Via Reddit is a very cool BSG Space Timeline image, which tries to map out just WTF is going on in the series.
Bookmarking for myself: Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something.
Lifehacker has pics of a Barren Attic to Programmer's Paradise conversion.
We're into the Pirate Bay Trial Day 8 and things are progressing, but not hugely so. Some choice pickings from the entry on torrentfreak:
Kennedy said he qualified as a lawyer since the 70’s but hasn’t practiced recently. He was asked if he understood BitTorrent. Kennedy said he did, but in “very vague terms.” When the defense lawyers asked more detailed questions, about uTorrent for instance, Kennedy said he’d heard of it but had no idea of the details. It was very clear he knew nothing about any remotely technical issues.
If you want to see the real nightmare for the prossecution, check out what happened on day 7:
When asked if he had any network equipment logging exactly what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ of any of his sample downloads, he replied that he didn’t. When asked if he verified in any way during the download process that he had any contact with The Pirate Bay’s tracker, again the answer was negative.
[...]
Then, Nilsson came out to say that he was sure that a majority of the content on The Pirate Bay was copyrighted. However, he had no evidence that supports this claim. The defense lawyers pressed him on this and he had to cave in, “I have no documentation as to the claim that most material is copyrighted. It is just an opinion,” Nilsson said.
Great article on The unrecognizable Internet of 1996. Story via slashdot. Man, 1996 I was in University, was probably working in my first tech job doing tech support, and may have heard of that free unix "linux" thingy. My time was probably more likely spent putting in dirty domain names into the web browsers on campus during class and seeing if "bigboobs.com" was a real site or not. If only then I'd thought of buying up domain names!
A comment on slashdot posted links to some Safari 4 demos of uses for the new HTML5 support it has. The second comment has direct links to a bunch of very cool things. Sadly I doubt you'll see any of these in the wild simply due to the small Safari market share.
Paul Thurrott has some details on what to expect from the Windows Vista/Server 2008 Service Pack 2. The notes include a couple of stand out items, blu-ray disk writing, integrated windows search 4.0, better power management and general compatibility/reliability/performance improvements. Oh wait, hardly any stand out items. Very boring in fact. Course, this might be a good thing... I'm not sure if you want huge changes from a service pack.
Red Hat Sets Its Virtualization Agenda over at OSNews.
This change poster is truly awesome. I must have it on my wall!
Saw the news this morning that Apple has released Safari 4 beta for the masses. It's free of course, for mac and PC, and has a few interesting new changes:
I'm going to give it a go on my Mac for a while, just to see how it is, and see if I can tell just what part of Firefox I'm so attached to. The one thing it really needs is a Firefox-like import of saved data... losing my history, saved passwords, form data, etc would really suck for a convert :(
Slasdot says that BASH 4.0 has been Released. New features are arrays, the ** syntax (matching everything recursively), and a bunch of other stuff.
IBM Developerworks has a nice article on the Anatomy of ext4, which is the up and coming new "standard" file system for Linux distros.
As the article says, sweet merciful crap - Man Vs Machine: Boy Killed Anally When Office Chair Explodes. I'm sitting on the front edge of my chair from now on. Or finding something safe.
Random cool story about how @THE_REAL_SHAQ on twitter is indeed, the Real Shaq: Finally, A Use for Twitter.
QUAKELIVE goes open beta on February 24th. I got in on the closed beta and it's (so far) basically Quake 3 that you can play from the webbrowser.... simple and sweet.
Perfectly timed.... a review of Replacement iPhone earphones. I tried out the TuneBuds myself, but the chord somehow managed to fray at the plugin connection and I lost my left earphone :( Too bad too, they were pretty nice.
Now this is awesome for the photography folks in the audience... check out this Hand Strap. This one is for a Canon, but I'm sure there are others available :)
Microsoft Unveils WinMo 6.5, My Phone, and Marketplace via the Apple Blog (so they might be a bit biased). Short story is a tweaked (not completely new) Windows Mobile, a syncing solution a-la Mobile Me / Exchange called MyPhone and an app store type solution. Sadly while this is still a good step forward, MS (and pretty much everyone but Android based phones for that matter) are still playing catch up to the iPhone. Even the MS advocates such as Paul Thurrott have said this.
Now that said this isn't a bad thing. This forces other companies to innovate and push forward, and the people completely centered in the MS Mobile world still do get an upgrade, which is never a bad thing.
Gizmodo says in their Android G2 Hands On that the new handset from HTC is "Close to Perfection".
Victoria Belmont links to The Trilogy Meter, a great and simple rating of the various movie trilogies out there.
Very cool Article Skimmer concept from the NYT. Via Daring Fireball.
Random comic about how Puttering can get old on Indexed. Great stuff, and speaking as someone with lots of holidays this year, and no idea where to go, it's very true!
OK, here's the story. Lowlife scum fucktards video tape themselves abusing a cat. Lowlife scum fucktards post to Youtube. Story is picked up by various news websites (reddit, digg, etc). Internet has outcry over abuse to cat by lowlife scum sucking bastard fucktards. Then the power of the Internet is harnessed away from porn and Internet memes and it's power is used for good.
Lowlife scum sucking loser bastard fucktards have their youtube video Zaprudered to hell and back, their identities connected through various social networking sites, their likenesses compared, backgrounds in the video are compared to other images they've posted, (think of this as a 2 minute montage of hackers working away desperately) and then the evidence all compiled and authorities, PETA, and local news are contacted.
Happy ending Fucktard loser lowlife scum sucking animal abusing bastards are caught.
The better news is the cat (Dusty) is alive and has been put in the care of the animal shelter and away from the aforementioned fucktards. Sadly the abusers were released to their parents custody instead of being in jail with some nice men who can give them a bit of abuse to see what it's like to be helpless and being picked on by someone 100x their size. Please note that the video is a newscast but still does show some disturbing images and audio (even though it's edited for TV) which personally I had to fast forward through. I'm very glad that this had a happy ending.
Here's a great comment on reddit about how the people at 4chan.org tracked these guys down, as well as some of the early findings. It's also nice to know that anytime anyone does any sort of checking on these two (Kenny Glenn Cat Abuser and Weston Glenn to help with the google juice... someone put up kenny-glenn.com but it's down now, you can check google cache for it though) the first Internet hits will (hopefully) be about senseless animal abuse.
Nice quote from quote from 4chan about how on the Internet you do not screw around with cats.
Confirmed: Palm Pre To Support Flash
Hilarious link passed on from Danni. Deaf Karaoke Live is fairly indescribable..... just watch and enjoy!
Crazy Albertans and their crazy SABLE-3 Balloons. Who things of sending a camera attached to a balloon up to 121,000 feet? This is a bit old, August of 2007, still very cool (and it showed up while I was surfing reddit this morning).
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released. This one is "Lenny", and comes with Gnome 2.22, KDE 3.5.10, Xen 3.2.1 for virtualization, and a bunch of other stuff. Download, upgrade, enjoy.
Holy crap. Check out this Tetris video. Amazing, this guy has got to be a ninja of some sort.
I've seen it all day today, but I finally got a a chance to watch Escape From City 17 - Part One. Best described as a fan made live action Half Life 2 movie. Check it out.
Great list of Mindfuck Movies... you know, the kind you walk out of not exactly sure what just happened, or feeling like you've been kicked in the gut by the final 5 minutes of the movie which somehow completely changed the preceding hours (think Sixth Sense, though it's omitted from this list).
Great list anyway... Primer definitely deserves it's spot!
Random link - F*** My Life - FML : Your everyday life stories. Looks like a hangout for angst-ridden teens :)
If you're not one of the types to think that Consoles are where the performance is at and a netbook is all the "computer" you need, then go on to the next story. If you have a PC, enjoy finding the biggest and the best in the budget, and know the difference between core 2 duo and dual core, then read on. Maximum PC has a Build the Perfect PC! Step-by-Step Illustrated How-To Guide that not only places out some good info about what's available these days (Intel i7 anyone?) but gives you a good rundown on why and how much for many different options.
OK, this one is definitely not for the faint of ear. The Sopranos, Uncensored via /Film is every single swear word from the Sopranos (I presume all 6(?) seasons) into one 27 minute video. Truly awesome in not only scale but execution!
I have no idea why, as I'm not a vodka drinker (unless it's mixed with orange juice), but this Skittles Vodka Tutorial screams "do this!" to me for some reason. How would you drink this? Just plain vodka? Is that kosher?
An interview of Robert Llewellyn on MacBreak Weekly pointed me to Red Dwarf exclusive images on the Dave TV site. Also note that Robert Llewellyn has a podcast called "Carpool" on iTunes, looking forward to checking that out.
Interesting article on the design and pricing in the Apple iPhone App Store. Check out Cold Hard Truth of the App Store.
OK, so if what Paul Thurrott is reporting about Ultimate Extras in Windows 7 is true people should be up in arms, and any Microsoft lovers out there should really be ashamed of their favorite company's marketing.
So it appears (again, this is only rumor at this point as a) nothing is final b) Windows 7 isn't out yet and c) I just read this on the Internet), that not only will there be no Ultimate extras in Windows 7 Ultimate edition, but the UEs you do have installed if you have Vista Ultimate (more on this in a second) are removed during install.
Lets be straight... Vista Ultimate Extras are something that MS should be ashamed of. Vista Ultimate edition's golden feature was supposed to be all this cool extra content you get randomly made available in the form of these "Extras" (I've bitched about this before). The extras that were made available were a joke. Animated backgrounds, a couple of sound themes, and a poker game were about the extent that were delivered. Remember that people are paying top-f-ing-dollar for Ultimate edition. $399 rings a bell for the cost of this, but I'd have to look it up to be sure. Animated backgrounds and a poker game. And now these are silently removed (supposedly) when you "upgrade" to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Now I'm actually excited about Windows 7. I have it installed via bootcamp and it looks like a fairly clean, good upgrade to Vista, really more of a Vista++ than a whole new OS, but regardless I applaud Microsoft for Windows 7, I really do. They'd get a lot of cred if they sucked it up, gave Vista UE owners a high discount (hell, make it a free upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate) and publicly say they screwed up and over-promised what would be coming from Vista Ultimate.
Let me also disclose that I was one of those people who got Vista Ultimate Edition, though I got it through the Microsoft store so it was a fraction of the cost of my guessed pricetag of $399.
Guess we'll see what happens when Windows 7 comes out....
Our provider had it's fiber line(s) cut accidentally by the city of Vancouver (thanks!) and thus the server was off the grid for a few hours today. Things are back up and appear to be all good now. Sorry for any inconvenience!
I'm so glad that someone finally brought this up. I've long wondered how to do this and I agree, there's really no good way (outside of adding some random words after the emoticon to pad things out :) like this).
Robert Scoble talks about Why Amazon Kindle 2.0 won’t suck like 1.0. True as his points may be, $400ish is a bit high to pay for an ebook reader (to me anyway).
The Geek Social Aptitude Test 2.0 by Jason Hummel, Web Developer in Fargo
Adblock plus, the adblock extension for Firefox, makes a case for themselves in their anatomy of ads.
Personally I very rarely use a browser without adblock installed on it, and when I do (or use something that's not Firefox) I always have a feeling of "oh gads, is this what normal people have to deal with?" I realize I'm stealing from the pockets of web developers and the little guy (hey, I run google adsense on this site, and notice a decrease in the meager return I get from it over the last year or so (hint hint)), but the arms race of the advertisers adding more and more ads to pages has just made a non-adblocked Internet unbearable.
Sidenote: please support the sponsors of UFies.org :)
Google Helps You Find a Robot Lady Companion on Mars. Coolest use of an AI, whole compilation of knowledge, and 3D mapping program ever :) Link explains all.
U2's latest single's video: U2 - Get On Your Boots. I'm not sure about the song to be honest, video is definitely interesting though!
Kotaku has some Impressions of the New Wolfenstein.
The story is a bit convoluted. It takes place in a fictional German city called Isenstadt. Even the rep on hand had some trouble explaining it to me, but it involves ancient amulets and crystals. But I know you don't care about that stuff. You just want to shoot Nazis, right?
They sadly don't make it sound like a slam-dunk, but I am looking forward to stepping into the boots of BJ Blaskowitz again :)
Editor Comparison graphs of learning curves for different editors. Love the vi one :)
World of Warcraft no longer legally for sale in Australia - WoW Insider
Kem Meyer on Less Clutter & Noise: New logos after the financial crisis...
This is pretty awesome, a note from @rainmakertom posting about how Stephen Fry posts Twitter updates while trapped in lift.
"Your brilliant comments are keeping us all (hysterically) cheerful. Last a heard engineers still on their way," he Tweeted.
Cool story about the use of this new "twitter" technology. *cough*@arcterex*cough*
Crackulous Allows for App Store Piracy. From Darren. Presented without comment (as it was sent to me).
VMware Releases Open Source Virtualization Client. Not sure I actually know what it is, but it's cool to see VMware releasing some OSS. Via Slashdot.
See where your friends are with Google Latitude. Sadly no iPhone version yet :( Great for real time stalking though!
I know it's old, but this Tropic Thunder promo video was passed on to me today. Hilarious.
Top 10 Funny Answers from Desperate Students. Most amusing. Gracias Mike from work.
Very cool interactive twitter Map of Popular Super Bowl Words.
Another Digg link... the Top 10 Moments From 24 comes to you because I'm looking forward to tonight's episode :)
El Goog has let Google Earth 5.0 out into the wild. The beta has new features in the form of historical imagery and timeline mechanics, ocean floor/surface data (see this story from digg for some more on that) and a new simplified touring system.
Looks like some of the 3D city imagery has caught up to MS Virtual earth too! I've always preferred GE to MS VE, but the MS system has had far more realistic looking city 3D views in the past. Check out this placemark in Vancouver as an example (ensure you have 3D buildings and and give it time to load all the textures).
How cool is this, and how good of a grade do you think these guys are going to get? Students call space station with home-built radio. How long before I can buy a ISS radio at Radio Shack and bug the astronauts too, or they start getting peppered with penis enlargement spam messages?!
