Malawi, me, friends, stories, and whatever else I generally find interesting that's going on in this world...

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

One more for the road



Wow.

How lucky were these guys?

Click both pictures to find out...

Go-ogl_e cracking down on pirates?

A Google lawyer announced that in September the firm will roll out a new content filter for YouTube that should block pirated material from being uploaded on the site.
Google, which acquired YouTube in October, plans to generate a library of digital video fingerprints that would be used by a computer system to screen clips being uploaded to YouTube, said Philip Beck, one of the attorneys representing Google and YouTube. Beck added that the screening process would take only a few minutes to determine whether a clip is copyright material.

Google, Viacom and the class of copyright holders that have filed suit against Google and YouTube within the past year, were in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, for a scheduling hearing.

Beck's statement is significant because it would appear to be the first time that anyone from Google has set a firm launch date for a filtering-system roll out. The company has frustrated numerous media executives by promising to produce better copyright protections for YouTube but not delivering. Critics are quick to note that many of YouTube's competitors already screen content.
Currently Google has to manually delete these files.

According to CNET
we've got untill September to watch greats such as "The S1MPSONZ"
(This is the full movie, available on G.Video)

Update: Seems like they manually deleted it... DOH!!!

Monday, July 30, 2007

The singularity - Part I

(Right click the picture, and select play)






Makes you wonder where we'll be in a couple of years.

Couldnt have said it better

Got in an Email. Thanks Jango from the "Bubjurden Fjords"

Bio-Walls


Now this is an amazing idea:

The most eye-catching feature of the IL Centre is the biowall, located in the main lobby. Three stories high, the wall is both beautiful and functional, acting as a biofilter and a central aesthetic feature of the building.

The wall is a natural air filter which removes VOCs and CO2 from the air as it passes through the wall into the building's office spaces.


The WALL in all it's glory

More details here

Where did they get the names?


The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human.
Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."





Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather.
He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!





Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from the lotus position or 'padmasana.' Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

More can be found here

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Dream Destination

Akihabara is one of the largest Electronic shopping Districts on the Planet.
Located in Tokyo, Japan, you can shop for anything electronic, computer, and anime.


Visiting Akihabara is the geek equivalent of a Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca. You have to visit at least once. Anyone into tech gear, computers and anime would not be complete without planting boots in the center of one of the busiest tech places on earth.


For more information about Akihabara, check these out:

- Article from the Washington Post

- Wiki Article

- Top 10 Akihabara stores

- Akihabara travel guide

- Akihabara Official web page

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Junkies Galore


Hunter S Thompson:
Patron saint of SOLID STATE magazine and inventor of Gonzo style journalism once said - My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour ...
Booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that. Legend.

Check out the others over at Solid State Magazine

Sunday, July 22, 2007