02/22/08

Earlier this week, Toshiba announced that they would no longer be manufacturing or marketing HD DVD players, which effectively ended the HD disc format war going on between HD DVD and the victorious Blu-ray format. Later that day, author and tech gad ...

Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate when regular speech becomes ineffective over large distances. From Wikipedia: Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication ...

Interview with Michel Gondry on his new movie, Be Kind Rewind. I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don't like cynical people. I don't like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to fight for it. Gondry ...

A series of posts by Mark Bernstein on what he calls NeoVictorian Computing. Some interesting thoughts in there; here's a taste: We software creators woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to t ...

Paula Scher argues that the design of advertising has gotten a lot better in recent years but that the graphic design community isn't paying too much attention. I'm not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to thi ...

factoryjoe : Open letter to Matt & Toni: Three ways for Wordpress to become more of a social network : Rashmi Sinha's weblog - "Wordpress does have the basic ingredients for social network. Spaces for individuals (their blogs) ...

factoryjoe : SXSW Videos - Upload and Share your SXSW Videos. Powered by Viddler. Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: SXSW, Viddler, Video

Rod Begbie : Obama of Dreams - Obama t-shirts in a baseball-logo stylee. (Notably lacking in any donation to the campaign, though) Tags : barackobama baseball politics t-shirts usa

43folders : Random Thoughts from Joel's World: Getting Things Done (GTD), Mutt, and Vim - Sound-looking method for doing GTD with a VIM outline

43folders : Juggling Sheep: Fully Present - Fatherhood

lots of tips for ubuntu and xubuntu users

a slim and fast ubuntu-based distro

another slim and fast ubuntu-based distro

Jakob Nielsen's advice

a decent look at cloud vs. traditional "local" computing

The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

Concerns loom as Google begins testing health records system: I can’t decide if this is scary or not. Dangerous? How do you manage security for something like this? The pilot will involve transferring the health information of between 1,5 ...

How do you or your company release code you’re compelled to release under the GPL? One of the core tenets of open source is that you release your changes to the community. Everyone pays lip service to this idea, but how do people and companie ...

Forget best picture. How can any of us judge what should win the Academy Award for best editing? Hollywood editor Mark Helfrich walks us through well-edited scenes from this year's five Oscar-nominated films.

bowser100 writes "The EFF has named their 2008 Pioneer Award winners, picking three people very familiar to this community — Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla Foundation, Canadian law professor Michael Geist, and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. ...

genji256 writes "Adding to his first impressions, Walt Mossberg has published a full review of the soon-to-come Lenovo X300. As a bottom line he 'recommends the X300 for road warriors without hesitation, provided they can live with its two biggest do ...

theodp writes "A recent Amazon SEC filing sheds light on the puzzling departure of Microsoft Sr. VP Brian Valentine in Sept. 2006. Valentine is the Gen. George Patton-like figure charged with pushing Vista developers, who dumped the still not-ready-f ...

Firebones writes "In 1986, the book Programmers at Work presented interviews with 19 programmers and software designers from the early days of personal computing including Charles Simonyi, Andy Hertzfeld, Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates, and Pac Man programmer ...

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has cyber-bullying on his mind; that and the laws proposed to deal with it. His article begins: "The authors of most of the recently proposed anti-cyberbullying laws have been invoking the tragic case of ...

A large number of readers are submitting the news that Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others including specifically the FOSS world. The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft. The announcement co ...

Serb rioters broke into the U.S. Embassy and set fire to an office Thursday, and police clashed with protesters outside after a large demonstration against Kosovo's declaration of independence.

Sometimes, government inspectors responsible for examining slaughterhouse cattle for mad cow disease and other ills are so short-staffed that they find themselves peering down from catwalks at hundreds of animals at once, looking for such telltale si ...

Cindy McCain did not hesitate as she stepped toward the microphone, taking her place in the history of political wives who stood by their men in the face of rumored or alleged marital infidelity.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will share more information about its products and technology in an effort to make it work better with rivals' software and meet the demands of antitrust regulators in Europe.

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your college exams.

Barack Obama won the Democrats Abroad global primary in results announced Thursday, giving him 11 straight victories in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A strong earthquake shook rural northeastern Nevada Thursday, damaging a town's historic district but sparing residents from any serious injuries.

A woman faces several charges after police said she climbed into a ladder fire truck at a Merrimack fire station and refused to get out.

German researchers on Thursday launched a rocket carrying 72 small fish on a brief space flight to study motion sickness. The cichlids were in an unmanned rocket that blasted off from a launch pad in northern Sweden, said Professor Reinhard Hilbig, w ...

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serb protesters ransacked and set fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on Thursday, venting anger at U.S. support for Kosovo's declaration of independence.

I was reading LWN where there were reports of security holes in a dozen different packages based off Mozilla's Gecko. Someone complained about the lack of a universal library that they should all use so that users would only need to update the librar ...

Serbs attack the US and other embassies in Belgrade in protest at Kosovo's declaration of independence.

I’ve written a book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which is coming out in a month. It’s coming out first in the US and UK (and in translation later this year in Holland, Portugal and Brazil, K ...

To no one's surprise, Gene Simmons has lawyered up and gone knocking at the doors of sites that have reported on a certain sex tape scandal that erupted this week ... including our silicon-headed sibling Valleywag, who have just posted a cease-and-de ...

/ / idiom 1 cop[0].goodInPercent = 100; cop[1].goodInPercent = 0; / / idiom 2 isCrowd = personCounter >= 3; / / idiom 3 injury += insult; / / idiom 4 1: board.draw(); goto 1; / / idiom 5 if (bird[1].feather == bird[2].feather) ...

NicheGeek.com USA Today discusses a couple of successful as well as unsuccessful webmasters of AdSense-driven sites. Some make over a $100,000 per year investing perhaps two or three hours a day -- others publish whole novels online and make $5 per m ...

Earlier this week, Toshiba announced that they would no longer be manufacturing or marketing HD DVD players, which effectively ended the HD disc format war going on between HD DVD and the victorious Blu-ray format. Later that day, author and tech gad ...

At the risk of turning Waxy into a Jonathan Coulton fan site, he performed a short set at the Valve Software's Steam Party capped by a finale of "Still Alive" performed on Rock Band, backed by the Harmonix developers on guitar and drums. I'm pret ...

The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2 [flash] by Brad Borne. [previously]

Like hockey fights ? Like the movie Slapshot? Want to see the real Chiefs? Les Chiefs is a documentary on the toughest team in the Quebec Semi-Pro Hockey League. There can be 10 fights in a single period. Goalies fight. Coaches fight. Some fans fi ...

Perhaps most famous luchador of all time is El Santo (aka Samson), who starred in, amongst many other things, the MST'd Samson Vs. The Vampire Women (Google Video). He even had his own photo comic and bag figure. However, even El Santo himself woul ...

The International Crusade For Holy Relics has been fighting (pdf) to have things like the nails used to attach J.C. to the cross removed from Ebay.

Lucky duckies.King County officials placed $207 million in investments that were subsequently undermined by the subprime mortgage crisis and expect to see proposals soon for a bailout.Taxpayers could lose up to $83 million, county officials say, but ...

This an "I have a sense that" post, based on impressions and therefore not necessarily empirically true, but... I have a sense that there are a hell of a lot of internal Clinton campaign stories lately. You know, campaign insiders talking about the ...

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

Lots of leads for the MP3s of campaign conference calls after yesterday's piece, but so far not one actual MP3 has been squeezed out of MSM or the campaigns. — — I made official inquiries through the Obama and Clinton websites, no respons ...

William King asks how Hillary Clinton justifies her claim that she has 35 years experience in government. It boggles my mind how Hillary came up with a grand total of 35 years of political experience. I know she has seven years of being a senator. No ...

....I think it's time to hand over the reins of Blogsavvy to someone who can make a decent business out of it given that I'm pretty much flat out with Edublogs and Incsub stuff these days.....

.... Я – против всех! Голосовать....

Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that's not all there is to it! This document includes the follow ...

I'm heading out to Tokyo tomorrow in advance of next week's Shoeisha Developers Summit. See you later! Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

very nicely designed browser-based RPG parodying Internet culture; more about the creators  

very entertaining videos created for the awards show  

Torontoist gets official word from the people behind the ad campaign  

yay, drunk Waxy Linking!  

viciously hard Windows platformer with a pastiche of retro games; here's one attempt  

anyone who pays $99/ year for the development kit can submit games for review  

like a freeform Crayon Physics  

The latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project is called "A Portrait of Early Adopters: Why People First Went Online --and Why They Stayed": Our canvassing of longtime internet users shows that the things that first brought them on ...

The SIM Card Spy will suck the data out of a SIM card on to a PC. It's $149. Have you ever wished you can spy on your wife, husband, teens, or colleague phone to see what they are up to? Are they being suspicious when on their cell phone? This SIM ca ...

Random House Audio -- a division of Bertelsmann, one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world -- has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers. In the announcement, Random House ...

From Larry This site hosts this video to explain the launch of two exploratory projects -- first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th. I have decided I want to give as much ener ...

Session description: By lowering or bridging barriers, cyberinfrastructure can bring different institutional, enterprise, and policy models into unaccustomed proximity. The result may be powerful complementarities – or it may be competition or c ...

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in. On Tuesday the Florida Supreme Court hit good old Jackie T with a show cause order, basically requiring that he explain why he has been abusi ...

Another week, another billion yen for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wii fighter doesn't look like it will be knocked off the top spot of Media Create's Japanese software sales charts any time soon, at least not while folks are snapping up Brawl and Wi ...

Coney Island is pretty quiet this time of year. I like it better this way.

AFP

Speed of climate change makes glasshouses bulwarks in the battle to preserve biodiversity. Originally from Christian Science Monitor | USA, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Feb 20, 2008 at 09:03 AM

Cuba has the potential to make 3.2 billion gallons of ethanol a year, a figure that would make it the world's third-biggest producer. Reaching that target would require a massive infusion of foreign capital, but with Cuba quietly modernizing its etha ...

Whether you're starting from scratch with a brand-new computer or you've decided to go back to a totally clean slate and reinstall your entire operating system, here are some tips and tricks to make a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows up-to-dat ...