Doctor Who Tardis 4-Way USB Hub
The site says the product is not available… Too bad. I’d get one.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
Yes — this is funny.
I assumed that this was something that people just, you know, do — but apparently they don’t. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the person in the next stall in the restroom — they finish, zip up… and a few moments later you hear the restroom door swing open and shut. Did you hear any water at the sink — let alone soap? No, you did not. Then you spend the rest of the evening trying not to shake hands with anyone…
I don’t want to hear any of that “I don’t pee on my hands” nonsense either. I don’t particularly care if you urinate on your hands or not; immediately after going to the bathroom is probably a good time to wash them.
Apocryphal sources (read: I’m not going to bother to research it) say that a generous portion of food-borne illness is not from salmonella or other food-poisoning, but simply from people having dirty hands. They say a large — way too large! — percentage of both men and women do not wash their hands upon leaving the bathroom.
Via cherryflava.
Can’t we all just — wash our hands when we’re done?
ComputerWorld says, Wait! Don’t buy Windows Vista!
Oh. Well, in that case I’ll put my money away… though, I’m more inclined to think like these guys…
I’m not trying to sound smart or be a computer science elitist — I’m just asking.
In languages like Scheme (ergo LISP), and others, functions (analogous to Java methods) are “first class/higher order objects”. For the purposes of this post, the great benefit of this is the ability to pass a function as an argument to another function.
Now, why, you may ask, would you want to do that?
Continue reading ‘Why can’t Java methods be first class objects?’
Bumptop looks like a very cool new computer GUI paradigm. It’s like a logical extension of the “Desktop” model, adding physics based movement, and allowing you to group your files/objects in “piles” and view and manipulate them in various ways.
Not sure what OS is running under-the-hood here, though; the most information I could find was from Anand Agarawala’s Master’s Thesis, for which Bumptop was apparently created:
BumpTop was developed on a Toshiba Portége M200 TabletPC with a 1.6 Ghz Intel processor, 1 GB RAM and a GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics card. The BumpTop prototype is written with C++, OpenGL and GLUT. Rigid Body Dynamics and collision detection are provided by the NovodeX Physics SDK (www.novodex.com) which is a high-performance physics engine popular amongst game developers and is used to power the marquee first-person shooter Unreal Tournament. Some desktop item icons were designed by David Vignoni from the Nuvola icon theme.
I’d guess that it is probably running on top of Windows, then, though the use of OpenGL suggests the possibility that a port to a Linux desktop would be possible. I don’t know about you, but this is cool.
I think physics-based touch/pen interfaces are going to be the future of our human-computer interactions… it will be interesting to see what form these finally take.
See also:
Bumptop Prototype
Keeping it real: Pushing the desktop metaphor with physics, piles, and the pen
Ever wanted to build a really small computer? According to Linux Devices’ article Via’s incredible shrinking mobo line spawns “pico-ITX”, you may soon be able to…
(Click image to enlarge).
When you look at the relative size of the RJ-45 and the VGA port to the motherboard… wow. That is small. I’ve really never heard good things about VIA, but I’d be willing to check out one of these… At 3.9 x 2.8 inches… at the risk of stating the obvious, you could center one of these on a 3×5 index card and still have a border on each side.
Besides the relatively unlikely instance of a government office using an Apple (unless this scene took place in Chloe’s home) this shot from 24 also features the somewhat disconcerting feature of having an invalid IP address… fun.
via reddit
Ars Technica reports: Indie labels combine to form a “virtual fifth major”.
Nice article; speaks for itself. I can’t see how this can be anything other than a Good Thing.
XML.com has a nice summary of What’s New in Prototype 1.5.
If that’s the sort of thing you like.
