Archive for July, 2007
Tonight we dine in hell!! =D
Jul 15th
Okay, check this out guys! =D A parody of the successful (and violent) movie “300″…
Lisa Nova does “300″
I have been watching quite some videos of her in the past hour, and in my opinion they are all pretty well produced and designed. There is a lot of potential in here. Her videos have gained mostly positive ratings, and have acquired some popularity. See all videos.
“OMG You are not using teh Debian!”
Jul 13th
Here’s a little tale of a professor who teaches classes using Linux. Which I totally support. He tells a story about how a student tried to mess around with the setup, not paying attention, and doing his own thing. I won’t post the entire story, but a part of it… you should read the entire thing from start to finish… it’s hilarious and an instant classic!
Pima is one of the 17 year olds in the class and considers himself an uber-hax0r. He constantly interrupts me during my lessons trying to make valid points that are somewhere between “WTF?” and “OMG YOU ARE NOT USING TEH DEBIAN!”. For those of you that listen to the podcasts and remember my story about training some folks over in another country and some dude put my kevlar vest over top his… well let’s say if we were in combat and this kid dropped his kevlar I think I’d dig a whole and bury it so he couldn’t find it.
The entire story over at the blogs of ITToolbox.
Star Trek’s beaming becoming reality?
Jul 12th
Not quite yet. Let’s say, we are working on it. At least some Australian scientists have reconstructed the beam experiment that has been conducted in Germany before, but with different methods. The scientists have been able to transport atoms from point a to point b with the help of lasers.
In Star Trek, a gigantic pod that can hold up to five or six people that are placed between kind of invisible tubes, are being transformed into energy and then back into matter at the desired destination. A so-called Heisenberg-Condensator plays a vital part in the transporting process from and to the Enterprise (yes, in all models of the ship, Archer’s, Kirk’s, Picard’s, and generally in all other human starships appearing in Star Trek). The process often takes only a few seconds, if the conditions at where ever the crew wants to go is right. The teleportation mechanism and the device have been made up because at the time of Kirk’s Enterprise, they could not afford to build and launch shuttles from the ship all the time.
The old-fashioned transporter built into Kirk’s Enterprise, which is a Constitution Class ship, by the way
In reality however, beaming a human being to another destination as seen when Kirk says ‘beam me up, Scotty’, is not that simple. Engadget has posted this article:
Although the idea of teleporting individuals from one place to another in order to sidestep the headache of rush hour traffic has been around for quite some time, a team of Australian physicists are busy making it work (on a smaller scale, of course). Granted, they don’t fully expect their teleportation scheme to be used on humans in the near future, but there’s always hope, right? Anyway, the team has developed a so-called “simple way to transport atoms,” which involves bringing the atoms to almost absolute zero, beaming them with two lasers, and using fiber optics to transport them to any other place at the speed of light where they “enter a second condensate” and reconstruct. We’ll keep you posted on when human trialing (hopefully) begins.
This process works with atoms, or several of them, but as soon as you enter the realm of more complex combinations of molecules and atoms, such as objects, beaming will become extremely difficult to achieve. First of all, you would have to have a storage medium that stores all the information about an object, it’s composition, how it’s made up, which molecule is at which position. For a human being for example, a magnetic hard drive as we know it, must have the approximate size of our planet to store all the information. Science has discovered a certain threshold, which marks the barrier of zooming into an object. If you try to get close as this boundary, the image will start to blur, you will not see what’s beyond the sub-atomic. Dr. Heisenberg found out about this threshold is therefore called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
This essentially means that you can store information of a human being (or any object for that matter) up to a certain point, but you will be missing important information, which makes up a human. We don’t know what it is, but it’s there, and cannot be dismissed.
As long as we do not have a way to get around the Uncertainty Principle, we’ll be beaming atoms, but that’s about it.
MGS4 not PlayStation 3 exclusive
Jul 11th
Sony is more and more falling into pieces. The PlayStation 3 sales do not go as expected, by far they don’t. The Wii has superceded all demands, even for the XBox 360, but from a sales figure perspective, Microsoft’s console is on the top, the Wii is not far behind. And PlayStation 3? Well some units are sold, but not as much as they were hoping for. For a long time, when the PlayStation 2 was the dominant device, game makers used to create games that are exclusive to Sony’s console, because no other hardware would be able to play it, like the PS2 did. Metal Gear Solid – or MGS – is one of these titles. Only Metal Gear Solid 2 made its way to the XBox, but that was about it.
Snake no more exclusive – the fourth one will sell on other consoles too
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots is the name of the game. Metal Gear has a long history, each game comes with about 900 or so electronic pages with an in-depth history of the very first Metal Gear franchise until today. Solid Snake is back sometime this or next year, but he teams up with PlayStation 3 and XBox 360. For Sony, this is a true pain in the ass, because they are now losing one of their greatest exclusive flagships, one of the name that made the PS2 great. And it could only be played on their console, a game, for which people would actually buy the console. Not anymore so, with the 360 already very long in the market.
Konami executive Kazumi Kitaue, head of Konami North America and European ops, dropped a bombshell today saying that Metal Gear Solid 4 may move to other consoles in an attempt to recoup development costs. He also said the PS3 price drop may not turn the ship around. The natural assumption, given the console hardware technology, is that Metal Gear Solid 4 will see its day on the Xbox 360, destroying one of the final feathers in Sony’s hat of exclusives.
In regards to the PS3 price cut, Kitaue unleashes the backhand with quickness. “I don’t expect a substantial impact … with $500, you can buy a person computer,” Kitaue told Reuters. It’s been surprising to see the mainstream media pick up on the $100 price drop without acknowledging that there is a new “better” model at the same price which caused all the calls for a price drop in the first place.
But for gamers, the first acknowledgment that Metal Gear Solid might find its way to other consoles is what’s really going to shake things up. Kitaue says, “Since Metal Gear Solid was born for the PlayStation, we would like to keep it a PlayStation game. But we might have to take some steps.” Whether those steps are announced this week or if this is some last ditch effort by Konami to force Sony to pony up exclusivity cash, which they say they do not do, is worth wondering about. If MGS goes to the Xbox 360 … well, all eyes will be on Final Fantasy XIII as the last famous third-party man standing.
Source: Joystiq.com
WWDC08: iWantToBeThere
Jul 10th
No one knows yet when Apple’s next big developer conference is on. Probably around June, July or August next year. Until then Apple will unveil some other products, and Leopard. So what can be expected at Apple’s greatest event? No one knows yet.
However, I have always been wanting to get there, just once, just to see Steve Jobs live on stage with my own eyes. Tickets will be expensive, at least for a normal man, so I gotta have to start savin’ some coins. It’s still a long time to go, and I hope I gonna make it. We’ll see.
WWDC is short for World Wide Developer Conference and is Apple’s biggest held event each year. Steve Jobs has held previous Keynotes to kick off the conference, in which many revolutionary soft- and hardware products have been shown to the public for the first time.
Resistance is futile
Jul 8th
I think the below picture pretty much resembles my opinion about Microsoft.
I am Gates of Borg: Your software will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Live free… or DIE HARD
Jul 7th
So I just came home from watching Die Hard 4.0 with my friends. So what’s SE51′s comment and verdict? Well. First of all, if someone is gonna do the John McClane thing (again), it’s Bruce Willis. There’s no discussion about it. If it’s gonna be about beating up the bad guys with all humanly possible things, it has to be him. While having arrived on July 4, the weekend suited me better.
Live Free or Die Hard: Bruce Willis is John McClane one more time
The entire action takes place on Independence Day, and some bad guy who is pretty much into designing state-of-the-art security systems is getting pretty upset when he repeatedly gets ignored by the government, for detecting potential flaws in the entire thing. He hires hackers first to test the system, but then he wants to eliminate them as they would know about the plan he is about to set in motion. John is sent to pick up one of the hackers, who also is a target, and reaches him just in time. And then the story unravels at sometimes insane speeds. One could say that as time and technology has progressed forward, the Die Hard franchise kept up with it. Cyber-Terrorism is now at the center stage. Well, and John doesn’t know much about computers, or even “Firesail” principles. At least what this term means in the digital world.
So. The movie’s on for about two hours, and has some incredible stunts and scenes in it, and the humor that we all know of John McClane has not lost its flavor. The camera turns are stunning at times, and so are the scenes. It is definitely worth the money and time. If you are a die hard fan of the Die Hard franchise, you so have to go and see this one. For what I think, it’s pretty well done, you won’t regret going there.
Dear Blacknight,
Jul 5th
again I would like to thank you for the offer you made to reactivate my site. The OS X Mercury project, merely meant as a different personal homepage, has drawn a great attention in the last days. You can say that my last three days have been quite eventful, as the whole turn of events have taken me by surprise. I never believed that people would actually look at it, or that blogs all over the world would comment on what they have seen.
Shocked and happy, I was, as you can imagine. In one day, my site has been visited by nearly 10,000 people, and I as private person do not have the money to entertain this kind of bandwidth, as usually those numbers are limited to companies. Eventually, after extreme overuse of bandwidth, my site has been auto-suspended. Fearing that a huge bill will make its way into my inbox, I was okay with the idea that no more bandwidth can be used, to make it worse, and the site would come back in August. Fair enough. In the end I never paid for that, so it was only fair that the site kissed bye bye.
One day later, I received an email from the support person I spoke with on the phone the day before. He generously offered to upgrade my site to a plan that would have some bandwidth left. In return, I would have to include a banner of their company on the bottom of my page. I was surprised, but happy, that this offer came. As soon as I accepted, my page returned to life. I made the modifications required in the CMS for the banner, and let visitors know that the domain cheated death.
So, team of Blacknight, thank you again for helping me in this situation. Thumbs up, you’re really cool! 
Blacknight.ie. Irish based web hosting.
Crop Circles 2.0
Jul 3rd
Crop circles. Some of them are man-made. We know about those. What about the rest? If all crop circles were man-made, it would make no sense whatsoever to found research groups for these circles, right? The truth is, that many circles’ origin is unknown, they were just there. They just appeared.
These out-of-the-blue formations show the following characteristics:
- The crop is bent, NOT broken
- People walking inside these formations feel sudden rushes of euphoria
- The formations show at many circles a deep level of sophistication with regards to the patterns displayed
People have tried to re-create crop circles of same size and sophistication over night – and failed. So basically it is possible to create this circles for human, given as much time as they wanted. But the crop was broken. This is the main thing from which a fake and original circle can be determined.The phenomena started sometime in the 60′s, if I remember correctly, during the Men In Black sightings. The MIB sightings and visits deminished, while the circles continued to grow. For some reason, most of them were seen in Great Britain, but they do appear in other parts of the world too.
Now, the formations reach a new level of sophistication, and enter the 3-D realm of patterns.
Courtesy The Daily Mail
This is the astonishing three-dimensional design, 200ft in diameter, has been created in a wheat field at Silbury Hill, Wiltshire. A floor of chequered tiles stretches down a long, high-ceilinged corridor with doors leading off each side.
I am puzzled. Totally. If anyone has any reasonable explanation, I’d be very interested to hear it. I am puzzled because I highly doubt that a 200-feet circle of this extreme level of sophistication can be created overnight by humans.
Besides this formation, the most astonishing formation I have seen is the Arecibo formation, found on Tuesday 21st August 2001. This formation was found near the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire, United Kingdom. In 1974, the Arecibo telescope sent out a “Hello Universe” message into space, which contained binary information, our solar system, our DNA, prime numbers and a lot of, how the device looks like with which it was sent, and other stuff.
This is the message WE sent:
Courtesy CropCircleResearch.com
And this is the formation we found that day. Differences are highlighted.
Courtesy CropCircleResearch.com
So… what this means, or what the origins are… well, I spark the discussion with this.
The question remains: Are we alone?
Are we?
Black Button
Jul 2nd
Mr. Roberts finds himself inside a white room, and meets a somewhat strange person. He’s offered a lot of money, if he does something… what it is? Well you better check out this cool and bizarre short movie which I’ve found on YouTube.