17 Mai 2004

Test: TwinHan Vision Plus USB-Ter

Hier wird ein Test einer USB-Box für DVB-T durchgeführt: "TwinHan, ein taiwanscher Hersteller für PC Zubehör, bietet seit einiger Zeit eine kleine USB Box an, mit der man ohne zusätzlicher Stromversorgung digitales Fernsehen per Antenne empfangen kann. Es handelt sich hierbei um eine der ersten externen USB Boxen, die ohne Strom auskommen. Doch kann man damit wirklich überall in den TV Genuss kommen?"

14 Mai 2004

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy -- The Official Movie Website

Oder auf deutsch "Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis -- Der Film". Was kann man mehr sagen: Juhu!
Und das Blog zum Film zum Buch gibt's auch schon ;)

Parallel-Universen...

...zuhause aufspüren: "A parallel universe, it may surprise you to learn, is actually detectable in your own home, office, or almost anywhere indoors. All that's required is a red laser pointer, a pin, and a piece of paper."
Naja, das Experiment ist schon ziemlich cool (Welle-Teilchen-Dualismus und so), aber wie der dann auf die Parallel-Universen kommt...

11 Mai 2004

Alan Turing: Thinking Up Computers

Die Business Week hat einen interessanten Artikel über Alan Turing: "The Cambridge University mathematician laid the foundation for the invention of software"

Ichpeils.net

ICHPEILS.NET für langweilige Stunden...

Sex, Sit-ups, Sex

Eine kleine Glosse aus der ZEIT: "Wenn ich so ein Männerleben führen würde, wie die Männermagazine es vorführen, wäre ich längst tot."
Beachtenswert sind die verschwiegenen Punkte am Ende des Artikels...

Hier ist dein Schild ...

Hier ist dein Schild ...: "Doofe Leute sollten Schilder tragen müssen, auf denen 'ich bin doof' steht. Auf diese Weise würde man sich nicht auf sie verlassen, oder? Du würdest sie nix fragen. Es wäre wie 'Tschuldigung, ich... äh, vergiss es. Hab das Schild nicht gesehen.'"

10 Mai 2004

European Space Shuttle Prototype Lands Safely In Sweden

Slashdot berichtet über Phoenix: "'Yahoo! News reports the successful test of a German designed prototype of the European space shuttle, Phoenix , taking place in the north of Sweden, moving the first all European mission into space one step closer.'"

07 Mai 2004

William Gibson

William Gibson: "This was was published as DEAD MAN SPEAKS:

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

I sometimes think that nothing really is new; that the first pixels were particles of ochre clay, the bison rendered in just the resolution required. The bison still function perfectly, all these millennia later, and what screen in the world today shall we say that of in a decade? And yet the bison will be there for us, on whatever screens we have, carried out of the primal dark on some impulse we each have felt, as children, drawing. But carried nonetheless on this thing we have always been creating, this vast unlikely mechanism that carries memory in its interstices; this global, communal, prosthetic memory that we have been building since before we learned to build.

We live in, have lived through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world’s attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the mountain valleys of my Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.

When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel”, we are seldom struck by the peculiarity of our situation: that a dead man sings.

In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a moment ago. It is something new, and I sometimes feel that, yes, everything has changed. (This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.)

Our “now” has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecidently elastic. The half-life of media-product grows shorter still, ‘til it threatens to vanish altogether, everting into some weird quantum logic of its own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quark-like blink. Yet once admitted to the culture’s consensus-pantheon, certain things seem destined to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large part, of the rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation.

And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge?

The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now. But then, again, perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting for us."

Flarion's Tokyo wireless adventure

The Register berichtet über eine mobile 4G Technik: "Exactly how well Flash-OFDM works in a live application is an issue that many experts have debated. In theory, in Flarion's white papers, Flash has an average downlink speed of 1.5 megabits per second - somewhere between five and six times the data rate of WCMDA 3G phones. Also in theory, it can handle far more simultaneous users, between two and three times, according to Flarion's own estimates."
Also doch kein UMTS-Handy kaufen, sondern abwarten und Tee trinken...

06 Mai 2004

Programming as if Performance Mattered

Der Titel sagt schon alles. Benchmarks und die Optimierung werden hier diskutiert. "I frequently see bare queries from programmers in discussion forums, especially from new programmers, who are worried about performance. These worries often stem from popular notions about what operations are 'slow.' Division. Square roots. Mispredicted branches. Cache unfriendly data structures. Visual Basic. Inevitably someone chimes in that making out-of-context assumptions, especially without profiling, is a bad idea. And they're right. But I often wonder if those warnings are also just regurgitations of popular advice. After all, if a C programmer was truly concerned with reliability above all else, would he still be using C ?"

XP reparieren...

c't 10/2004, S. 94: Windows XP: "Ein Malheur mit den Boot-Sektoren lässt sich leicht beheben. Die Wiederherstellungskonsole, die Sie von der Original-XP-CD starten können, ist das Mittel der Wahl: Sie kann den MBR (fixmbr) und den Boot-Sektor (fixboot) reparieren. Außerdem kann sie nach vorhandenen Windows-Installationen suchen (bootcfg /rebuild) und so eine verloren gegangene oder durch Umpartitionieren wertlos gewordene boot.ini-Datei restaurieren - der Befehl fragt für jede gefundene Windows-Installation nach, ob sie in die boot.ini-Datei aufzunehmen ist.

Lediglich die Boot-Dateien (ntldr und ntdetect.com) kann die Wiederherstellungskonsole nicht direkt restaurieren. Hier müssen Sie selbst ran und die Dateien aus dem i386-Verzeichnis der CD auf die Festplatte kopieren. Das ist zum Beispiel dann nötig, wenn Sie nach Windows XP noch 2000 installieren; die Installation ersetzt die Datei ntldr durch eine Version, die XP noch nicht zu starten vermag."

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