They are trying to collect pictures at every whole degree intersection of latitude and longitude. It would be an interesting complement to the satellite/aerial picture databases already available on the internet.
Category: tech
Cool keyboard
Here's the company site:
Here's the thread on Slashdot from March 20:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0
Unfortunately, all the company is saying about the key-stroke detection technology is:
VKB has developed a detection method through several proprietary developments for the accurate and reliable detection of user interaction … VKB has filed numerous patents on its core technology and related applications.
I suppose you could go find their patent applications…
Replace your browser's history/cache
In Robert X. Cringely's 14 March 2002 column, he mentions the programs that are available that will wipe your browser's history file and cache so that other's can't see what you've been surfing. He goes on:
The only problem with those programs is they leave a squeaky clean system that makes you look to the boss like you are hiding something, whether you are or not. So rather than delete files and caches, my idea would be to REPLACE them. You could start www.cleancache.com and have there sample history files and caches ready for downloading. Just choose a profile — little kid, history professor, java programmer, soccer mom — and actual content from actual people would be downloaded, replacing your surfing identity with theirs.
Googlewhacking
As reported in various media (CNet, Wired, etc) there is a new sport called "googlewhacking" where you try to use Google to find exactly one web page that has a pair of words. If more than one page matches, or no pages matches, the pair of words does not count.
For some examples, see http://www.googlewhack.com/tally.pl
Hmm, now that I think about it, you can also cheat if you're patient enough. If you find a pair of words that get zero hits. Create a web page (maybe an anonymous slashdot post) that contains the pair of words, wait for google to find it, then you "win". But I'm sure that any judges would get suspicious if they could trace the page back to you, or if the page did not use words in a "reasonable" way.
New digital sensor technology (Foveon)
Check out this preview series of articles (use the "next" links to navigate through). Pretty cool stuff.
You can go directly to some shots from a prototype 4 megapixel camera. The first is the complete image scaled down, the second is a 100% zoom. If you look close and see some artificats, these are jpeg so there are some compression artifacts from jpeg itself.
In the Beginning was the Command Line
Below is an excerpt of the complete article. Here's a link to a nicely formatted HTML version. Here's the official link, but it's a zip file containing a text file, so it's not quite as friendly.
by Neal Stephenson
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
On the security of Microsoft's products…
"Nothing is worse than an expert out of his field, and Microsoft is very good at office software."
— Robert Cringely in his 17 Jan 2002 column
Increasing graphics performance
The blurb below is from the 21 Jan 2002 issue of The Harrow Technology Report:
Fifteen years ago, when Pixar introduced its then-amazing computer-generated video titled "Luxo Jr.", it required 75 hours of Cray supercomputer time to render each second of photo realistic animated video. Today's GeForce 3 chip in many PCs can now render similar video in real time!
With computer performance increasing exponentially, it's easy to lose track of how far we've come. I remember being blown away by Luxo Jr. when it was first released, but now it's no big deal.
The "wayback machine" for the internet
http://www.archive.org/ has been "recording" the internet for the last several years. For example you can see the history of my homepage here (wolfenet.com/~jtmartin/) and here (netjeff.com).
Joel Spolsky on "bloatware"
In the full interview, Joel addresses the concern over "bloatware", where software takes up progressively more disk and/or memory space. Among programmers, "bloatware" is a derogatory term.
Moore's law makes much of the whining about bloatware ridiculous. In 1993, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space. All adjusted for inflation. So stop whining about how bloated it is.
Actually, the whole article is pretty interesting. I'm putting a copy here for when the link goes bad. Read on…