A page for randomness

Wired News: World’s Worst Superhero Names
I was taking a look at the recently released video game Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and it got me thinking about superhero names. The Silver Surfer is an unlockable character in the game, and I think that’s pretty cool.

The trouble is, I don’t know why I think it’s pretty cool. You’d think the name itself would put him in the loser category, and it probably would, except that there are so many terrible names for superheroes and supervillains in Marvel and DC comic books that “Silver Surfer” doesn’t even make the bottom 50.

Having discussed bad superheroes before, I thought I’d follow up with some names that are worse than the Silver Surfer’s.

Paramount, 20th Century Fox embrace BitTorrent | CNET News.com
Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent will begin distributing movies and TV shows for top entertainment companies starting this spring, the company is expected to announce Wednesday.

In February, BitTorrent will launch a video store where customers can download movies from Hollywood studios such as Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and 20th Century Fox, as well as TV shows from MTV Networks. Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced a similar partnership with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.

Financial terms of the agreement were not released.

The deal comes at a time when Hollywood is looking for a winning Internet movie strategy. Short-form video distributed over the Net has caught fire at places like YouTube. Many in the digital-entertainment realm are preparing for a day when the Web will provide an effective and profitable distribution method for feature-length films.

Slashdot | Best Sitting Posture Is Not Straight Up
“Researchers at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging to collect images from 22 healthy volunteers, who assumed three different sitting positions: slouching posture in which the body is hunched forward, an upright 90-degree sitting position, and a relaxed position where the subject reclined backward 135 degrees. They concluded that the reclined position is the best, and the forward slouch the worst.”

Slashing your smoking may not help your health - health - 28 November 2006 - New Scientist
Smokers who believe they can avoid fatal disease by slashing the number of cigarettes they smoke each day are sorely mistaken, according to a new study which suggests the only safe way to escape the risk is to quit.

Long-term research conducted among more than 50,000 Norwegians found that men who halved their daily consumption of cigarettes were as likely to die of cardiovascular disease, reduced blood flow to the heart or cancer as heavy smokers.

And, remarkably, it found that women who cut back were in fact more likely to die prematurely than their heavy-smoking counterparts.

Sorting Algorithms Demo
We all know that Quicksort is one of the fastest algorithms for sorting. It’s not often, however, that we get a chance to see exactly how fast Quicksort really is. The following applets chart the progress of several common sorting algorithms while sorting an array of data using in-place algorithms. This means that the algorithms do not allocate additional storage to hold temporary results: they sort the data in place. (This is inspired by the algorithm animation work at Brown University and the video Sorting out Sorting By Ronald Baecker from the University of Toronto (circa 1970!).)

Some of these sorts are very stupid or very slow and should not be used in code. The use of Bubblesort is deprecated. So don’t use Bubblesort! Also, don’t use Swapsort! It is only a demonstration of the amount of time Java takes to swap n elements.

pirate.swf

CMPS 415/515 Assignment 4 notices:
1) Submission: Submit a screen (window) capture image in addition to the usual material.

for the ray tracer we needed to include an image
of our scene….

paper or electronic?

i got docked points for not including one…
but i included it (paper)…they didn’t specify either type.

At least I got 10 bonus points.

Nintendo Wii: the Ars Technica review : Page 1
With the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the primary focus is graphical prowess. What special effects can be added to games; how high can we push the resolution, and just how good we can make these titles look? It can be argued that with most games on these two systems, the primary difference between the next-gen and last-gen is improved graphics. Fight Night Round 3 looks better on the PS3 than on the PS2, for instance, but is it worth $10 more? In many cases these new games feel a lot like old games with a new coat of paint. One might begin to wonder if we are going to see the same basic gaming concepts over and over, simply with better graphics as time goes on?

Nintendo is saying no; they are dropping out of the graphics race. Fact is, the Wii is not very powerful in relation to its two competitors. Where it can fight back is innovation; instead of a normal controller, you interact with the game via a remote control-like device that many simply call the “Wiimote.” In-game movements are based on, well, real-life movement—and one or two buttons. This control scheme is designed to be intuitive and to really immerse you in what you’re doing.

That’s the basic proposition: last-gen graphics with a truly new and innovative control scheme. Are gamers going to be willing to overlook the dated graphics in exchange for waving their hands around instead of tapping buttons?

An attractive design

As it turns out, these questions are familiar. When I looked back at my DS review, I recalled some of the early predictions. “The PSP will kill the DS,” many said, because it can do much better graphically, and gamers would happily pay more for it. Likewise, we heard worries that developers would never take advantage of the DS touch screen, leaving it nothing more than a gimmick. In the eyes of many, Nintendo was throwing away their portable gaming “monopoly.”

We know how Nintendo’s gamble turned out; the DS paid off, Nintendo made an almost obscene amount of money from the system, and it’s outselling the competition. The underwhelming graphics didn’t seem to bother anyone, and it didn’t just appeal to some hardcore gamers. People who were never interested in a GameBoy were intrigued by the touch screen interface and the novel games. It actually brought in new gamers, and that strategy is a large part of Nintendo’s plan.

The Wii has the possibility to do the same thing. Few of your Halo and Final Fantasy skills are going to translate to this system. Instead, you’re going to have to learn a whole new way to think about games. When it comes to the Wii, we’re all newbies, and while that may make some hardcore gamers uncomfortable, it’s a revelation for new gamers who finally have something they can pick up and figure out instead of feeling like they couldn’t compete without years of practice. The graphics are underwhelming, sure, but that Wiimote is a brand new way to play your games.

Cyber Monday, you’re no Black Friday | CNET News.com
Retailers, of course, have breathlessly promoted the first Monday after Thanksgiving as a crucial day for online shopping, the day Web cash registers were supposed to be stuffed as bargain hunters got an early jump on holiday gift buying. But in all the effort to hype the day, somebody forgot to tell consumers.

WHO predicts death and disease in 2030 - health - 28 November 2006 - New Scientist
Over the next 25 years, annual AIDS deaths will more than double, and smoking will account for one-tenth of all deaths worldwide. But the good news is the world’s poor will become wealthier, live longer and stop dying of infectious diseases.

Scientists at the World Health Organization have come up with the most comprehensive analysis yet of what people will suffer and die from in the year 2030. Globally, the risk of dying before the age of five could be halved by then.

Cigarettes will kill about 50% more people by 2030 than it currently does, and depression will be second only to AIDS as a cause of debilitating illness.

Mozilla Sunbird™
Mozilla Sunbird™ is a cross-platform calendar application, built upon Mozilla Toolkit. Our goal is to bring Mozilla-style ease-of-use to your calendar, without tying you to a particular storage solution.

Microsoft Watch - Vista - Microsoft’s Miscalculation
Vista’s visual improvements make the calculator oversight all the more glaring. My complaint is simple: The / for divide and * for multiply. Why can’t these symbols be what they’re supposed to represent? Apple gets this right. Mac OS X calculator uses x for multiply and ÷ for divide.

Little things do matter. I suppose Microsoft could argue that people should just do all that complex math in their heads anyway. Yeah, it sure is fun to calculate in my head $199.95 for a hotel room plus local taxes plus $14.95 Internet access times five days multiplied (Or is that divided?) by the percentage interest on the credit card applied to X number of days of the billing cycle.

AMD’s R600 die gets pixellated
As you can see, the chip location on the packaging is rather interesting, rotated at a 60 degree angle - but do not be surprised, since this is not the first case of GPU manufacturers rotating the chip on the packaging. There are two reasons for that: first one is the fact that AMD needed more room for resistors which can bee seen around this big die and second is far more important - to shorten the traces to video memory as much as possible, in order to reduce the EM noise produced by the PCB.
Since the R600 comes with 512-bit memory controller, rotating the die was pretty much the only way it could get to stratospheric clocks of both GPU and GDDR-3/GDDR-4 memory.

Wired 14.12: Commercial Break
The contest ran for four weeks and drew more than 30,000 entries, the vast majority of which faithfully touted the vehicle’s many selling points – its fully retractable seats, its power-lift gates, its relative fuel economy. But then there were the rogue entries, the ones that subverted the Tahoe message with references to global warming, social irresponsibility, war in Iraq, and the psychosexual connotations of extremely large cars. One contestant, a 27-year-old Web strategist from Washington, DC, posted an offering called “Enjoy the Longer Summers!” which blamed the Tahoe for heat-trapping gasses and melting polar ice caps. An entry called “How Big Is Yours” declared, “Ours is really big! Watch us fuck America with it.” The same contestant (hey, no rules against multiple entries, right?) created an ad that asked the timeless question, “What Would Jesus Drive?” On its own Web site, the Tahoe now stood accused of everything but running down the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Slashdot | The Last Games You’d Play?
“I am an older man (44), an avid fan of video games, and I am faced with a problem; my hands are becoming arthritic as I get older. I fear I will soon have to completely give up the console games I have loved over the years. To that end, let me ask the Slashdot Nation — if you were going to give it up, what games would you insist on playing before you had to quit? I’m willing to make some effort to do this, and spend some cash; I will buy the new consoles if I need to, or try to find obscure titles.”

broadband help » News » Amazon downed for 10 minutes due to promotion - Too many requests take out entire web site

Amazon ran a special promotion this week but under-estimated the demand for the product from users with fast connections. At exactly 2pm EST, the offer was open an Xbox core system at less than half-price. Unfortunately for Amazon, so many people were waiting for the promotion that the entire Amazon website - not just the promotion page - sank without a trace from just before 2pm, to at least 2:12pm. The home page, the product pages, everything, were unavailable.

While attracting a lot of traffic to the amazon pages at once sounds like a good idea we wonder how many amazon shoppers elsewhere in the site abandoned their purchases halfway through after they found their experience destroyed by the vote rush going on in the next room. Was the quid worth the quo? some people got quite irate.

The poor performance of the amazon site during the giveaway also reflects badly on the Amazon “elastic compute cloud” offering Amazon EC2 which is designed, supposedly, to offer instant capacity to companies which need to deal with exactly this kind of sudden rush.

How to live long and prosper - health - 25 November 2006 - New Scientist
WANT to be the first one on your block to live to 100? You are in with a fighting chance if you’re the first-born child of a young mother.

Natalia Gavrilova and Leonid Gavrilov of the University of Chicago sifted through data gathered on 991 centenarians born in the US between 1875 and 1899 and used US census and Social Security Administration records to reconstruct the family histories of 198 of them, searching for anything they had in common.

It turned out that first-born children were 1.7 times as likely as their siblings to live to be 100. An even stronger predictor of longevity was how young their mother was when they were born. Those whose mothers were less than 25 years old were twice as likely to survive beyond a century.

While the researchers aren’t certain why this should be, they suspect younger mothers are less likely to have acquired latent infections during their life that could damage the health of the fetus. Younger mothers may also have better-quality eggs. “If the best, most vigorous maternal ova cells are used first - very early in life - this could explain why particularly young mothers produce particularly long-lived children,” Gavrilov says.

DailyTech - Student Develops Paper Capable of 450GB of Storage
According to a report from the Arab News, a university technology student named Sainul Abideen has invented a method of storing massive amounts of digital data on a plain piece of paper that he claims could store many times the capacity of the best Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs. In fact, Abideen says that his Rainbow technology can enable him to store up to 450GB on a piece of paper. As far as a real life demonstration of a 450GB paper goes, the technology still needs development.

Abideen claims that that his Rainbow system is better than a binary storage because instead of using ones and zeros to represent data, Abideen uses geometric shapes such as squares and hexagons to represent data patterns. Color is also used in the system to represent other data elements. According to Abideen, all that’s required to read the Rainbow prints is a scanner and specialized software.

The reporter at Arab News claims to have seen 450 pages of fully printed foolscap being stored on a 4-square inch piece of Rainbow paper. The reporter also claimed that he was shown a 45-second video clip that was stored using the Rainbow system on a plain piece of paper. Interestingly, 45-seconds of video isn’t a lot, and if the Rainbow system can store up to 450GB, then we need to be watching full length high-definition videos from a piece of paper.

Console war has a victor
THE LATEST VIDEO GAME war between Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony already has a victor.

With Power chips in the Vole Xbox 360 and Wii and a Cell chip in the PS3, IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Biggish Blue is likely to sell $3.7 billion worth of chips and associated design services this year. Last year it made $2.9 billion and the year before “only” $2.5 billion.

This is not bad dosh considering that only a few years ago analysts thought that IBM was set to sell off its microelectronics division because the outfit was losing cash.

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ebeach/deity.html

jh060917.gif (GIF Image, 500×347 pixels)

Cosmonaut shanks longest golf shot in history - space - 23 November 2006 - New Scientist Space
Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball from the porch of the International Space Station (ISS) early on Thursday, making it the longest golf shot in history. However, the commercial stunt did not go completely as planned.

Tyurin hit the 3-gram ball with his gold-plated six-iron club at 0057 GMT (1957 EST Wednesday). But the ball did not follow its intended path. Tyurin was supposed to tap it one-handed into a “retrograde” orbit – in other words backwards relative to the space station’s direction of travel. That would ensure the ball would burn up quickly in the atmosphere and not hit the ISS or other spacecraft.

Intel orders rival to stop making CPUs
GIANT CPU maker Intel is pressuring smaller rival Via Technologies to exit the CPU market, industry sources in Taiwan claim.

In exchange, Intel will allow Via to continue making PC chipsets which use Intel’s patented technology, say the sources at PC mainboard manufacturers, who do not wish to be named.

Houston, Wii’ve got a problem?
Any piece of consumer electronics is bound to ship with a small number of units affected by hardware problems. From manufacturing defects to units manhandled during shipping, a small percentage of devices will exhibit some kind of abnormality. Still, with the recently introduced Nintendo Wii containing untested electronics in the form of the motion sensor, it is a useful task to see if early adopters are having any more problems than usual. The answer: not really.

The official Nintendo Wii forums have been host to a number of folks having various issues with their brand new console. One person had their Wiimotes go out of sync and resist repeated manual resyncing. Another had their Wii freeze up in standby mode.

Ultra-short laser pulses turn metals pitch black - tech - 22 November 2006 - New Scientist Tech
Blasts of laser light lasting a few millionth billionths of a second can turn the polished surface of any metal ultra-black, by covering it with nanoscale ridges and crevices. US researchers say the trick could one day be used to make better solar panels and more efficient fuel cells.

Chunlei Guo and colleagues at Rochester University in New York, US, used a titanium-sapphire laser, which requires only a normal power supply, to repeatedly blast samples of polished metal with pulses lasting 65 femtoseconds each.

After just a few pulses, “we found femtosecond pulses can reshape the metal’s surface into a range of different nanostructures,” says Guo. The resulting nanoscale pattern of cavities and protuberances traps light so efficiently that a shiny surface turns jet black.

“The new surface can absorb very close to 100% of light,” says Guo. The technique was also found to work on copper, gold, platinum, aluminium, titanium, zinc and tungsten.

Slashdot | Drivers License Swipes Raise Privacy Concerns
Clubs in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere are requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses for a swipe through a card reader. Some bars do this too. The card reader displays their birth date and the establishments let it be assumed that the only purpose of the swipe is to check the customer’s age. They rarely if ever disclose that the personal data stored on the license — the customer’s name, address, license number, perhaps even height, weight, and eye color — go into a database and are retained, perhaps indefinitely. While a federal law forbids selling or sharing data from drivers licenses, there is no prohibition against collecting it. A few states have enacted such prohibitions — New Hampshire, Texas, and Nebraska. Privacy advocates warn that such personal data, once in a database, is bound to be misused.

Microsoft’s Ballmer forced to eat his Linux words
MICROSOFT CEO Steve Ballmer has triggered a PR nightmare for his firme over his threats to down Linux with intellectual property based lawsuits.

Not only has his new Linux chum Novell issued a statement which said it disagreed with what Steve whispered to the press, Volish spinners have had to issue a statement toning down his original comments.

Ballmer had claimed that Microsoft’s patent cooperation agreement it pushed on partner Novell was a way to protect corporate users of the SUSE Linux operating system from potential lawsuits.

Mars probe probably lost forever - space - 21 November 2006 - New Scientist Space
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has failed to spot the silent Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft. The agency will next call on the Opportunity rover to listen for the missing spacecraft’s radio beacon, though mission members say MGS may already be dead.

MGS was launched from Earth on 7 November 1996 and arrived at Mars in September 1997. It has long outlasted its planned original mission, which ended in 2000, and has returned more data on Mars than all previous missions to the planet combined.

YouTube - Shop at Home Guy Vs. Ninja Sword
Shop at Home Guy Vs. Ninja Sword