Alzheimer’s a metabolic disease? From The Guardian:
A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer’s is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. This could be a revolutionary finding.
Via Wired:
Following a day-long Domain Name Service server outage, web hosting provider GoDaddy is letting its competitor, VeriSign, host its DNS servers.
Part of me wants to point out that GoDaddy’s relationship with VeriSign’s is not quite that of a competitor. GoDaddy’s primary business is domain registration. VeriSign sold Network Solutions back in 2003. VeriSign used to sell SSL certs, that’s now owned by Symantec. They however still sell hosting and DNS services which competes with GoDaddy, however I don’t think they are really competing as they seem to be targeting different markets. VeriSign is the authoritative registry for .com and .net, making them essential to the entire operation of domains. GoDaddy being the largest registrar suggests they’ve had a relationship for a long time.
What this demonstrates is that GoDaddy totally dropped the ball and realized they weren’t prepared for today’s events This was a very long outage, even with moving to VeriSign.
Mars Curiosity Self Shot. No duckface. I wonder if Instagram will add a Mars filter to mimic that effect. Hope so.
I’m really enjoying the photos coming back from Curiosity so far, and it’s just getting started.
PCMag quotes an Amazon spokesperson:
“[W]ith Kindle Fire HD there will be a special offers opt-out option for $15. We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We’re happy to offer customers the choice.”
Apple may have a reputation for gouging customers on things like $19 cables, but $15 to turn off ads on a new $499 device is a little absurd. Not to mention just outright tacky.
You’d think Amazon would want to make their higher end devices viewed as polished and having a great experience to compete with the iPad. If price was the deciding factor the iPad would have already lost out to the plethora of Android tablets out there. The reason it hasn’t is because the experience on Android tablets is miserable.
Here’s a cool video of a hard drive in slow motion. Even better when they throw some water on it. Drives move really quickly, 7,200 RPM’s is faster than the engine of most vehicles. Think about that. Crank video up to 1080p and put it in full screen.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales threatened to encrypt traffic to the UK if new tracking laws are implemented:
But if we find that UK ISPs are mandated to keep track of every single web page that you read on Wikipedia, I’m almost certain – err, I shouldn’t speak for our technical staff – we would immediately move to a default of encrypting all our connections in the UK.
Truthfully, we’re going that way anyway. It’s only a matter of time before all websites will be moving to HTTPS for the sake of implementing SPDY or whatever succeeds it. I don’t see a non-secure standard taking hold any longer. Security is no longer considered a bonus, it’s a requirement. Facebook does it by default now, Twitter does it by default now, WordPress.com does it by default now (for SPDY). It’s not just personal communications. Lots of non-personal data is going over HTTPS now. The trend will keep accelerating. It’s no longer as cost prohibitive to implement. Don’t be shocked if this entire blog is HTTPS only in the not too distant future.
Matt Inman aka “The Oatmeal” zaps Matt Harding aka “Where the Hell is Matt” with 10,000 volt Tesla cannon. And yes, he’s doing the “Where the Hell is Matt Dance”.
This is what the internet is about.
Here’s an interesting set of pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists from around 1900 depicting what they thought the world would be like by the year 2000. Some of them at least partially came true. The “busy farmer” is partially true as farming has become more automated. “Electronic Scrubbing” does reflect what a Roomba is today. Sadly no flying cars.
Interesting to note flying was a very common theme.
Via Gizmodo
JournalStar has an interesting article about pricing strategies and the psychology behind them. It’s always interesting to read about. We often view good buys not in terms of what they are, but relative to something else. If you can control what that “something else” is, you have a lot of control over consumers.
From Network World:
Scientists at DARPA say there are some 1,300 satellites worth over $300B sitting out in Earth’s geostationary orbit (GEO) that could be retrofitted or harvested for new communications roles and it designed a program called Phoenix which it says would use a squadron “satlets” and a larger tender craft to grab out-of-commission satellites and retrofit or retrieve them for parts or reuse.
This is some serious Star Wars stuff here.