Gadgetopia

Gathering Storm Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets: Lemme tell you: if Bruce Schneier is even a little afraid, then I m curled up in a fetal position somewhere rocking back and forth. Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they re different. These worms spread more ...

Metal Storm Limited has put together an all new ballistic weapon technology that eliminates most mechanical action from weapons, replacing it with electronic triggering mechanisms that can lead to all kinds of unique solutions. Metal Storm's technology provides a means whereby objects, such as bullets that have been tightly grouped ...

Here's another great use of Google Maps -- Storm Report Map. Our local meteorologist pointed this out last night. It overlays a Google Map with weather report data after storms strike. A quick look at June 20th shows that Gadgetopia World Headquarters was right in the middle of a whole ...

Metal Storm Limited, the Australian company that developed a pioneering fire-by-wire weapons system, will soon be demonstrating a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to Department of Defense officials to prove the technology's potential as part of a remotely controlled weapon. The UAV being used is the Dragonfly DP-4X helicopter, which ...

Sandia supercomputer to be world's fastest, yet smaller and less expensive than any competitor: This description of the new "Red Storm" computer being developed at Sandia is like porn for hardware geeks. Supposedly, this machine is going to take the title of World's Fastest Computer back from the NEC Earth ...

Cray forecasts Red Storm for masses: It's about time that Cray re-entered the commercial market. I remember when Cray was a force to be reckoned with. Things were never quite the same after Seymour Cray the founder of the company died in a car accident back in 1996. ...

Or, "How not to make your TV station web site work". News 14 Carolina in Raleigh, NC apparently had a web form for businesses to submit information closings and late starts due to weather. While a human reviewed the submissions before they went on the air, you could edit your ...

Hurricane Ivan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Wikipedia coverage of Hurricane Ivan is just phenomenal. They have hotlinked satellite images, all the latest announcement and statistics, links to about everything you need to know, etc. Like the Madrid bombing coverage and the Olympics coverage, Wikipedia again gets the official "Pretend ...

Ringside at PeopleSoft Bout, SAP Hopes to Share in the Prize: Good article about how SAP is trying to poach customers from the Oracle / Peoplesoft mess. "By positioning itself as a safe haven, SAP hopes to pick up the storm-tossed customers of its three main competitors, Oracle, PeopleSoft and ...

Those geniuses at Google are at it again, now providing satellite photos of the areas of New Orleans, LA, that were hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. If you do a Google Maps search for New Orleans, LA, you'll get the map of the city with an extra red button, labeled ...

Instant messengers take corporate world by storm: A quick look at IM in the enterprise. This has been talked about a lot, but I've never seen it actually take off anywhere. "...many are awaiting the entry of Microsoft. The software giant already offers consumer-grade IM and included a corporate messaging ...

A National Geographic team put together some cool toys that record what it looks like inside a tornado. It's a technological first. A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras 6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view, and one pointing upward captures footage ...

Is Perl Still Relevant?: An interesting answer from Tim O'Reilly about whether or not he thinks Perl is still relevant. In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when ...

Lawmaker: E-mails show Brown 'out of touch' during Katrina: If you're a government employee, watch what you send in an email, because all of it may get regurgitated very publicly. Emails sent by former FEMA chief Michael Brown around the time Katrina beat up on New Orleans have been published. ...

Let's say you could tap into the nuclear weapon fire control systems of every country in the world. And let's say you could expose a PHP API for those systems. You then could build a page that when called, would launch all the nuclear missles in the entire world and ...

Caparo T1 - First Drive - Motor Trend: The Caparo T1 is coming soon. It promises Formula 1 performance in a street legal car. This is what 0-60 in 2.9 seconds is apparently like: And then. Then. Then my world explodes, and I can t swear to the accuracy of the ...

Numbers station : A post over at Boing Boing reminded me of the phenomenon of numbers stations. Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin that broadcast streams of numbers, words, or phonetic sounds. No one knows for sure where their signals originate or what purpose they serve. The ...

Dome Home - Pensacola Beach: Here's a site about a "dome home" in Pensacola Beach, Florida. No, not the geodesic dome houses which never really caught on (but which I still love). This is an actually smooth circular dome house built to withstand hurricanes. After several years of repetitive storm ...

This book presents a seductive idea than I wanted answered what causes trends to tip? For instance, take a fashion trend. The book uses the resurgence of Hush Puppies an example. One minute they were boring and outdated, but for a few months last year, they were the hottest ...

Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky): This a good post that discusses how Joel Spolsky changed his mind about user interfaces. I knew Spolsky was very thick-client oriented for a long time, but this post has some interesting insights and information on how and why he ...

Interview with George Clooney - On Career, Sex And Politics: Ever wonder what stars think about all the stuff written about them on the Internet? Well, this is one of the most simply inventive things I ve seen in a while: Esquire sat George Clooney down to surf the Web about ...

The Discovery Channel has a great show called "Super Ships" which just talks about big ships. And not glamourous ships like cruise liners or warships -- just big, industrial ships. I watched a profile last night about the Super Servant 4, which is a massive freight-carrier which was re-configued to ...

Let me play industry analyst for a second and explain why I think computer manufacturers are in deep kimshee: Hardware has vastly out-paced software. Besides gaming, there's no compelling reason to upgrade your computer. I'm still running on a 1GHz/384MB machine I had built for me two years ago. I ...