There are an estimated 6.8 billion people on this planet at the time of this blog post. There will be 5 billion cell phone subscriptions by the end of this year. Granted some people have several, most have 1.
To put this in perspective 884 million people in the world do not have access [...]
Archive for the ‘Tech (General)’ Category
Cell Phones And Toilets
Luxury Markup
Audioholics has a must read review of the $3,500 Lexicon BD-30 Blu-Ray player.
What did they find? It’s actually the $500 OPPO BDP-83 inside a new case. Literally. They put the entire chassis inside, not just the components. Then they did some audio measurements and found they also matched. Not just [...]
Coin Tosses Not Totally Random
It’s generally assumed that a coin toss is “fair” because it’s considered “random” as long as you don’t use a double headed coin. In fact professional sports like football use it. While previously known or at least suspected, it’s not so random. Research shows it has a 1% bias. Making the [...]
xkcd: Tech Support Cheat Sheet
Todays xkcd comic was even funnier than normal:
[From xkcd]
UNIX Apocalypse
Apparently Unix time/POSIX time will hit a rather impressive 1234567890 in the next few days. What is even more interesting is that this is happening on Friday the 13th, 2009. You can find out when it will happen in your local time by running perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890),”\n”;’. Just another milestone [...]
Super Mario Gravity
The other day I mentioned there is a JS implementation of Super Mario brothers. I also mentioned that the physics feel about right compared to the real game.
Apparently someone did some analysis on the series and correctly concluded that the gravity physics are totally not realistic (shocking). The real nuggets are that he [...]
Z2k9 Bug Strikes The Zune
From the company that brought you Windows ME, and Windows Vista, Microsoft Corporation today introduced the world to the Z2K9 bug. Apparently all 30GB Zune’s reboot and freeze due to a bug in the date/time drivers. Classic. Microsoft’s solution is to simply wait until 2009 (a few more hours). Even more [...]
Making Products Easy To Repair
Lately consumer protection and financial laws seem to be a favorite of politicians who want to help the American people “keep their hard earned money”, er whatever slogan it is they go with these days. For a long time I’ve been of the feeling that they are overlooking the obvious. Making things easier [...]
MTA’s Fail Whale
Apparently the Fail Whale in tech is a disease lately. The latest obvious occurrence has been New York’s MTA with their MetroCard vending machines. I noticed on Monday walking into the station, the lines in front of the vending machines were insanely long (normally 2 people max, now 15+) and presumed just a [...]
Recursive Grep
I didn’t even think about it until about 15 seconds after I pressed enter:
grep ‘call_user_func_array’ * > out.txt
Sigh.
