Virgin Galactic

What won't Richard Branson do for money?

...officials from Virgin Galactic and from the State of New Mexico announced that they had reached an historic agreement which will see the building of a $200m spaceport in the southern part of the state on a 27 square mile area of state land.

Virgin Galactic[a]?  Now that can't be a good idea.  Didn't Richard try to fly around the world in a hot air balloon a few times?  Wait, was he successful?  I can't remember...

 

So why not build a spaceport and see if we can't throw a few millionaires into the air and watch them blow up like some fireworks on the 4th?  I think that's a fine idea. 

 

$200 million for a spaceport plus how many billion for a few spacecraft?  How much is a flight into space going to cost?  $10 million for an hours flight is my guess.  It just sounds like a bad idea all around. [ars technica]

 

 

Technorati Tags : Virgin, Galactic, Tourism

Google Music Search

What other [free] products could Google possibly supply us with?

Hot on the heels of yesterday's public confession of its new fascination with widgets, Internet un-portal Google has unveiled yet another new service: Google Music. Accessible from the main search page, Google Music provides information on albums, lyrics, and other artist-related information. When users enter the artist or song name as a search argument, a small box with the artists name and image (or icon of music notes) appears at the top of the results.

Music search?  Is that even worthy of a note?  I found this at ars technica (which has an amazing amount of extremely interesting articles lately it seems).

 

The thing that gets me is the lyrics part of their post.  It's not in the next paragraph:

Clicking on the link will take you to a Google Music page with links to artist information, album information, artist websites, photos, along with online discussions. There are also the inevitable "buy this album" links to places like the iTunes Music Store, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and other online merchants.

With the RIAA, ASCAP, and BMI announcing in the last few days that they will now be going after tableture and lyric sites, would it be smart for Google to offer up artist's lyrics in their search results?  I don't think so.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Google, Music, Search

Cracking the XBox 360

Now here's food for thought:  Do you think that any amount of security on a gaming system will stop crackers from reverse engineering it?

A group of crackers called Team PI Coder says it has discovered the basic workings of the console's file system.  The information has helped the group dig out the raw data from the console for 13 Xbox 360 games.

I'm going to go with "no" on that one.  What makes Microsoft think that their newest protection on the 360 is any different than the other systems to date?

A spokesman for Microsoft said there had been a series of improvements to the Xbox 360 that protect it against cracking.

He said that hardware on the system only allows Microsoft certified and signed programs to run on the console. This meant that copied games would not be recognised by the system and would not run.

Ahhhh!  So that's it!  Hardware based protection.  Maybe a bit like the last Xbox?  Oh, I'm sure it's improved, but when the challenge is there, there's a lot of engineers and reverse engineers that are going to be working on the problem to try to break the system.  Remember the last Xbox?  Yeah, the one that used a modchip to bypass the EEPROM (I think that was it)?  Well, it didn't last long, and neither will this one.

I'm not interested really, but it makes me mad that MS would have the balls to think that their system isn't breakable.  If it boils down to 1's and 0's, it's breakable.

Technorati Tags : Bypass, Security, Xbox, 360

The Trickiness of the RIAA, Etc

I know we all know that the Recording industry is much smarter than we thought.

 

Lately, the industry has found a creative twist in this game: They're deliberately mislabeling CDs, giving their artists pseudonyms, and sometimes even fake song titles, to throw off those who might swipe a record from a desk or mailroom and spread it over the Web.

So they give out these promos to journalists, but they put sneaky names like Jack and the Bean Stalk on them, and no one can figure it out.  Why is it, then, that Madonna's last album was leaked onto the 'net a few weeks before its retail date?  What will they think of next?  Hey, I know, maybe they could mail CDs that are disguised as grilled cheese sandwiches.  When the hunger reviewer tries to eat it though, watch out!  You don't want to see a hungry journalist get tricked like that.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Music, Industry, Snafu

Pentagon Watches Peacemakers

Why would the US think that this was a good idea.

If you've marched against the Iraq war or flashed a peace sign during a rally, the Pentagon may be keeping an eye on you. The U.S. military has been building a secret database that suggests it is monitoring peace demonstrations and collecting information on Americans who oppose the Iraq war.

MTV has this article on the Pentagon, which, to me, is just about the most retarded thing I've ever heard.  How do they expect to keep an eye on half of the population of the US?  How many Americans now support the war in Iraq?  One?  Two maybe?  They seem to be coming around to what we have known for a long time.  The war in Iraq is just a bad idea.  Get out.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Pentagon, Watches, Protestors

To Flop or Not

Have you ever wondered if that movie you're filming in your backyard is going to be a huge hit in Hollywood?  Yeah, that's right, me too...

 The program looks at several factors, including the movie's rating, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theatres it opens in. It weighs all these factors using a neural network and predicts whether or not the movie will be a box-office hit. The predictions are sorted into nine categories, from "flop" (less than US$1 million) to "blockbuster" (over US$200 million).

ars technica has an article on this software that will predict whether a movie will be a success based on data provided before the movie comes out. 

 

Uh-huh.  Sure it will. 

 

So if I spend $1,000 on a movie it's not going to make me over $100 million?  Is it sure about that?  What if I spend $10 million?  Will it be a success?  What if I make a movie like The Blair Witch Project?  Will it think it's going to flop based on the fact that it cost barely anything to make, and it was a horror?  I think it's a stupid program that won't lead to anything we don't already know as human beings.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Movie, Prediction, Software

iPod Boxers

I've noticed this on a few sites already and just passed it off as really stupid, but I suppose it has some use to someone.

iBoxers are boxer shorts with a pocket built to hold an iPod or anything you please.Purchase a pair for $22, buy two and get three free iTunes downloads.

There's a point where Apple iPod "gadgets" are just unnecessary.  Really, you're running around your house like Tom Cruise, playing air guitar in your underwear, and you can't hold your iPod?  Nope.  Guess not.  So where do you put it?  Well, you put it in the pocket of your Boxer Shorts especially designed for just this situation.  Check out the picture at ubergizmo to see how stupid it really is.  At least the guy looks like he's having fun.

 

 

Technorati Tags : iPod, Gadgets

Apple Boombox?

Engadget has an interesting article on Apple's future.

In what would be quite a departure for Apple, AppleInsider is rumoring that the company’s iPod division is working up a foray into consumer electronics land next year, including products such as an iPod boombox.

A boombox?  That can't be right, can it?  Although, if you think about it, who wouldn't want to be able to hook up their shelf-sized stereo to their computer and load up 175,000 songs onto it.  Music for a lifetime.

 

What's next?  Maybe Apple could get into Stove Stereos.  I kind of need music while I'm cooking.  If only my microwave would sing to me instead of beep every time my TV dinner is done.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Apple, Boombox

 

Remove the XP Start Button

Has that little "Start" button in the taskbar ever bothered you enough to actually want to remove it?

 

Well the people at Channel9.MSDN.com have come up with a great solution.

Well, times move on and I wanted to shrink the size of my start button, so I edited the Windows string table to change "start" to an empty string. Since Windows doesn't allow null, empty, or zero-length strings (for some bizarre reason) I replaced it with a space.

I then reloaded explorer, by-passed the SFC dialog, and the start-button is now much smaller.

But the button had an unsightingly bulge to the right where the space was.

Since you can't have an empty string in the string table, I wondered what would happen if you deleted the string table entry, which I did. I then reloaded explorer.

Lo and behold, the start button was gone, entirely.

Isn't that a great solution?  If you read through the comments you'll get a better understanding of what you have to do, but it makes sense in the end.  I like the idea because sometimes I have so much crap on the taskbar that it would be nice to spread it around a bit.  Also, it just looks cleaner without that big bar there.

 

It's said that you need to have Visual Studio or some other resource editor, but I'm not sure which one other editor can be used, so if you know, leave me a comment.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Windows, Hacking

SmashMyXbox

These guys are just sick...

Don't watch the video if you are desperate for an Xbox 360. PS3 fans (who are convinced the PS3 is far superior, or have a dislike of Microsoft) may like this.

From channel9.msdn.com comes this exciting news.  Those idiots who did smashmyipod.com did another one called smashmyxbox.com.  They should be shot.

 

One thing that would have been a bit better is if they could have been in first, quickly paid for it, and then smashed it in front of a long line of 1000 people or so.  That might've been better.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Smash, Xbox, stupid

WiMAX a Go

It looks like we'll be getting WiMAX by mid 2006.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has quietly ratified the long-awaited 802.16e standard for mobile WiMAX, which is also known as 802.16-2005.

It's about time.  From the Wiki page for WiMAX:

The technology has been claimed to provide shared data rates up to 70 Mbit/s, which, according to WiMAX proponents, is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support more than 60 businesses with T1-type connectivity and well over a thousand homes at 1Mbit/s DSL-level connectivity.

This would be ideal for a smaller town, such as the one I live in with 100,000 people, where the need for wires is a thing of the past and there would then be more than two options for highspeed internet for the area.  The initial costs would be high, but with reasonable pricing it would pay for itself in the end.  Now where did I put that $500,000,000 I need to put a tower on the hill across the lake?

 

 

Technorati Tags : WiMAX

MS IE 7 More Secure

Apparently IE 7 will be more secure according to bloggers at the Redmond site.

Microsoft is changing Internet Explorer 7's security zones in a bid to create a more attack-resistant browser, according to public blog entry written by three developers at the software giant.

Yeah, right.  Sure...  Okay.  Security holes abound, I'm sure.  We all know that there are going to be major problems with this piece of software.  Look for a patch within 2 to 3 days, and then an IE 7 SP1 within two weeks.  It's the way it goes.  Some of this can be attributed to MS not testing their software enough, but I will give them a bit of credit and expect some of the security flaws to be unknown (or unknowable) before the software comes out.  Can't wait for it though!  I'll still use Firefox.  Original story.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Microsoft, Internet, Explorer, Security

 

 

Paris Hilton vs. SPCA

It's good to know that people realize Paris Hilton can't take care of that stupid mutt she drags around all day.

Paris Hilton is the world's worst dog owner, according to an online poll conducted by the magazines New York Dog and Hollywood Dog. "Our readers felt Ms. Hilton's dog-parenting skills left a lot to be desired," said joint editor Leslie Padgett. "First she loses Tinkerbell, then she ditches her dog for a cuter dog, then replaces that dog with a ferret, then a Kinkajou monkey, and then, I gather, a goat." The title of best dog owner went to Joss Stone, who narrowly edged out Ashley Olsen.

How anyone can subscribe to, and vote in a poll by, a magazine about dogs I'll never know, but this late breaking news is soothing, to say the least.  Why does Paris carry those dogs around anyway?  Does she like dogs or does she like the fact that millions of girls around the world are now carrying little runts around like a purse all because of her?  It's a tough job being famous for being famous.

 

 

Technorati Tags : Paris, Hilton, Dogs

Princeton Student Fined by RIAA

It seems the RIAA continues to delve into the retarded.

Delwin Olivan is an 18-year-old Princeton student who is being extorted by the RIAA to the tune of $5,000 as punishment for being caught promoting music by sharing it on the Internet. His fellow Princetonians have founded the Free Delwin group, which is fundraising to help pay off his settlement.

Boing Boing has a post about it, and they nicely point out how stupid it is.  Really, a kid sharing music online, a university student at that, and they want to fine him?  At least the artists affected will eventually see $0.0000001 cents each from the settlement.

 

 

Technorati Tags : RIAA, Music, Piracy

More Wiki Problems

Wikipedia seems to have problem after problem these days.

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

How this is funny, I don't know, but the guy should get into a lot more trouble than just leaving his job and not using Wikipedia.  Falsely accusing someone of murder isn't a light accusation.

Wikipedia, while an exceptional idea, is proving not so exceptional in execution.

Technorati Tags : Wikipedia, Prankster