Month: May 2006

Hybrid bear found

Sometimes, I even surprise myself with the tidbits of information I see that pique my interest. For some reason, I just couldn’t skip this article at LiveScience.com after seeing the title – “DNA Tests Confirm Bear Was a Hybrid.”

Now really, how could you skip a story like that?

IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) – Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility for years.

But Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, was the first to suspect it had actually happened when he proposed that a strange-looking bear shot last month by an American sports hunter might be half polar bear, half grizzly.

So since I felt the need to post it here, you can probably guess that this bear actually *IS* a hybrid. But head over the the LiveScience article to find out more details about the bear. It’s pretty cool (no pun intended).

[tags]Hybrid bear[/tags]

Gigabyte g-Smart i

(via TechEBlog)
Normally, I don’t give a rip about new cell phones – at least, not enough to bother posting or talking much about them. This phone, however, looks pretty interesting to me. The Gigabyte g-Smart i is a clone of the Nokia 6270.  And it’s a phone I actually would like to have.i_phone_1.jpg

Here’s a Nokia 6270 clone done right. The g-Smart i features a 2.1-megapixel camera, MiniSD card slot, 2.4-inch TFT touch screen display, FM tuner, GPS navigation system (optional), TV tuner (optional), and support for a host of audio/video files (MP3/MPEG-4/3GPP/WMV). Plus, it’s powered by Windows Mobile 5.0. This phone measures just 19.8mm thin and weighs 130g. No word yet on pricing and availability.

[tags]Cell Phone, g-Smart i, Nokia 6270 clone[/tags]

Mega-crash

porsche_mega_crash_02.jpgGot this from a co-worker. It seemed interesting enough to warrant a post here. That’s one of the rims that apparently popped off as a result of the crash. Please, follow the link to see the full effects. This will involve more than a little extra oil in the engine to compensate for a leak, I’m certain.

[tags]Mega-crash, Porsche crash[/tags]

Million Gigabyte thumb drives?

(via Engadget)

Color me skeptical, but according to this announcement from Drexel University, we might in the not-too-distant future see USB keys (or whatever interface dominates at the time) with massive storage capacities.

Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.

Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.

Sounds good to me. I’ll order a couple now, to avoid the early adopters rush.

Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe offrom the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires.

Dang it, there’s always a catch, isn’t there? I predict that before the year is out, we’ll hear that this technology is feasable, but 5 years away. Next year, we’ll get an update that the technology is feasable, but still 5 years away. And let me go out on a limb and say that in 2008, we’ll get an update that this technology is feasable, but is roughly 5 years away.

In case you haven’t kept up with breakthrough technology, everything is roughly 5 years away.

[tags]Massive data storage[/tags]

What to do if your identity is stolen

(via LifeHacker)
I read an article recently that said identity theft is significantly lower than most reported numbers indicate.  I wish I could find that to link to it.  Perhaps I can find it later and make mention of it.  Regardless, there is an article over at The Consumerist about what you should do if you are one of the folks who does get your identity stolen.

[tags]Identity theft[/tags]

Microsoft works to protect your sensitive ears

(via Engadget)
Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology to auto-censor audio streams.  Here’s the abstract:

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The censored speech can either be stored or made available to an audience in real-time.

[tags]Audio auto-censoring[/tags]

Browser speed tests

(via OSNews)

If you’ve ever wondered where your preferred browser falls on the performance curve, this article at howtocreate.co.uk has lots of details.  The short result is if you just want the fastest browser, you are almost certain to be best served by Opera.  The gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon) do OK, but don’t beat Opera on anything but start time.

Ok, ok. Firefox and Mozilla are clearly optimised for Linux, and Opera is clearly optimised for Windows. These optimisations are mostly obvious with the loading times, although there is also a little difference in the cache handling on the different operating systems. However, Opera seems to perform admirably well on most tasks, on any platform. When it comes to page rendering (tables, CSS or images), most of the major browsers perform very fast, with very little to distinguish between them. When it comes to scripts, Opera clearly holds its head above the others, nearly twice as fast as the others. The only one that comes close is Safari 2.0, but that is tied to the Tiger release of Mac OS (currently in preview).

Opera also is a clear winner using history. In fact, on Linux it is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all except starting time. On Mac and Windows, Opera is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all tasks. Surprisingly, Mozilla is now faster at most tasks than Firefox (please don’t send me any more emails about this line, I am well aware of why it is faster). Internet Explorer on Windows was either as fast as – or faster than Mozilla and Firefox for most tasks, with the exception of scripts, where it took over twice as long.

There is a lot more to the article than this snippet.  Please head over and read the full article for all the details.

[tags]Browser test, browser speed[/tags]

Portable video players

I nave no reason to get one of these. I can’t afford such a silly expenditure. But man, I wish I could buy any of the recently displayed portable media players I’ve seen over at TechEBlog. Here are just a few of the recent PMPs I wish I could get.

And there are more posted several times a week, it seems. Mostly, they are released in Korea with no announced US release date. So I’ll probably never get one of these, but I really think they are sexy.

[tags]Portable Media Players,PMP[/tags]

Sandboxie for protected surfing and application installation

(via FreewareWiki)

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations.

. . .

For example, if you run the Freecell program to play a game, it starts by reading the previously recorded statistics, displaying and altering them as you play the game, and finally writing them back to disk for future reference.

Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk.

. . .

If you run Freecell inside the Sandboxie environment, Sandboxie reads the statistics data from the hard disk into the sandbox, to satisfy the read requested by Freecell. When the game later writes the statistics, Sandboxie intercepts this operation and directs the data to the sandbox.

If you then run Freecell without the aid of Sandboxie, the read operation would bypass the sandbox altogether, and the statistics would be retrieved from the hard disk.

A run for anything sandbox to contain your programs and limit what they can do to your system.  Sandboxie is free, and looks very, very useful.  It’s going on my system for sure.

[tags]Sandbox, Sandboxie, Virtualization[/tags]

Man sues Compaq for false advertising

(via Bruce Schneier’s security blog)
As the headling says, a suit has been filed against Compaq (now HP) for false advertising.  Michael Crooker is suing Compaq for advertising a feature called DriveLock, purported to make the hard drive unreadable without the proper password.  After Mr. Crooker had his apartment searched by the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), his laptop was taken.  Later, data from the hard drive was used in a later search of his e-mail account.

He bought it in September 2002, expressly because it had a feature called DriveLock, which freezes up the hard drive if you don´t have the proper password.

The computer´s manual claims that ¨if one were to lose his Master Password and his User Password, then the hard drive is useless and the data cannot be resurrected even by Compaq´s headquarters staff,¨ Crooker wrote in the suit.

. . .

The FBI had broken through DriveLock and accessed his e-mails (both deleted and not) as well as lists of websites he´d visited and other information. The only files they couldn´t read were ones he´d encrypted using Wexcrypt, a software program freely available on the Internet.

I’ll let you make your own decision about whether or not normal people should have access to security software of this type.  I will say I view personal access to cryptography software to be as important as personal access to firearms.  You, of course, don’t have to share my view, but if you don’t, I’d be interested in hearing why in the comments.

[tags]DriveLock, Cryptography[/tags]

Free IP TV from Channelchooser

(via Lifehacker)
I haven’t checked out the available line-up yet, but Channelchooser looks to be offering TV viewable online.  If you want to see what the next big thing in TV *might* be, watch a little online.  If studios ever figure out how to use the Internet for distribution, this kind of thing could catch on.

[tags]IPTV[/tags]