Gadgetopia

Scaled Composites, the X-Prize competitor funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen, and led by aviation uber-genius Burt Rutan, has scheduled a test flight that, if successful, will be the first space launch in history by the private sector. SpaceShipOne will rocket to 100 kilometers (62 miles) into sub-orbital space above ...

Scientist Imagines Elevator Reaching 62,000 Miles Into Space: This seems so wrong on so many levels. President Bush wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that's really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles ...

Here's a funny video from a space shuttle flight that features a Macintosh. I can't tell from the video or the hosting site what mission it's from, but the machine is a Mac Portable, which was introduced in mid-1989. We've talked before about Macs in Space; one thing I didn't ...

Human Space Invaders Recreation: This is so cool I could cry. A group of people recreate the classic game Space Invaders using stop motion and people. They did Pong too, but it's not nearly as neat. (Beware of the sidebar content on this site. Some of it can be questionable.)

Outer Space Exposure: It turns out that if you get kicked out of a spaceship without any protection, you won't explode. Oh, you'll still die, but not in the fantastic manner portrayed in the movies. Though an unprotected human would not long survive in the clutches of outer space, it ...

'Space Invaders' to alight on U.S. soil Japanese game machine maker Taito said Friday that it plans to restart sales of "Space Invaders" in the United States, almost 25 years after the video game first appeared in arcades. [...] Taito aims to sell 10,000 of the standalone game machines at ...

Our company is sort of in the market for office space. We have an office now, but we're casually looking for something we'd feel a little more at home in. We've been talking about it, and all of us want the same thing: something very hip, very cool, like...oh, I ...

Space.com has an article about the computers controlling the Mars rovers; turns out they're using RAD6000 processors, which are glorified PowerPC chips designed for the rigors of extra-terrestrial duty. Kissin' cousins to the G4 on my desk! "This has become a real workhorse for space missions," Scuderi said. "We currently ...

A friend of mine got within 4% of his Gmail limit. Here s what happens.

Orbiter - A free space flight simulator: If you get tired of the terrestial confines of FlightGear, expand your boundaries a bit. ORBITER is a free flight simulator that goes beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere. Launch the Space Shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to deploy a satellite, rendezvous with ...

Maxim, U.S.A. on MAXIM ONLINE: Maxim Magazine took their cover of Eva Longoria, blew it up to about 100 ft., and laid it on the ground just outside Las Vegas. Then they photographed it from space in a promotion with Google Earth. If you don't have Google Earth, there's a ...

A Rocket To Nowhere: This is a brutal but facinating essay on the shuttle program. The author makes a compelling case that the program is less than worthless and should be abandoned -- along with the ISS -- as soon as possible. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by ...

Hubble casualty of Bush space plan: Sometime in the future, we'll be mourning the poor Hubble Space Telescope. It was good while it lasted. The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush's plans to send humans to the ...

It's the newest extreme sport: Expensive Hardware Lobbing. The object: Get your multi-million dollar space probe to explore another planet without crapping out before it can do the job. The players: Earth's space-faring nations, and all other planets in the solar system. The rules: There are only four major ones. ...

What happens when you crap in outer space?: This is a two-minute video by a guy from the Canadian Space Agency discussing how you go to the bathroom in outer space. It ends with an explanation of what shooing stars might be that s worth knowing

Congrats goes out to the Chinese as they have successfully launched a person into space. Looks like space will be getting a little more crowded, but at least the food will be good. NASA better watch out, price for sending people and payload into orbit will soon take a tumble. ...

What's in a Name?: CMS Watch (formerly CMSwatch) ran into a copyright problem you wouldn't quite expect. CMS Watch is now two words instead of one, following a short spat with Swatch AG over our trademark. We capitulated in the face of deeper legal pockets and are now pushing the ...

SlashDot points us to a fascinating article on how Swedish engineer Boris Smeds saved the Huygens Probe from certain failure during its upcoming landing early next year. [...] it was quite a shock when Boris Smeds, a graying, Swedish, 26-year ESA veteran [see photo, "Unsung Hero"], who normally specializes in ...

Well, maybe not that far. Yet. The FAA on Wednesday licensed the first private rocket, and has given the green light for a real sub-orbital space flight. Burt Rutan and his California-based Scaled Composites have built SpaceShipOne, a funny looking rocket-powered plane that Burt hopes will usher in "a renaissance ...

Space venture has West Texas county abuzz: Has Jeff Bezos jumped the shark? I never picked him for something like this, I guess. It even makes Branson look level-headed. Over the next 30 to 40 minutes, Simpson said Bezos told him the goal of his venture known as Blue ...

Boy, 4, dies after riding Epcot attraction: This ride is apparently pretty intense. From the CNN article: In 2003, Disney began placing motion sickness bags in the ride. During an eight-month period in 2003-04, six people over age 55 were taken to the hospital for chest pain and nausea after ...

NASA rethinking death in mission to Mars: There are some very sad questions you have to answer when you re sending someone to Mars. How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back? When should the plug be pulled on ...

I simply must visit Lifehacker more often; their site is chock full of good stuff today! They linked to NeedMySpace.com this week, a site that allows you to send a special "Get Lost" message to a special someone. Lots of options for images and messages so that you can get ...

Burt Rutan and company dropped by St. Louis Saturday to pick up their check from the Ansari X-Prize folks. "Eight years ago, we stood here and said one day someone is going to do something no one's ever done before," said Doug King, president of the Science Center. The X ...

SpaceShipOne captures X Prize: Yeah, baby. What a great headline. SpaceShipOne climbed into space for the second time in a week to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize. X Prize officials said the privately funded craft reached 368,000 feet -- well into space -- Monday to win the $10 ...

Interwoven to Buy iManage: Another consolidation in the content management space.

Readying Gateway's post-PC future: Man, I gotta buy some Gateway stock: "Eighteen years after co-founding what would become of one most recognized PC companies in the history of the computer industry, Waitt is working as quickly as he can to shed Gateway's image as a PC builder. ... 'We're taking ...

Elevator 2010: Move over XPrize, Elevator:2010 is here. They're offering $50,000 to the best "climber" prototype, with a couple of other contests for some other pieces of the puzzle. We firmly believe that the set of technologies that underlie the infinite promise of the Space Elevator can be demonstrated, or ...

Continuing my theme of REALLY big things, LaCie has announced the Bigger Disk, a one terabyte external drive. More than enough space to store all of your music, photos and movies whether obtained legally or otherwise. The LaCie Bigger Disk, with the largest hard drive capacity available, is a unique ...

Looking for a smaller PC? How about one the size of your desktop's CD-ROM drive? They're pricey, but LittlePC.com has some of the smallest systems you're likely to find. Littlepc.com is a manufacturer of small pc, mini pc and little pc products designed for limited space applications. The small computer ...

Private spacecraft makes historic launch: SpaceShipOne is in the air as I write this, trying to become the first private, manned vehicle in space. I wish them every success toward this goal. Thousands gathered in the Mojave Desert to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private manned space flight. ...

GalleryPlayer: Don't want to get stuck with the same old art hanging on the walls? This service will "deliver" images to your plasma television (or many, depending on how rich you are), and rotate the image at set intervals. It's based upon something Bill Gates himself has in his home. ...

Project Blackbox: This is the coolest thing in the history of the world. Ever. Expect to see one of these in my yard soon. After today, you'll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter--built ...

Open House: I want to go so bad it hurts. Joel, send me a ticket. Great pictures at that URL of their new office space. Someone in New York needs to go and take pictures. Here at Fog Creek Software we recently finished a big expansion of our office space. ...

Hubble spies lord of the stellar rings: The picture with this news article is eerie. (There's a scientific discovery buried in there somewhere as well, but that's not nearly as interesting the Eye of Sauron....) A recent image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope which makes the system look ...

Werkema.com: Software: SpaceMonger: This is a great little freeware app which I found on the Pricelessware site. SpaceMonger examines your hard drive to see where you're using space, and displays this analysis to you in the form of rectangles the bigger the rectangle, the more space that directory is ...

Godzilla PVR: These guys built their own PVR with 11 tuners and 1TB of storage space. They did this to demo their own software: Beyond TV. For $70 and the hardware, you too can make the PVR of your dreams. Since the price of 250 GB hard drives have dropped ...

Vega Strike looks completely awesome. I have no idea how I've never heard of it. Vegastrike is an OpenSource 3d Space Simulator. Currently in Beta development, the project, at version 1.0, is to be a generic space simulator. Current features include split-screen play, trading, exploration and of course plenty of ...

I'd like to make an appeal to all the developers in the world for software that doesn't install. Just give me an executable. Bundle everything up into that, or perhaps have a handful of DLLs in the same folder as the program. I get the program, I stick it in ...

One of the links from the Oceania site that Deane talked about earlier is the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to providing solutions that will safeguard humanity from the growing threat of terrorism and technological cataclysm. Seems odd that they'd think to use something ...

A design classic: This is an interesting little essay by James Dyson you know, the guy with the oh-so-delicate British accent in the commercials for his neon yellow vacuum cleaner? (These commercials were recently parodied by Saturday Night Live imagine if Dyson invented a toilet...) CNN apparently asked ...

I'm using a new stat tracking app called Mint. It has a plug-in called "User Agent 007" (ho, ho -- what wit) that captures browser stats. Interesting stats: almost 90% of Gadgetopia visitors are at 1024 x 768 or greater almost 20% of visitors are at higher resolution than 1024 ...

Storage takes starring role in tech gizmo sales pitch: We went through a long period a few years ago when hard drive size was so abstract. Discs had gotten so big compared the stuff we put on them, that increases in hard drive space didn't really matter to anyone. I ...

Air Force pushing for ground-based, satellite-killing lasers: The Air Force wants to shoot down orbiting satellites using ground-based lasers. It's like real-life Missile Command. Air Force officials are attempting to co-opt $5.7 million from the 2007 budget for developing high-energy lasers that could be used to destroy enemy satellites We ...

Virgin Galactic has stated that if it's current planned craft, SpaceShipTwo, is successful, they'll try to build an orbital vehicle, SpaceShipThree. Orbital vehicle SpaceShipThree (SS3) will be developed by space tourism company Virgin Galactic and Mojave-based SpaceShipTwo (SS2)-developer Scaled Composites, if the planned SS2 suborbital service is successful, says Virgin ...

Building a Search Engine: Interesting backstory behind the Mozdex project. This is an open source search engine that they're going to try and use to index the entire Web. ...we have a network of two db servers using the Lucene Index system (Jakarta Project) with two terabytes of disk space ...

Dive Into Python: I'll always post about a free book. I love free books. "Dive Into Python is a free Python book for experienced programmers. You can read the book online, or download it in a variety of formats. It is also available in multiple languages." Incidentally, Python and Zope ...

LEGO: Another great article at Wikipedia. Name one geek who never played with Legos. The company's name was coined by Christiansen in 1934, from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well." The word "LEGO" is claimed to mean "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, although this is ...

Wired News: Madden Keeps Gaining Ground: An homage to the greatest sports sim ever created. "'EA has never been satisfied with Madden,' says Bryan Intihar, associate editor at Electronic Gaming Monthly. 'They have a formula and they keep to it, but they add little things every year to make it ...

I just watched the shuttle Discovery clear the tower on its way back to space -- 9:39 a.m. Central time. Our prayers go with the crew. Godspeed, ladies and gentlemen.

You can now buy a piece of the history-making Virginia Tech Supercomputer. MacMall is selling refurbished Apple G5 computers that came from Virginia Tech. In my opinion the Apple-refurbished systems are priced a bit high at $2799, which is only $200 less than a new G5, but they do come ...

Man buys virtual space station for $100,000: Another crazy purchase in an MMORPG. Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films, plans to call the space resort, in the science-fiction themed game Project Entropia, "Club Neverdie." Like other land areas in the game that has been visited by 300,000 players, the ...

Possible new iPod causing buzz: Because if there's anything an iPod needs, it's more storage space. The photo viewer angle seems interesting. Is Apple Computer Inc. fine-tuning an enhanced iPod with roughly 50 percent more storage and a color screen to display photos?

I watched "The Incredibles" with the kids this weekend. Amazing film. Not only is it entertaining as all get out, but the CGI is jaw-dropping. Absolutely stunning stuff. I was perusing the trivia section of the IMDB record, and I found this: The unusual architecture in the film was based ...

The briQ is a computer the size of a CD-ROM drive that can actually be 'plugged' into your existing computer. "Need an in-dash MP3 player? Need two computers in the space of one? Slide a briQ into the expansion bay of your x86 or Macintosh computer!"

Google Web Search Features: This is new. Parcel tracking IDs, patents and other specialized numbers can be entered into Google's search box for quick access to information about them. For example, typing "fedex" followed by a space and a FedEx tracking number will return the latest information on your package.

Report: Wal-Mart to exit VHS business, free space for DVDs: The death of VHS tapes happened awfully suddenly. [Wal-Mart's decision to stop selling VHS tapes] comes after an announcement from Target that it will phase out VHS sales by September. Best Buy and Circuit City no longer sell VHS tapes, ...

NASA is reportedly being sued by a Russian astrologist because the Deep Impact probe "deformed her horoscope." Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe." ...

Google Maps has now added an option to display your map with sattelite data. If you ever wondered what Gadgetopia World Headquarters looks like from space, now's your chance. Of course, the defenses are masked from sattelites, and most of the facility is subterreanean, but you get the idea. Via ...

I worked on improving the search on this site today. Search has been through a number of iterations. First, I used the basic Movable Type search. But it was slow and I wanted to do some interesting things with search. So last year, I switched to using a SQL "LIKE" ...

Worst. Idea. Ever. Alexander Lavrynov, a spacecraft designer, said he has patented a device for putting advertising into space that would be seen from Earth, Interfax news agency reported Wednesday. I've always looked forward to showing my son the constellations: "Can you see Orion? It's the one right by the ...

Scripting News "On Tuesday, July 15, UserLand Software transferred its copyright in the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. This addresses one of the major concerns about RSS 2.0, that it was published by one of the competitors in the RSS application ...

Top Ten IKONOS Satellite Images for 2004: There's something innately powerful about a satellite image. Here are the best of 2003 with a neat little Java viewer. Space Imaging, the world's leading provider of Earth imagery and related services to commercial and government markets introduces its top 10 images from ...

I just need to point out an obvious fact: hard drive space has gotten ridiculously cheap. I just took delivery of two 300GB drives that I got from New Egg for $132 each. That's 44-cents per GB. I remember when storage dropped under $1 per GB, everyone thought that was ...

eZ Conference 2008 - a set on Flickr: Joe is keeping a Flckr Photoset from the eZ Conference in Norway. He spent some time with eZ Systems (again, more on this later), and he has some great pictures of their offices. It s a nice space. I hear the scenery is ...

HP to Unveil More Than 100 New Gadgets: All the computer manufacturers are starting to encroach on the gadget space. Big day for HP today. "Hewlett-Packard Co. is introducing more than 100 new consumer gadgets on Monday, from digital cameras to photo-quality desktop printers, in anticipation of what could be ...

Space Imaging :: Image Gallery: This a great satellite imaging site with a "best Of" gallery full of satellite images related to current events. It's dominated right now with Tsunami photos, but there are some other gems in there too: Stage 13 of the Tour de France, a good archive ...

Exxon Secrets: This is fantastic work with Flash. It reminds me of that tsunami Flash tool of a week ago. This one is just as good and shows how Flash can be used to really let the user explore a "space" of information. Note: I'm not endorsing or condeming the ...

Sirius, XM in possible merger talks: The only two players in the satellite radio space are discussing a merger. A deal would create a monopoly in the segment. But the newspaper said that XM and Sirius are hoping a deal would be allowed if the Federal Communications Commission considers satellite ...

Microsoft signs film deal for 'Halo' video games: This is screaming for Vin Diesel in the lead. Microsoft Corp. has signed a deal with two film studios to make a movie based on its popular space-based video game series Halo," Let's get a random fact. If they told Vin Diesel ...

Toshiba develops 100GB hard disk for notebooks: Yikes. Toshiba Corp. has developed a hard disk drive for notebook computers that can hold 100GB of data. The company expects to begin selling it later this year, it said Thursday. The new drive offers a quarter more storage space than the company's ...

Chuck (TV series): I saw a preview for this show on the flight from Denver to San Francisco. It looks pretty hysterical Chuck is a member of the Geek Squad Nerd Herd at Best Buy Buy More, and he gets a bunch of spy secrets embedded in his brain. ...

Improved image-shrinking technology claimed: This is interesting. I've never been able to get JPGs to compress much at all. I figured they were as compressed as they were gonna get. Allume Systems, based in California, US, says the new version of its StuffIt compression technology can reduce JPEG files by ...

EMC to Buy Documentum for About $1.7 Bln: Big news in the world of enterprise content and document management. Documentum was the largest player in this space. "Data storage systems maker EMC Corp. on Tuesday said it would buy Documentum Inc. for about $1.7 billion to expand its document management ...

Copernic Enters Enterprise Search Space: Copernic has a client-side tool called Agent that's quite good. Now they're expanding to the enterprise. "The product, called Copernic Enterprise Search, can support searching repositories of up to 2 million documents. It will be offered free to companies with less than 5,000 documents to ...

A new and improved News.com: Looks nice, but why don't they underline hyperlinks? "We have tried very hard not to make a radical change to the site's look and feel. What we have done, is provide almost equal space for news and for perspective/context. You will notice we have designated ...

The New State of Search: Here's a little table of all the search engine acquisitions and deals that have happened this year. I didn't realize that Overture bought AltaVista, then AllTheWeb, and then was acquired by Yahoo! along with Inktomi. Then Google picks up Prya Labs, and MSN lanuches the ...

Armadillo Run: This could be the greatest game in the history of the world. Armadillo Run is a physics-based puzzle game. You have to build structures with the purpose of getting an armadillo to a certain point in space. There is a selection of building materials, each with different properties, ...

Who/Where are the Women?: A good point I'd never considered before. Spawned by recent conversations with friends, I've been thinking about people who are known for designing and working with web standards. Specifically those who have a strong interest in CSS or are already using style sheets to compliment or ...

Why Europe still doesn't get the Internet: A European council has decided that if you flame someone, you have to allow them to respond in the same space. The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or 'blogs'), must ...

Red Hat Cans Linux Distribution: They're ditching the consumer oriented version to focus on their enterprise customers. We should have seen this coming after they announced they were going to stop selling in retail outlets. "Leading Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. on Monday made clear its intention to focus on ...

E-serenity, now!: This is cited as the first use of the new term "information environmentalism" something we could all probably use. The newest polluters are not chemical manufacturers leaking toxins into the air [...] The information age, it seems, is data-contaminated. And it's not just the volume of information ...

Russian combat jets were scrambled yesterday in response to an attacking "aircraft" from their tiny Baltic neighbor, Lithuania. Apparently the Russians are still using their pre-1940 radar equipment. "Our fighter approached the trespasser to make it land or leave Russian air space", the press service said. "A closer examination showed ...

World's first civilian space shot launches from Mojave Desert: No confirmmation on their altitude yet, but everyone is home safely. SpaceShipOne pilot Mike Melvill was aiming to fly 62 miles above the Earth's surface. The exact altitude reached was not immediately confirmed by radar. The ship touched down at Mojave ...

PlaceTime.com - URIs for Places and Times: The need for this may not be immediately obvious, but more and more URIs are being used for identification of people, objects, and now times. "PlaceTime.com is intended to be a URI space containing URIs that represent places and times.These URIs ...

Intel Education: An Innovation Odyssey Day 300: Great story about the use of blogs in education: "She also set up a weblog for each student. That allowed for instant publishing and created a space where classmates could read and comment on each other's work. Students' attitudes began to change. 'They ...

The shifting culture of video games: "The event is split into three areas. A conference room houses a dozen or so computer hardware and software makers touting their latest wares to throngs of eager gamers. A smaller room hosts game tournaments where players can win computers and other prizes. Next ...

RFID Privacy Workshop @ MIT: There was a conference at MIT a week ago on how to handle the RFID privacy issue. With workshops like "Enhancing RFID Privacy through Antenna Energy Analysis," how can you lose? The goal of the RFID Privacy Workshop is to bring together RFID technologists, boosters, ...

Just a reminder that SpaceShipOne lifts off from Mohave Spaceport at 10 a.m. EST this morning. It hasn't been decided if the craziest senior citizen in history, Mike Melvill, will pilot this time. (However, he's done the last two, so I really can't imagine them putting someone with no experience ...

The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source: Here's a great survey of all that is good in the open source world. Movable Type made the list for Perl (even though it's not technically open source), and I was surprised to see Ruby in there as a Perl alternative. ...

The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial: I saw this several years ago, but had never been able to find it again until MetaFilter posted a link today. Very cool View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in ...

About four months ago, I asked you all to send me a screencap of the Gadgetopia home page sitting in your browser window. I promised to do some analysis of the results, and I kept meaning to get to it, but never got to it. Tonight, I finally sat down ...

'Lie group E8' math puzzle solved : Crazy. An international team of mathematicians says it has cracked a 120-year-old puzzle that researchers say is so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan. [...] The problem's proof, announced Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the ...

Welcome to TDV Vison: An 8.4" screen is awfully small, but so is the price: $799. Prices are falling awfully fast in this space. "The V800XPT is an 8.4-inch LCD PC and notebook in one product. It features an external USB keyboard module, an external USB optical drive, a Transmeta ...

The Onion | Gmail User Pities Hotmail User: Too funny. Recent Gmail convert William Ramsak, 23, said Monday that his "heart goes out to" friend Kelly Oldenburg, who still sends e-mail through an MSN Hotmail account. "I feel so bad for you, needing to squeeze into 250 MB of storage ...

Halo Talk Show: This guy has set up a talk show within Halo 2 where he interviews people and...defends himself. The "talk show in game space" takes place inside an open multiplayer game of Halo 2. As Damian Lacedaemion interviews his guests he takes out the occasional intruding, and clueless ...

Microsoft DreamSpark: Microsoft is trying to hook new developers young by getting them in college with free development tools. DreamSpark is simple, it s all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology ...

Waxy.org: Andy Baio lives here: Andy created a "mini-blog" on the right -hand side of his site for stuff which doesn't rise to the level of the "actual" blog. Boing Boing has done this too allowed "guest" bloggers to have a space on the sidebar. This brings me back ...

Yeah, this is a GREAT idea: People wanting to contact extraterrestrial beings through www.TalkToAliens.com can dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a transmitter and sent into space through a 3.2-metre-wide dish in central Connecticut, US. The service, launched on 27 February, will cost users ...

Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?: Predictions of how life in the year 2000 will (would?) be, from a 1961 magazine article. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom. You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 ...

Sony Charges $50 Extra to Sell You Laptop with No Crapware: How nice of Sony to sell you a computer that s not pre-loaded with crap for an extra $50. “System optimization service” is what we’re calling a computer that comes without crapware. And by characterizing hard drive space as “valuable” and ...

CF InFlight's Skycam: While watching the Bucs and Eagles tonight, my 13-year-old asked how they get those incredible flying camera shots that follow the players across the field. I did a little digging, and found this: CF InFlight's Skycam is a broadcast-quality robotic camera which is suspended from a cable-driven ...

Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service: The social networking space is getting awfully crowded, capped now by Google's entry. The launch of Orkut comes after Friendster's rejection late last year of Google's offer to buy the site that has become known as an online venue for hooking up friends ...

Space capsule crashes to Earth after chute failure: A few weeks ago we reported on plans to snag the Genesis capsule using helicopter stunt pilot (the post has a picture). Sadly, they never got the chance the capsule's parachutes never opened and it dropped like a rock. Retrieval helicopters ...

Sweden mines space for tourist dollars: Ten thousand dollars gets you on Sweden's version of the Vomit Comet, starting this summer. Late this summer, a company called Xero AB begins offering the first zero-gravity flights from Kiruna, 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. [...] Xero AB, founded ...

I've seen Ford Explorer limousines, Hummer H2 limousines, and Ford Mustang limousines, but this is a new one on me. Vaca Meter Limousines has converted an old Boeing 727-100 and converted it into a 50-seat luxury limousine. [...] It's powered by a six-cylinder, turbocharged diesel engine in the back and ...

Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design: I talked once about whether cool design and aesthetics could ease or hinder the adoption of a Web app. This article plays into that from the angle of color. "One easily remedied cause of such drab design is color. Perhaps no ...

Open Source Takes on Hardware Biz: When you think "open source," you always think "software." Well, a group of developers is extending open source into hardware by developing a chip with freely-available blueprints. "Hardware has always been very proprietary even more so than software," said Lampret in an interview ...

Report: 'Star Trek' set for '08 revival: Good stuff. The as-yet-untitled "Star Trek" feature, the 11th since 1979, is aiming for a fall 2008 release [...] The project will be directed by J.J. Abrams, whose Tom Cruise vehicle "Mission: Impossible III" will be released by Paramount on May 5. Abrams, ...

SubTropolis: I wish there were more Web resources on this, but you'll have to live with a single page on the commercial broker's site. I saw this on the Travel Channel this morning. SubTropolis, the world's largest underground business complex, is a subterranean industrial park with nearly 5 million square ...

Can We Trust Track & Field Records? - How accurate are they?: Interesting anaylsis of the technology used to time track and field events. This is in the news lately because a Jamaican just broke the 100 meter record by .01 seconds. Not a big margin. The best systems use ...

Microsoft kills off Outlook Express: This was probably inevitable, but it makes you wonder what Microsoft's entry-level, bundled email program is going to be. Are they going to push MSN as the email program for new machines? "'[Outlook Express] just sits where it is,' said Dan Leach, lead product manager ...

Thinking Different, Saving Money: Apple finally beat someone on price. Of course, you need to buy 1,100 dual processor G5 with a healthy education discount, but the more you buy, the more you save. "Lockhart estimates the hardware cost $5.2 million, a reasonable price, he said, for a supercomputer that ...

Cracking Down on Cyberspace Land Grabs: Great article on the New Thing stealing IP blocks. "Network operators were galvanized by a particularly brazen case in April, when a trail of spam led to the discovery that no-less than six /16s nearly 400,000 addresses had been misappropriated from ...

MSR Netscan - Usenet Social Accounting Search Engine: Microsoft is testing a new tool to collate Usenet postings. It's pretty simply in theory you bulk load Usenet postings into a database, then mine the results to make everything easier to wade through. This demo examines postings from Microsoft's own ...

Our buddies at NASA have been working on a way to produce meat without having to raise animals. On a deep-space mission this would be a handy thing, but here on the home planet it would be a great thing too. Papers published recently describe how industrial-scale tissue engineering could ...

Natural Process : Process Flow: An art exhibition (I couldn't figure out where) called "Natural Process" has Google's home page printed at a gigantic size, hung on the wall, then projected on the Web. The NP system is constructed so that a webcam captures the painting in the museum and ...

Google, Amazon in a war of search words: Two Internet heavyweights are scrapping it out for top talent. Oh, to have a computer science degree... "Google and Amazon.com are fighting for top computer scientists on Google's home turf: search results. When Web surfers use Google to search on the name ...

PHP Becoming Mainstream: I've always been fascinating by an analysis of book sales as an indicator of language adoption. My "how much shelf space is it getting at Barnes and Noble" test correctly predicted the ascendance of both Python and Ruby. As such, I find this interesting. We've noticed that ...

Where Sharing Isn't a Dirty Word: Great little article about the magic of iBiblio, where I admit to finding more than one Sherlock Holmes novel. Ibiblio's staff and contributors rescue documents, videos, audio and image files from dusty archives or attics where few could view them and put them on ...

The Vertical Farm Project: Here's a neat concept from Columbia University of a farm built into a high-rise structure for urban areas where there's a servere space crunch. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to ...

Welcome to Save Disney: Web spin is all the rage these days. Martha Stewart started it with a site to refute the charges against her. Michael Jackson recently did the same. Now a Disney heir and an ex-Disney board member have set up a site solely to attack Michael Eisner ...

The Cool Cam: This is a really fascinating story the development of European Air War by Microprose back in the late 90s. The project was doomed, until a developer ignored pressing bugs and built a new feature that saved the project. It almost seemed as though the execs were only ...

Encyclopedias gather dust as research moves online: I'm not surpised that paper encyclopedias are dying off. I am surprised that CD-ROM based encyclopedias are. In the age of the Internet, encyclopedias are gathering dust, and most families with young children don't even consider buying the space-hogging printed sets anymore. Even digital ...

Shatner aims for real 'Star Trek': This bodes very well for the Virgin Galactic venture. Compared to the $20 million Dennis Tito paid to go to the international space station, $210,000 isn't a bad deal. [William Shatner] is among more than 7,000 people who have told Richard Branson they would ...

Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam: Turns out spam is coming from places other than you might think. It's tempting to envision spam coming from some centralized location so we can all sit around and complain that they don't shut the loser off, but the reality appears to be ...

Apple has beefed up its .Mac service in several ways, but it's still way too expensive. $99.95 a year for a gigabyte of storage space (combined Mail and iDisk), .Mac Backup software, .Mac Groups, your own Homepage, yadda, yadda, yadda... Who needs it? I guess I'm still hacked that Apple ...

Cruciforum: crucially simple: Apparently the most simple discussion forum in the world. There s exactly one file. Cruciforum is a very simple web forum, designed to make it really easy to add a discussion forum to a website. If you want to start off some conversation around a bit of code ...

Jahre Viking: This is a big ship. The biggest in the world, it turns out. The Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) oil tanker Jahre Viking was the largest ship afloat in 2004. At 485.46 metres [1,503 feet long] from tip to tip, she surpasses the tallest land structure, the 424-meter ...

Teens' wireless feat could be world record: Quite a feat took place at DefCon. In the end, their 55-mile amplified connection exceeded last year's winner by 20 miles. Then they turned off their amplifiers and broke the record for an unamplified connection at the same distance. While not yet confirmed, ...

bbPress > Home: This is the new forum software for WordPress. It's really nice to use, and the tag thing is handy. bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. Most software in this space is focused on features like avatars or file attachment ...

A link I may come to regret showing Deane: DevX has an article on PHP-GTK, which provides PHP bindings to the GIMP Tool Kit, the foundation of the GNOME desktop environment. Now, PHP has begun to carve a space for itself in the standalone application arena as well with PHP-GTK. ...

LitePC: IEradicator - the Internet Explorer Hitman!: This is perhaps a little extreme. And given the dynamic loading that Windows apps generally do, I wonder if you're going to wipe out some DLL that something else needs at some point? IEradicator is a tiny, script that uses the Windows setup ...

The gods at Google are at it again, but they're only spitting on me; they just released the beta version of Google Earth, but right now it's a Windows only world. Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in. Search for schools, parks, restaurants, ...

The Cassini Space Probe has photographed a frightening visitor lurking in orbit of Saturn. NASA is trying to play it off as the moon Mimas. Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across). The enormous crater at ...

SC072 | Products | SiCortex: You think your desktop hardware is fast, buddy? Look what sits inside this little desktop tower, just in case I have to accurately model a hurricane season or something. Note the processor count and RAM numbers. The SiCortex SC072 “Catapult” is the personal version of ...

Here's America's unquietest library: The first surprise is that this is a library. The second surprise is that it's in Salt Lake City, of all places. With all due respect to residents of the obviously great state of Utah, you're just not known for being this daring. "The $65 million ...

Valley Boys: Great article on the history of Digg.com. Another guy who started from nothing, and is now trying to fend of VC who are trying to force money down his throat. Soon, Rose was blabbing about his idea to his girlfriend, his buds, his bartenders. This would be bottom-up ...

Last November, EGM got together a bunch of 11 and 12-year-olds and asked them their opinions of Pong, Space Invaders, and other games from our youth. Needless to say, they weren't kind. EGM has done it again this year, with entertaining results. The kids were harsh: EGM: Before this came ...

A Powerful CMS Unleashed: This is weirdly fascinating. You know those hard-sell SEO guys that have the mile-long landing pages full of testimonials, varying font sizes, and centered text? Well, this guy has bought that same subtlety to the CMS space. Dear Determined Business Owner, [ ] If you are not ...

Most people know that you can control some Flash playback settings by right-clicking (Option-click on a Mac one-button mouse), but did you know that there is a Settings Manager for Flash? Naturally, you access it through a Flash image, which you find at this link. Websites might occasionally want to ...

Amazon Askville takes on Yahoo! Answers: first look: Amazon is heading into the Answers space with Askville. Google ended Google Answers last year. Yahoo Answers kind of sucks, for reasons I explained here. The only one I ve had a good experience with is LinkedIn Answers, a site on which Aaron ...

April 13, 2029 is the date that asteroid 2004 MN4 a quarter-mile wide chunk of rock may hit the earth. (Of course, it's already got a Wikipedia entry!) If you're wondering if that is a Friday, I checked already; it is. The risk rating for asteroid 2004 MN4 ...

Linux weighs in: With all the hype about Linux on the desktop, and the presumption that Linux runs servers, a lot of people forget that pure Unix is its competitor in the server room. This article is talking about 500 or 1000-processor Linux installs not your everyday workgroup server. ...

Golden age of arcade games: The featured article on Wikipedia today is "The Golden Age of Arcade Games." I was at the perfect age for this. I still remember haunting the arcades as a 13-year-old. During the early 1980s, arcade game technology had become sophisticated enough to offer good-quality graphics ...

Legislator seeks to block Gmail: I don't agree with the senator's logic here. Like I've said before, GMail is essentially a big bribe. In exchange for 1GB of storage, you give up some privacy. So long as people understand that going in, where's the harm? You won't catch me doing ...

MiniHitch Product Specifications: This is a really neat little idea. The MiniHitch allows you to mount your Mac Mini on the back of your monitor, by making use of the 100mm or 75mm spacing VESA pattern mounting holes found on the back of many LCD monitors. Slick design as well ...

Intrepid Mac-Hacker extraordinaire Leo Bodnar, who was the first to show the world how to over-clock a Mac mini, has written about some interesting things he's found exploring the innards of a Mac mini. Or more to the point, things he didn't find. I have noticed a missing unpopulated connector ...

RailFrog / CMS Ridin' on Rails: Here's the first Rails CMS...or not, actually. It's a plan for a CMS. There's apparently been nothing written, but they have a site and a logo and a name. I'm endeavoring to help jumpstart the development of an open-source CMS application, built using Ruby ...

Last week, I wrote about how hard drive space was getting ridiculously cheap. Today, I get a Dell catalog in the mail. Their deal on a Dimension 2400: 2.4 Ghz Celeron WinXP Home 256MB RAM 80GB hard drive CD-RW 17" monitor Color inkjet printer All this for $299. There's no ...

Play, Learn, and Surf...with Kids.us!: Good for them. Just wait for the wave of IE plug-ins that will lock the browser down to this domain only. "Finally, there's an Internet domain that parents and children can trust for educational and appropriate online fun: kids.us! All content on affiliated sites is ...

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Here's an obvious situation that may not have occured to a lot of people. Struggling to find the space in a small corporate library for the ever-expanding collection of serials, I was delighted to buy a site license and have full-text-searchable issues available at the ...

Ocean living: From Hydropolis to Trilobis: Sigh. I want to live underwater. I bet Joe wants me to as well. Some days more than others. Anyway, a good article here about several different projects involving Atlantis-like coolness. [...] we tend to forget about the seas below and another once-popular 21st ...

Ever wonder what would happen if you threw a ball out the back of a moving vehicle at the same speed the vehicle was moving? I have my little brother & I argued about this when we were kids, but Dad would never let us try it. Some Japanese ...

Airbus bets on building largest commercial plane: The Airbus A380 is set to be unveiled next month. It will be the largest passenger plane in history. Its wings stretch nearly the length of a football field, about 50 feet longer than any plane in the air today. Nose to tail, ...