- Sosumi: more on the Beatles’ lawsuit against Apple Computer, Inc.:
“The Beatles own a holding company called Apple Corps, Ltd., which controls Apple Records, which released records by the Beatles and other artists from 1968 until the mid-’70s, and was recently resurrected to releases Beatles anthologies. Any good Beatle fan knows that,” Roger Friedman reported for FOXNews back on June 3rd of this year.
[...]
Did you know that when the first Macintosh with a microphone shipped, Apple Computer added a new system alert sound called “Sosumi” (“so sue me” – for those Redmond). Hear “Sosumi” here.
I mentioned this case earlier this morning but forgot to mention that I own various patents on the process of making sound, any kind of sound. And have in fact, trademarked the words: orange, beatle and guitar.
Warning Earthlings: The Next Revolution in P2P File Sharing is Upon You. Resistance is futile.
A friend recommended this software over the current crop of P2P managers, I’ll check it out and get back to you — supposedly the security/annonymity is barnone (except for FreeNet types).
- Personal Torrent Collector: It’s a Bit Torrent manager. For those of you that are not familiar with Bit Torrent, it’s a new P2P model that was originally developed to distribute GNU/Linux wares’. Now it has expanded into yet another large network filled with movies, music, games and much much more! Anyways, PTC adds some new features like ‘Pause’ and ‘Resume’ which are very useful no matter how fast your connection is or how large the file is.
PCs are a marvel of engineering on the inside.The shell of a garden-variety desktop machine, on the other hand, is as dull as a command prompt. Users longing for a box whose beauty is more than CPU-deep have invented a new form of self-expression: casemodding – altering a PC’s exterior to make it as distinctive as its owner. Think of it as nerd folk art, equal parts Linus Torvalds and Martha Stewart. Modders don’t just dress up stock boxes. They stuff motherboards into gasoline cans, build containers that resemble gingerbread houses, and custom-fabricate phantasmagoric adornments; they combine expert craftsmanship with whimsy, nostalgia, and a Transformers-inspired sensawunda. It’s a mod, mod, mod, mod world.
My favorite was the Caffeine Machine followed closely by the AMD Big Block. And on a personal note I had a roommate back in college that changed every light on his computer to “dark blue” — even the ones in his keyboard. He also sawed off the side panels on his case and replaced it with a see-through plexi-glass. Then he got married.
The moral of the story: if you start modding your computer case, you’re going to end up modding your life and eventually get married — game over pal — no restart button.
- At USDA, the Mouse Is in the House:
Employees at the Department of Agriculture’s main cafeteria were just sitting down to lunch on Friday when security guards ordered everyone in the huge eatery to leave.Al Qaeda? Bomb scare? No. Mouse droppings. The D.C. Department of Health closed the cafeteria for failing to pass inspection.
Who’s laughing now Upton Sinclair? Ha!
- Research to (Nearly) Die For:
Scientists probing the paranormal said on Wednesday they hoped to set up a major experiment in Britain trying to find out once and for all whether the mind can step outside the body at the brink of death.The proposed study would involve interviewing people who had survived cardiac arrest to see if they had had an out of body experience while on the operating table.
Reminds me of the James Randi $1 Million Paranormal Challenge. I’m getting a vision right now… of yet another empirical loss for ESP types.
- Artists blast record companies over lawsuits against downloaders:
Recording artists across the board think the music industry should find a way to work with the Internet instead of suing people who have downloaded music.“They’re protecting an archaic industry,” said the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. “They should turn their attention to new models.”
Here here, Bob Weir. Anyways, thought you all would appreciate knowing that not everyone in the music industry is an asshole, just most people.
- Biggest Chill: MIT Team Achieves Coldest Temperature Ever:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded — only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The work, to be reported in the Sept. 12 issue of Science, bests the previous record by a factor of six, and is the first time that a gas was cooled below 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree).
Yea, I remember it got below 70 degrees Fahrenheit in Texas once. I thought I was going freeze my britches off.
- GI Joe ad parodies: Remember watching those public service announcements on a weekday afternoon staring some no-name character from GI Joe? Well, you get to watch the same animation but with new 2.0 voices. And uhh, caution about the vernacular, yiggity y0.
My good friend Pavel Kotyza comes through in a big way, with these excellent TV ads from the socialist era. They must be seen to be believed.
Boy do these suck big time. If you thought the craptastic nuclear propaganda found in Atomic Cafe was teh sukc, nothing beats a moth-eaten ad from Czech-no-slovakia.
With a single act of defiance, a lone Chinese hero revived the world’s image of courageAlmost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world’s living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square–June 5, 1989–may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined.
The only really disappointing part of this article was the author never tells you who the guy is. I’ve read dozens of essays about “The Lone Tiananmen Protestor” — but no name, profession, Zodiac sign, favorite food, etc. Don’t make me do the dirty work now.
- Sky’s the Limit for Car Salesmen on Roof of World:
Once they roll off the production line, the Regals and smaller Excelles are stacked on to trains for an 800-mile ride inland to the northern province of Shaanxi.From there, one by one, they are driven southward on the bumpy highways and dirt roads that lead to Lhasa. The whole journey takes about two weeks.
“When they get to Lhasa they already have about 1,700 miles on the odometer,” said salesman Zuo Zhaohu, himself an import to Tibet from another part of China.
I can just see myself cruising down the mean streets of Shangri-la, the Lost Horizon and nodding my head to Heinrich Harrer — in a Buick.
- Tax sin stains state. Summation: We need to tax you, so you can save money. We need to kill you, so you can be freed. I always wondered what people were behind the initiatives to increase taxes. She just made The List®.
- TheBrain:
PowerBrain helps you organize all your Web pages, contacts, documents, e-mails and files in one place so that you can always find them—just like you think of them. This saves you time and makes your life easier! With PersonalBrain you can even find related items—that you worked on—but forgot existed.
This almost reminds me of the StuffI’veSeen project over at Microsoft (I mentioned that a few months ago), but it’s not. I played around with the demo and it’s quite different… though not my cup of tea for the time being. Check it out if you’re looking to streamline notes and projects.
How does the Perspecta display actually create 3D imagery?First, your 3D data is processed in real-time by the Perspecta software. For example, if you’re using SolidWorks to design the world’s fastest skateboard, Perspecta will echo the 3D imagery over to the display. Or, if you’re using the Perspecta SDK to simulate fluid flow through a sports car engine, you use a group of functions to send colored lines and triangles to the display.
This 3D information about skateboards or engines zooms over a SCSI cable to the Perspecta display.
First, the data is crunched by the Spatial Rendering Kernel. A lot of this work is done in Perspecta’s embedded graphics electronics.
Then, the proprietary optics creates 3D imagery that hovers inside a transparent sphere. Basically, the 3D information is put into a format that is similar to thin slices of an apple around its core. Next, a high-speed digital projector shines these “slices” onto a special screen that spins at approximately 730 rpm. Therefore, you can place imagery at locations which have true (x,y,z) coordinates. The result is a convincing, interactive, colorful 3D image that can be seen from any angle in the room.
Check out the photos here and some real-time video of how it works. And yea, ignore all those buzzwords, they ain’t got nuttin’ on these.
- Back story on the Quote of the Day — several libertine teenagers decided to shoot up cars on I-40 in Tennessee, killing one driver. The family of this victim is now suing Take-Two Interactive as they published a game that the teenagers played.
I thought this quote from TheRegister was a perfect response to such an lawsuit:
“Or perhaps the answer to the perennial problem of delinquent teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue the creators of Tetris.”
Remember, video games don’t kill people, people kill people.