Found this article about a new MP3 player from Dell on Daring Fireball.
In short it looks as though Dell are trying to do the whole Apple iPod thing including the music store.
Mr Gruber is unimpressed and so am I. (Mind you my experience with Dell machines are hardly pleasant. So far the only good thing I can say about this manufacturer is that they make computers in black.)
A Princeton University student has published instructions for disabling the new anticopying measures being tested on CDs by BMG — and they’re as simple as holding down a computer’s Shift key
LookSmart, one of the dodgier search engines, has been hit hard by news its biggest customer, Microsoft’s MSN, would not renew an agreement which accounts for most of LookSmart’s revenue
Coles Myer has followed Telstra’s lead and begun flirting with open-source software, such as Linux, as the retailer rationalises its IT operations. Even Microsoft is toying with a licensing scheme similar to an open-source arrangement for one of its code libraries
ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.
Also of note is the lawsuit of Wile E Coyote v ACME.
Tom Baker, the fourth Dr Who, told BBC Radio Five Live that comedian Eddie Izzard had landed the part. But BBC says no final decision has been made on who will star in the TV show when it returns in 2005. I’d like Richard Grant for the role, but am quite taken by the suggestion of Jonathan Pryce
A disused industrial site at Green Square will become Sydney’s first legal squat, where students will live for a token sum pending redevelopment of the site. Six art students and four architecture students are due to move into the dilapidated Waverley-Woollahra incinerator within the next three weeks pending approval from South Sydney Council. The project already has tentative support from the property’s owners, Waverley Council and Woollahra Council
Researchers at Loughborough University in central England say they may have worked out why the cookie crumbles and that the problem may be due to cooking techniques and humidity
Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design is a concise article on what is possibly my favourite design element — colour. (For those of you who are not designers/artists of some description, and quite possibly some who are this may sound a bit mad). It’s also an element that clients are very wary with and almost always go with the *safe
option, ie blue grey and predominantly white — maybe a smidggen of orange or red.
When clients come to me asking for a new web site or interface they have such bold ideas for being fresh and eye catching, something with a personality of it’s own. In the end all they seem to want is what’s *safe
or what their competitor has with a slight twist. Colour is not something clients want to stuff up because it has such an immediate and emotional impact on how users see the company.
Yes sometimes safe
colours are appropriate, but it seems to me that this IS the sole reason they are often used, leaving us with some bland unmemorable designs, almost indistinguishable from one site to the next.
*Safe, ie neutral light colours that won’t offend and in many cases don’t impress either.
More disturbing imagery from Warren Ellis:
She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn’t have. Don’t be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.
I threw up between her legs and she didn’t talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can’t really blame her for, but still.
I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.
Had them hacked off at the knee and came home with a suitcase full of modular replacements. The stumps had little Firewire ports that plugged into the new lower leg units. She fitted what she called her Sex Legs and flexed artificial toes, feet fixed in a perfect arch to accomodate the welded-on six-inch heels. Apparently there were Segway gyroscopes in the calves to keep her upright when she walked.
I came home one night to find her in a red latex minidress and sixteen legs. Spider things were sprouted from her knees, eight legs each. She paraded on the plastic kitchen floor for me, swinging her hips. Clackclackclackclack on the floor. Clackclackclackclack.
She stuck her tongue out at me when I started retching. There was what looked like a DC power inlet on the tip.
After that, it just got ugly. I had to go. I saw her again a couple of weeks ago. She introduced her new boyfriend as Spin. His skin was cold and shiny, like white plastic coating over steel. He had a revolving drum in his stomach. She leant against him and grinned.
I’m living in my car now. My car loves me. I mean, it wouldn’t have grown a real vagina for me otherwise, would it?
Philips has found a way to burn a dual layered DVD+R. Unlike other dual layered disks that have been developed, this one is also designed to be backwards compatible with current DVD players. The DVDs will hold 8.5GB of data — 4 hours of video — and are set to be released as soon as next year
Google’s new AdSense terms of service, not only allow them to terminate you without notice, cause or recourse (withholding any sums owed to you at the time), but also bind you to a number of restrictive confidentiality terms, including one that prohibits you from criticising the service. This is definitely on the wrong side of the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ line
A literary gem from Warren Ellis:
I had to kill the pig.
It was a GM Vietnamese potbellied pig that some freak had meatfitted with a voicebox and the frontal lobe of a grown-up crack baby.
It scuttled across the carpet on fat little legs, firing hideous acidic turds out of its fortified arse like it was Satan’s vending machine. I loaded the harpoon gun I’d borrowed from Sunil. There are a few parts of the world where you can legally hunt humans who have gone aquatic, and Sunil owed sexual favours to all of them. The pig turned, rasping “Fuckpig! Fuckpig! Fuckpig!” I’d not yet worked out whether he was talking to me or telling me his name, but it seemed to be the only word he knew. I’d been listening to it for two weeks. Two. Weeks.
The harpoon locked down into the receiver chamber, and the air compressor hissed, charging the gun.
I hefted the gun and took aim as the bastard dropped another shit on the carpet, burning another hole in it. “This is it, you disgusting fucking object. Melissa left me with a disease so unusual and horrible it does not have a name, a weird Japanese doll that sucks out its own urine, and you. I’ve had my urethra irradiated, I listened to the doll scream as I shoved it into a wood chipper, and now there’s only you left. The pet pig.”
“Fuckpig!”
The compressor stopped hissing. The gun’s chip crooned to me, for no good reason, in the synthesised voice of Peter O’Toole: “You may kill things now, young man.” I threw the receiver lock to open the barrel and fired at the pig’s smoking anus.
Of course I bloody missed.
The pig hurled itself to one side like it was an action movie hero, rolling and coming up poised and ready on its foul black trotters. The harpoon thudded into one of my speakers. I fumbled another one into the chamber and slammed down the receiver lock, hoping there was enough push left in the compressor for another shot at the little crapmachine. I waved the harpoon gun at it. You couldn’t see its eyes; they were dark wet slits surrounded by great folds and swells of warty pigflab. But you knew it was scheming. I edged between it and the clear run through my long thin apartment to the front door. I had it pinned here in the back bedroom. Nowhere to run.
It feinted to my left like Ali, with a rasped “Fuckpig!” I pretended to follow the feint, and then snapped the gun back as it launched itself for the opening it expected between my right and the doorjamb.
It realised I had it and pissed itself in mid-air, an evil green sprinkler. Twisted its immense gut around to carom off the wall. I kept a bead on it as it bounced off my bed — realised too late that it was aimed for the window.
Fuckpig! and it hurled itself through the window. I ran to the sill, trying to keep my hands away from all the broken glass. The pig had launched itself with some force, I gave it that. There was a chance it could reach the shopfront awning on the other side of my narrow market street. The odds were better that it’d miss and splatter. But I don’t like gambling, really, and this was a personal thing.
I put a harpoon through the bastard pig from arsehole to breakfast-time, skewering it in mid-air.
It dropped down into the market, landing on a fruit stand. Its guts let go and the awful flow dissolved all the apples. There was a storm of swearing in Croatian, and then the retching started.
And, you know, this is as good as the next month or so got.
The Ig Nobel awards for 2003 were presented at Harvard University.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has formally taken court action against Domain Names Australia and its director for alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act related to mailouts to domain name holders
Adelaide-based telco Agile Communications has circumvented the limits of Telstra’s ADSL network by building its own broadband infrastructure in a small South Australian town
Seventeen conservation and wildlife protection groups filed suit this week to challenge the federal decision to lower the status of the gray wolf from endangered to threatened in the lower-48 states. The decision would also ultimately hand over species management to state governments, at least one of which has called for extermination of the species
Bert Hickman, a retired electrical engineer living outside Chicago, enjoys using magnetic force to smash coins to roughly half their normal size.
Bert’s high-voltage equipment takes up most of his screened-in porch (from the looks of things, his wife drew a line at the sliding door — there’s a clear border between tidy suburban house and chaotic suburban lab). Bert begins the coin-shrinking process by wrapping a quarter in copper wire and bolting the leads to copper bus bars, which are connected, by way of a triggered spark gap, to a 600-pound bank of 12,000-volt capacitors. A bulletproof blast shield encloses the coin and coil, and a high-voltage power supply charges up the capacitors. The only thing holding back the several thousand joules of energy stored in the capacitors is the tiny space between the spark gap’s two brass discs.
Pressing a switch triggers the spark gap, which releases the entire charge through the coil in 25 millionths of a second. This creates a huge magnetic field, which induces a current and then a magnetic field inside the coin, which in turn pushes back against the field outside. The repulsion force between these two fields crushes the metal, instantly taking a quarter down to the size of a dime. A large amount of energy discharged in a short amount of time usually entails an explosion, and in this case the copper coil is blown apart with a brilliant flash and a satisfying bang.
Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall
Intel’s Vanderpool is a computer chip designed to run more than one operating system at a time could break Microsoft’s stranglehold on PC software
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