Although the most obvious use for this is to replace flash memory, I suspect it’s going to be very important in the future, to a lot of different applications.
“The Five ForcesCircles of Hell”
Poloni Ploni Almoni mentioned this page to me. I’m not an MBA, and I’ve never studied their way of thinking, so it was quite eye-opening, and finally explains a lot about cell phone providers that I’ve never understood before.
“Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island”
So much for the “you can’t prove evolution because no one can see it happen” argument.
“Rep. Monique Davis to atheist Rob Sherman: ‘It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!'”
This outburst makes me ashamed that I was born in Illinois. Obviously there are some people who still think “freedom of religion” only means that “everyone is free to practice my religion.”
Foul-Mouth Passwords
I stumbled over an interesting article, from a couple years ago, on passwords. The most interesting part, to me, was a pair of statements buried in the text:
- Cuss words were very popular. Boy, there’s a lot of aggression out there.
- I was surprised about how many Christian-sounding — for example, “Ilovejesus” — log-on names were associated with the worst cuss words.
Just a thought, but if you’re really trying to live a clean life, try using a random password generator/database instead, or learn ways to remember random passwords.
New and improved?
We were on the road today, and stopped for breakfast/lunch. I got an apple juice, and was bemused to notice that the label claimed that it had a “new and improved taste!” Funny, it tasted just like apple juice to me.
Firefox 3 beta 5
I decided to try Firefox 3 today, because Firefox 2 takes well over five seconds to load on my new Eee system. Not a big deal most of the time, but when I’m scanning RSS news articles in Thunderbird and keep seeing articles I want to read, a five second delay for each one gets old pretty quickly.
My only concern was that some of my extensions probably wouldn’t work with it. I don’t use that many, but over the years I’ve collected ten that I keep active most of the time. Of those, NoScript and Secure Login are the only ones that I won’t live without. To make a long story short, it turns out that five of my extensions are already set up to work with it, including those two, so that’s not a problem.
As was promised, it’s faster loading — about 20% faster initially (less than four seconds on the Eee), and near-instantaneous when starting later instances while the original one is still active. But there are a lot of other nice little features that I’ve discovered in it. The full-screen mode has a larger usable area. It’s much more readable when you shrink the text — I can reduce it quite a bit and still read it easily. The security warnings are much more noticeable, and can be turned off on a per-site basis (like the ZFS-FUSE bug-reporting page, it doesn’t recognize the certificate issuer at present), and there are several other minor changes that I don’t presently recall (as well as the Easter egg in it).
All in all, I like it. 🙂
The HandSolo Mobile
This was apparently an April Fool’s joke that I just saw for the first time. After I stopped laughing, I started thinking… it actually sounds like a good idea, at least to a point.
“Mom’s diet may play role in whether baby is boy or girl”
Just an interesting science article.
Safari for Windows… but why?
I was recently discussing the state of computers with a friend, and it occurred to me that there’s no obvious business case for Apple to make their Safari browser available for Windows.
It makes sense for them to have their own browser for the Mac, so that they’re not at the mercy of any other company for one, but what does a free browser for a competing OS get them — especially when essentially all the competition is free too? I don’t see the business sense behind it. They can’t hope to gain enough market share to become a de facto standard, which is the only way I see that they could gain any strategic advantage from it (as Microsoft did after they killed off Netscape).
“Curiouser and curiouser…”