against her was allowed."
Bill Clinton's Post-Presidency - A Plan for World Domination: "Clinton is still a man of huge public-service aspirations. He?s still adored abroad. And he?s still considered president by the nation?s estranged, bluer half. Yet he?s also still deeply wounded, burdened by a sense of both underappreciation and unrealized promise. Much more than his successor, Clinton understood exactly which direction the world was headed when he twice took the oath of office, yet he didn?t, for reasons both circumstantial and of his own unlovely making, deliver some of the things he valued most: universal health care, a shored-up system of social security, energy independence, security at home and in the Middle East. He can?t rest on his laurels. So what does a man do with all this feral hunger?to do more, to set the record straight?and all this hurt, God, so much hurt, which steams off him with such intensity it practically blurs the air?"
Taking on record companies: "Santangelo was sued by several record companies in U.S. District Court in White Plains in February. The record companies said Santangelo's home computer and Internet account were used to illegally trade copyrighted song files. The record companies say people like Santangelo are destroying the multibillion-dollar industry." Where is my violin?

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

The story of Mel, a Real Programmer from FOLDOC
TimesDispatch.com | PHOTOS: iBook sale frenzy HAHA! Got this from:News.com
The Southwest Florida GNU/Linux Users Group - Seagate warranty -- not recommended for professional use: "As I write this now (Sunday afternoon or more affectionately known as day 5), I'm still waiting for a replacement drive from Seagate. I'm not holding my breath, as I wrote earlier, I've already arranged for a replacement from my vendor. I just cannot believe that this is how Seagate responds to warranty claims for their higher end products. This is not a run-of-the-mill IDE drive that came with my ordinary workstation. This is a server quality hot swappable SCSI 320 hard drive. This is the kind of hardware you'd regularly find in a server running someone's business."
Clinton: I Would Have Attacked Bin Laden: "'I desperately wish that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole,' Clinton tells New York magazine this week. 'Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early.'" Yeah. Pull the other one.

Monday, August 15, 2005

vb developers embrace linux... say what???
Mac Rumors: Apple and Google Partnership? Yawn.
Vista Gives the Linux Desktop a Chance: "Microsoft isn't saying how it ended up with corrupted files on the Microsoft Download Center. That sure doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Microsoft's protection today or tomorrow. Come on, Linux desktop guys. There's a golden opportunity to take the wind out of Microsoft's sales sails here. All you need do is to keep making the Linux desktop better. Microsoft is already doing its part to make itself an also-ran."
Video Without Boundaries, Inc. MediaREADY? 5000 Advanced Digital Media Center
A Sense of Deja Boom - Yahoo! News: "Yet listen closely, and there's a forlorn quiver in her voice--indeed in the voices of many of this state's half-million hard-boiled residents. Dating back to the 1920s, there's never been an energy boom in Wyoming without a bust trailing behind it."

Thursday, August 11, 2005

PBS | I, Cringely . August 11, 2005 - The Gloves Come Off: "This is why the cable TV companies are all ramping-up their Internet bandwidth. For the moment, they still have an advantage, but in another year or two that will be lost, so they are trying to bulk-up now, hoping customers will later be too lazy to switch."
The Future Of Radio
GrayLady.com: NY Times explodes wall between print, Web

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

DavidByrne.com - home page
Falsifiability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Paul Feyerabend examined the history of science with a more critical eye, and ultimately rejected any prescriptive methodology at all. He went beyond Lakatos? argument for ad hoc hypothesis, to say that science would not have progressed without making use of any and all available methods to support new theories. He rejected any reliance on a scientific method, along with any special authority for science that might derive from such a method. Rather, he claimed, ironically, that if one is keen to have a universally valid methodological rule, anything goes would be the only candidate. For Feyerabend, any special status that science might have derives from the social and physical value of the results of science rather than its method. Following from Feyerabend, the whole 'Popper project' to define science around one particular methodology?which accepts nothing except itself?is a perverse example of what he supposedly decried: a closed circle argument. Moreover, it makes Popper effectively a philosophical nominalist, which has nothing to do with empirical sciences at all. Although Popper's claim of the singular characteristic of falsifiability does provide a way to replace invalid inductive thinking (empiricism) with deductive, falsifiable reasoning, it appeared to Feyerabend that doing so is neither necessary for, nor conducive to, scientific progress."
Falsifiability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SupInfoCom - Arles

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Discovery Lands Safely in California: "Discovery swooped through the predawn darkness and landed at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert at 5:11 a.m. PDT, concluding the conclusion of the first shuttle re-entry since Columbia's tragic return." I'm glad it has concluded,

Monday, August 08, 2005

MS nixes Google hire | The Register: "'Lee is not a search expert,' they state, pretty baldly. 'throughout his career ... Lee was an executive who managed groups developing technologies in the area of speech engines and enhancing the user interface.' All his triumphs were someone else's work, they insist. And Lee didn't know anything about the commercial sphere, either. Hey, welcome to Google, you phoney. In fact the whole lawsuit reads like a work of fiction, and deserves to be forgetten fairly quickly. Two questions can't be, though - why did Microsoft push back now, with Lee? And how significant is this hiring spree? Is Google trophy hunting or are these make-or-break hires? The latter is a very good question, and it's worth looking at how much value media-visible rocket scientists have contributed. Recent evidence suggests not."
Acer Ferrari 4000 notebook | The Register: "When it came to raw power under SYSmark 2002 I expected the Acer to trail the Samsung slightly. After all, the Samsung had a 2GHz Pentium M chip compared to the 1.8GHz Turion in the Acer. However, I was proved wrong, with the Ferrari 4000 edging ahead of the X50 with a score of 252 compared to 241. The X50 did seem to have the edge when it came to PCMark 05 though, turning in an overall score of 2791, while the Ferrari 4000 could only manage 2661."
WSJ.com - The Theology of Global Warming: "First, the 'consensus' is ostensibly based upon the several Assessment Reports of the IPCC. One must bear in mind that the summary reports are political documents put together by government policy makers, who, to put it mildly, treat rather cavalierly the expressed uncertainties and caveats in the underlying scientific reports. Moreover, the IPCC was created to support a specific political goal. It is directed to support the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. In turn, the Convention calls for an effective international response to deal with 'the common concern of all mankind' -- in short, to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Statements by the leaders of the IPCC have been uninhibitedly political. Second, science is not a matter of consensus, as the histories of Galileo, Copernicus, Pasteur, Einstein and others will attest. Science depends not on speculation but on conclusions verified through experiment. Verification is more than computer simulations -- whose conclusions mirror the assumptions built in the model. Irrespective of the repeated assertions regarding a 'scientific consensus,' there is neither a consensus nor is consensus science."
WSJ.com - The Novak Exception, Again: "As long ago as February 2004 ('The Novak Exception'), we warned that the media would regret their demand for a special counsel to discover Mr. Novak's sources, since that same counsel would eventually turn on them. And so the special counsel has, sending Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail for contempt. The members of the liberal press pack owe Mr. Novak an apology, not vice versa."

Friday, August 05, 2005

Commerce Dept. Signs up For Red Hat
Microsoft Shops at Wal-Mart for an Operating Chief - New York Times Gees. Isn't this headline about 3-days old? NYT needs to go back to making up the news so they can get out ahead of everyone else.
Worm risk over Win2K flaw | The Register: "'Whilst news of this latest Microsoft flaw is presently fairly opaque to the industry, we cannot expect that it is, or will remain secret from the so-called 'black hats'. One can expect one or more worms to exploit this flaw as an attack vector very shortly,' said Tom Newton, product development manager of firewall developer SmoothWall."
Fireplaces by Heat & Glo: Gas Fireplaces, Wood Fireplaces, Electric Fireplaces Too bad this website is running Windows on an old 486. Might be easier to go there on a real road as opposed to the "information superhighway".
Developing alien technology? MS can help | The Register: "We're not quite sure what the difference is between 'redaction' and 'deleting' here, but presumably if we could work it out an MS black ops team would storm the building and erase our memories with an MIB-style device. Still, it's better to be safe than sorry, even if Microsoft does add the following caveat: **We recommend that you carefully review any documents redacted using this tool to confirm that all the information that you intended to redact was successfully redacted**. Yes, then eat the original, set fire to the building and kill yourself using the 'Redmond Blue Pill' as supplied with your end user licence. Thank you. Bootnote: *In our dictionary, 'redaction' is simply preparing for publication, or editing. Mind you, it is an 1873 edition - printed long before Microsoft redefined the English language paradigm with its magnificent Encarta offering."
Download details: Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction: "The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically." Or you can simply redact Word from your computer and be done with it.
U.S., U.K. Airlift Robots to Help Russian Submariners: "The situation is atypical,'' Alexander Kosolapov head of the Pacific Fleet's press service, told Rossiya Television after the accident was first announced this morning. "But it's not worth dramatizing.'' What is it with these Russians? They are so "I can handle it, I can handle it!" and then so "Ooops, I can't handle it!"
First potential virus risk for Windows Vista found | CNET News.com: "A virus writer has published the first examples of malicious code that targets Microsoft's upcoming command-line shell, code-named Monad, according to Finnish antivirus maker F-Secure. If the technology is included in Windows Vista, these could be one of the first viruses to target the new operating system formerly known as Longhorn, F-Secure said Thursday." The thing isn't even out yet and there are viruses for it? Way to go Microsoft!

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Microsoft develops new 'Super' language | The Register: "Describing the importance of indexed search and retrieval in Windows at last month's partner conference in Minnesota, Ballmer went one further, by describing the capability as not just 'super' important or even 'super, super' important, but, he ruminated: 'Super, super important, super important.' Watch out for next year's analysts? summit."
The INQUIRER guide to roadmaps Very handy reference.
Darknet: "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation is a new book that offers first-person accounts of how the personal media revolution will impact movies, music, computing, television and games. Released May 2005."

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Gore gored on new TV network | News.blog | CNET News.com: "It's not Blogma's intention to make routinely sarcastic comments about politicians who claim to be Web-savvy. (Honest.) Yet we couldn't help but notice the less-than-flattering blogger reviews of Al Gore's latest 'invention.'"
MercuryNews.com | 08/03/2005 | VCs party like it's 1999 with Brilliant Shopper deal: "Because it's hot, and VCs are the lemmings. Google and Yahoo started making money hand over fist, because of all the advertisers wanting to pay big bucks to list ads beside search results. And now a whole industry of others are trying to replicate that success -- either with an advertising model, or seeking another way to get a cut."
Microsoft Vista means you need new monitors: "The missing technology is Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management and while it is a de facto standard for display copy-protection in televisions, so far it has not made much of an impact in the computer display market. Amongst those that will not have it are the people who spent shedloads impressing their friends with their new Dell UltraSharp super sexy 2405FPW widescreen display." I can hardly wait. Oh... I can wait. I don't use Winderz. I'm still thinking about getting one of those Penguin AMD-64 workstations with Red Hat pre-inwstalled that I saw when I went to check on the blade servers (below).
LINUXWORLD SF: Penguin adds new 64-bit BladeRunners - Computerworld: "AUGUST 03, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Linux hardware and clustering company Penguin Computing Inc. is releasing two new blade servers in its BladeRunner family, the 4130 and the 4140, based on 64-bit chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., respectively. Penguin will be showing off the blades at the LinuxWorld show taking place in San Francisco from Monday to Thursday." Hmmm. I thought Bladerunner went out of business. maybe they just got baught or something.
Comic Strip Blog: NASA dumps space shuttle design and goes back to primitive rockets I remember having arguments about this back in the 80s. Sometimes an idea just has to be tried and seen to fail before people will accept that it was a bad idea. There are a lot of notions that come to my mind that fit this mold. So why are people always so unwilling to try new ideas? And once they ARE dragged along why are both proponents and oponents often so reluctant to simply record the results and move on?
The Final Theory: Interesting.
Science that Backs Up Faith - Christianity Today Magazine

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

A Convert With a Crush on His Mac - Computerworld: "One of the main reasons for my initial interest in the Mac was security. Having spent countless hours repairing my family's, friends' and co-workers' computers after the ravages of malware, it occurred to me that there must be a better alternative. With its Unix core, the Mac OS X operating system was very appealing to me."
Understanding the TCP/IP protocol, Part 1 - Computerworld
Linux vendors cozy up to Debian to push into enterprise - Computerworld

Monday, August 01, 2005

Muslim-American Scholars Issue Fatwa Condemning Terrorism- U.S. Department Of State
? Respecting licenses goes both ways | Open Source | ZDNet.com
Funds of a Bronx Youth Group Allegedly Lent to Air America - August 1, 2005 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper: "The top executive at a Bronx youth organization said yesterday that the former director of Air America Radio received more than $800,000 in loans for himself and the radio network from the nonprofit organization while serving as its development director." Looks like a nice place to work. I wonder if they have dental.
Hacker forced new planet discovery out of the closet: "It transpired that Brown and his friends had been sitting on the information since 2003 when they snapped it with a 122cm telescope at the Palomar Observatory. However they couldn?t confirm much about it until it was analysed again last January. So in the time honoured tradition of boffins everywhere they decided to keep the data from the common people until they knew a bit more. Brown said that data is still being processed and it will take at least six months before astronomers can determine the planet?s exact size. The planet seems to be about 1.5 times the size of Pluto, which is usually dubbed a planetoid because it is so small." That's allright, the hackers probably have faster computers and aren't running Windows. Maybe they can release the info on the planet's size sooner.
corante.com : "The world?s first blog media company, Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business that?s authored by highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists; read by many of the sector's top entrepreneurs, executives, funders and followers; and is helping to lead the emergence of blogging as an influential and important form of reportage, analysis and commentary"
EFF: DeepLinks - Microsoft Sells Out the Public on CGMS-A

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