Penelope Corcoran, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter, had a chance to try out a Bow-Lingual on Crema, her part-Chihuahua part-Dachshund beastie. The unit didn’t score too well, looking more like an expensive, battery hungry, canine version of a Magic 8-Ball than a true translation device
Scientists studying an unspoiled jungle river wilderness in Venezuela have announced the discovery of 10 new fish species, including a red-tailed tiddler, a ‘punk’ catfish with a spiky head and a piranha that eats fruit as well as flesh
Edward Tufte is professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics and graphic design at Yale. He’s also no big fan of PowerPoint, likening it to a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint — pointed out by sbszine — illustrates the absurdities of PowerPoint beautifully.
Easyjet 737 HB-III departed on 15 August at 09:50 from Geneva and flew ten minutes later into a thunderstorm. They returned to Geneva for an emergency landing with extensive hail damage.
A satellite image shows the extent of the recent blackout on the east coast of the US.
Human rights groups have condemned Vietnam for upholding espionage charges against Pham Hong Son, an imprisoned cyber-dissident and pro-democracy activist, calling for his immediate release
The Fuelcell Propulsion Institute plans to convert a 120-ton diesel locomotive into a fuel cell-driven train, a project that could one day make fuel cells a reality for subways allowing trains to run independent of the electricity grid
An alliance of online music broadcasters sued the recording industry in federal court, alleging major record labels have unlawfully inflated webcasting royalty rates to keep independent operators out of the market
Mexico claims multinational chain Zara is abusing trade agreement by importing cheap clothes from Asia
Technical writers aren’t very funny, so this is something of a rare and unintentional exception. Darren Barefoot has assembled a bunch of examples of bizarre technical illustration. The link to the site on learning to use Japanese toilets is worth checking out
Yahoo! News is now offering the feeds in the RSS format. The feeds are free of charge to use for individuals and non-profit organisations for non-commercial use
Osirusoft, one of the largest anti-spam black-lists, has been shut down by its operator following a barrage of massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks that have crippled the service
Amazon has filed 11 lawsuits against marketers that used its name when sending bogus e-mail, charges that echo a widening problem for companies operating online
Software giant Symantec is adding product activation technology to all of its upcoming consumer products, starting with Norton Antivirus 2004. Customers who fail to activate the software by contacting Symantec within 15 days of installing it will be left with a non-functioning application. Despite such good intentions, product activation remains a tricky business, and that Symantec runs the risk of alienating loyal, legitimate customers by imposing the technology
It’s always interesting to read through the search logs for the site to discover what loons have been attracted like moths to a flame.
This week’s offerings include: vampire
, were wolf
[it’s one word, mate], aligator man
[misspelt], bambi
, chimera twins
and come cabra
[another misspelling], which strange as it may seem are all actually site content.
The odder searches were: custom guns
[wanker], eardrum
[huh?] and the bizarre dog hair dye
[run, Fido, run].
These people are out there. They are your friends and neighbours, they are the annoying people who read over your shoulder on public transport, they are the people walking brightly coloured dogs, they can’t spell, are searching for weapons and are capable of entering random characters into a search engine. Be afraid.
AOL has added weblogging tools to its internet offerings and Yahoo is trialing its blog tool in Korea. While Jason Kottke tries to educate the press on the correct usage of weblog
Three Boston companies think it’s about time to change the light bulb, saying that LEDs are the future of illumination
In a case that pitted trade secret rights against free speech, the Supreme Court in California has ruled that courts can block internet users from posting codes that can be used to illegally copy DVD movies
Over the weekend, a denial-of-service attack took down the web site of The SCO Group, which is caught in an increasingly acrimonious row with the open-source community over the company’s legal campaign against Linux
Neil Gaiman writes about the shortcomings of a kitten that waits until you’re asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
Makes my dogs wake-up tactics look tame by comparison.
Telstra’s 100,000 cable broadband customers were unable to log onto to the carrier’s service for four and a half hours this morning, thanks to a faulty router
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