This is one to read later…
Tech Crisis: China & India pass US in Engineering degrees: “While American youths study to head into law and finance, students in China and India are earning engineering degrees in droves and have passed the US in absolute numbers. If science and innovation drive the wealth and productivity of a society, we have a problem…”
Great post on Coding horror, with links to some fantastic Cartoons by the legendary Larry Gonick.
The Cartoon Guide to.. Programming?: “
I recently found a link to a series of Larry Gonick’s mathematical cartoons that were originally published in Discover magazine:
The whole darknet thing has been interesting me recently, not as a way of doing anything undercover, just more of the potential of running networks on top of networks and closed community creating new content.
One post that really got me into it was that at:
http://blogumentary.typepad.com/chuck/2006/03/mpaa_smackdown.html
When Kori Bernards of the MPAA got many questions thrown at her about copyright, when the discussion should have been about Darknets. It goes a little way to show the passion that users have for buying content and using it in the ways they want not in the predefined ways that the middlemen think we should.
The reason it arose in the darknets talk was obviously connected. I have mirrored the videos that are of the event here:
JD Lasica’s Darknet Mashup
SXSW audience and MPAA
Ian Clarke – Encoding broke my DVD
DCMA and Flickr
One of the most interesting papers on darknet is a must read if you are interested in the subject, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman.
Interesting article on the growth of spam in other countries, particularly Asia.
American spam slowing; Europe, Asia taking over: ”
American spam slowing; Europe, Asia taking over
4/21/2006 11:20:01 AM, by Anders Bylund
The most recent global spam study conducted by Sophos shows China closing in on the US when it comes to relaying spam, and the Asian markets together have put some distance between itself and former spam leader North America. In 2004, over half of all spam was sent through the US, but today, that number has dropped to just 23.1 percent according to the report. China relays 21.9 percent of the junk e-mail traffic, and South Korea rounds out the top three with 9.8 percent.
Asian spam adds up to 42.8 percent of the total, and North American runs neck-and-neck with Europe at 25.6 and 25 percent, respectively. A Sophos spokesman explains that the American drop in the rankings is due to the intensified efforts to find spammers within US borders and slap them with high fines. By contrast, some European countries such as Poland and Spain have seen their spam totals increase, presum”
Yepp my second time to crazyville, again for NAB, this time NAB 2006 with vizrt as we have a rather large stand there in the main conference centre showing off our production pipeline.
We will of course be showing off all our products, plus how we have a whole televisual pipeline from asset creation, storage, and publishing to multiple devices at once such as HD television to 3G phones.
This is the Digg description “Have you ever run into a “Missing HAL.DLL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” or “Windows could not start…” message?
That was when I learned about XP’s built-in “Rebuild” command. It often can easily fix “missing HAL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” “Windows could not start…” and similar problems in just a minute or two.”
However this article also gives insight into not only rebuilding but pointers into streamlining installs and reinstalls and other areas users don’t often see with their Windows boxes until too late.
A list by someone (yes, I haven’t taken the time to look at who wrote the article) of some rather nicely designed blogs, but they all seem to have quite interesting content aswell which for me makes them worthy of blogging.
Just a couple of tricks, first updating the software. Apple has provided the commandline tool softwareupdate which can be used like this:
To do installs and updates of the various OS specific and Apple software. Its not Ports, or even APT but its better than nothing I suppose. Another one that is often not known about is the built in, system wide spell checker. Check on the edit menu of alot of applications to see what the shortcut is.
I’ve been looking for a way for ages on getting content down fast on to my Linux server, and the combination of a giganews as my usenet server and my newly installed nzbperl scripts running mean I am getting there.
I have setup two folders on the Linux box, one that is a watch folder, looking all the time for new NZB files, and another with the results of the files. Simply uploading an NZB file will result in nzbperl downloading all the binaries and decoding them. Placing the files in a directory ready to be manipulated.
Soon I will script up some automatic PAR2 and unrar’ing of the files, but at the moment this is just excellent.
As you can see at the moment I am working on a new theme (CSS style) for this site. I was never happy with the old version, it never looked finished so I just started work on it yesterday and I already prefer it so I am going to leave it up for now.
Work will carry on tomorrow evening. Can’t wait to get it finished and looking like it deserves.