Exactly what comes to my mind every time I go to the movies: Newspapers and Movies – Both Fading Fast
(0)Archive for the 'Science' Category
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The site deserves its name – as soon as you start trying it out, you’re hooked. Based on the Music Genome Project
, they listened to and categorized over 10,000 songs with attributes like influences by [insert music style here], mild rhythmic syncopation, electric instrumentation, extensive vamping, minor key tonality, antiphony, etc. etc.
Your personal DJ, suggesting music judging from your previous selections, at your service:
Opera’s state-of-the-art web browser is going to be free from today. They removed the ad banner and the licensing fee, as those two seemed to be the main reasons that limited Opera’s acceptance. The company is still making revenues though. It started with an online party where you could grab a free key for the browser, but it seems the company understood that they never could rival Firefox with their current business model. It’ll certainly cost them in the short run, but if it spreads out enough and grabs a few % from IE, it could work. Since IE 7 beta is going public on December 7th, things finally got into motion.
That’s a lot of money. Skype has over 50 million users, but $2.6 billion is certainly 50 times more than they earn in revenues. I can see eBayers using eBaySkype to contact each other, but honestly, how well do you understand mictures like Denglish, Konglish, Engrish, Chinglish, Spanglish, Franglais, Indian English and other variations?
Since last week, I’ve been trying to get as much information about the hurricane Katrina disaster as possible. I’ve stumbled over a weblog that regularily publishes news snippets from CNN, FOX, MSNBC and others. Crooks and Liars by John Amato is very critical of the current U.S. government and the style of the postings might not be everybody’s taste, since they get explicit at times – but the weblog certainly raises a lot of valid questions about how the government responded to the disaster.
Seeing the number of videos they offer for download and the high number of visitors, I thought their server must have been under lots of stress lately. I emailed to the weblog’s author and suggested to use torrents for distribution. Bittorrent and similar clients are programs for easier distribution of huge files. Since many use them to download movies and songs, RIAA and MPAA are trying to sue operators of websites that host torrents, which are neccessary for clients like Azureus to “find” the file in question and download it. The websites that offer those torrents are quite easy to find, just google for it.
In spite of the entertainment industry opposition to the torrent technology itself, there are lots of legal uses, as can been seen at Legaltorrents, also, the beta version of World of Warcraft, Planetshift (a free, cross-platform MMORPG) and the fan-film Star Wars: Revelations have been made available through torrents. The basic idea this technology is founded on is great – everybody in the network shares his file with everybody else. In the end, everyone gets his file faster and supports others in doing so while the peers in the network with complete copies have a lower traffic load. Visiting Amato’s weblog again this morning, I found torrent files all over the place. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume the files offered there can be considered legal, at least in the U.S. (it might fall under fair use), but I’m curious about other countries, like Germany.
“Crooks and Liars” starts using torrent files
update: Why P2P is Here to Stay
update: NASA Blue Marble Project uses bittorrent
Hilary Rosen worked at the RIAA for 17 years, now she’s been invited to blog for a week over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog – a professor of law who serves on the board of the EFF.
We’re back. There would be lot to write about (in short: it was great, Belgium is a great country), but one mishap on Tuesday kept me busy until today. After my first post from our host’s computer on Monday, I’ve been told that the computer has problems
.
Several dozen viruses, beside Sobig, AntiSpyware Viruses, Trojans and as far as I could tell, keyloggers as well. Since I couldn’t rule out that my passwords for Blogger and several Emailaccounts were compromised, I spent the day with changing all of them. It was time for reneval anyway, but it hits you when you least expect it.
Explain the Internet to a kid using simple terms and concepts… or just show them a video. Like this one. Depending on the age, die Maus is a good alternative (in German).
Science follows fiction. It’s not exactly the Six Million Dollar Man, but it’s getting there:
The world’s first bionic man, Jesse Sullivan, 54, accidentally touched live wires while working as a utility lineman in Tennessee. He suffered severe burns, causing him to lose his arms.
[...]
When Sullivan’s brain tells his arm to do something, it’s done in seconds and he has feeling in the bionic arm.
[...]
By the time it’s perfected, the cost of manufacturing the bionic arm is expected to be about $6 million, according to the report.
The hospital’s website has several videos about the procedure and the results. Give it a few years and people might feel and look natural.
This could be the next big thing. P2P and standard technology. There’s a detailed analysis of the Skype network as well (quite technical). I hope Xten or some other company will create a client for it, I’m using Skype, but I principally don’t like proprietary software that much. Skype is so successful because the installation and usage is a piece of cake, a little bit of competition wouldn’t hurt.
How many Joe Average processors do you need to accumulate the equivalent of 22.8 teraflops (one trillion computations per second) of calculating power? I have no idea, but this one can do it alone – and simulate a human brain. One of the benefits the science team aims at is cracking the neural node, which basically means to understand how the brains works, how it uses electrical signals, how our memory works. It might even help to answer question like how selfconscience and our perception of reality are constructed, how intelligence works? Questions philosophers thought about it and tried to answer and give definitions for thousands of years. The project is not about creating a thinking brain, some kind of computerized artificial intelligence, but still, just the thought of being able to simulate the brain was pure science fiction a few decades ago. You’re mentally ill? Let’s take a closer look…
It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, …
[...]The end product, which will take at least a decade to achieve, can then be stimulated and observed to see how different parts of the brain behave.
Blue Brain project: Mission to build a simulated brain begins
This weblog is going to get a new home soon. I reserved the domain grabic.name, since my internet provider, 1 & 1, supplies its customers with one free top-level domain. I’m also thinking about using WordPress, NucleusCMS or Serendipity in the future. Blogger is a great – free – service, but it’s too limiting.
What to do when you boot up your computer and there’s no internet connection? Two days ago, our phone line went dead for an hour, after that internet was down until a few minutes ago. If you didn’t change your DSL settings, the hardware doesn’t smell or look charred, the software is untouched, then there’s not much one can do: Sit tight and wait. Telekom customer support can check basic DSL availability, so that’s what I did and called them. The storm yesterday night must have broken something since there are outtages all over the country. If you’re lucky and have alternative internet access (a modem or an IT cafe around the corner), take a look at this website next time. Currently there are still some people in my area having DSL blackouts.
…no Man (machine) has gone before: Voyager I is about to leave the solar system after 28 years of travel: