"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper."
- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind."
‘String Ducky’ is the winning submission for a recently concluded user-generated-video contest to present String Theory in Two Minutes or Less. The official winning video (chosen by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene) was created by Sandy Chase, a Science TV producer from New York city.
Picking up on my last post about the slothfulness of Windows Vista on a reasonably equipped PC, here is the ultimate anecdote. PC World magazine tested many notebooks throughout the year, and concluded that the fastest machine to run Vista, is a Mac. Specifically, the strongly geared Macbook Pro trumps offerings by leading PC manufacturers that offer only Windows-based systems (except perhaps, for Dell, who recently started experimenting with Linux distributions).
From the PC World article:
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.
A comparison of the twelve models featured in the review reveals the fact that the Macbook Pro is actually quite competitively priced - laying to rest the long standing tradition of Macintoshes being outrageously expensive. It is much cheaper than five of the featured notebooks, save for the fact that you have to purchase a copy of Windows separately in order to run it on the Mac.
What’s the definition of a good computing experience? Booting up your operating system and staring at it, with no ability to smoothly run applications or games, according to Dell. I know Vista has elicited a lukewarm experience, and my biggest gripe about Microsoft’s latest OS offering has been that a ton of resources have to be sacrificed to the machine running it if any productive experience is expected.
An operating system should, ideally, allow maximum availability of resources to the applications intended to run on it. Configurations that essentially were used for small servers until a few years ago, are required to power Vista on a ‘home computer’, forcing average users to invest in an insane amount of computing hardware and resources compared to the tasks they would want to achieve.
I found a link to Dell’s product description page via a reddit news article, and quickly grabbed this screenshot to prove my point. Check out what Dell has to say about the uses of a ‘good’ system with 512 MB of RAM that can, at best, provide basic Windows Vista experience (with no Aero, aka resource hogging eye-candy window display system on board) - “Great for… Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.” Seriously? You’ve got to be kidding me. This screenshot has not been modified in any way! Although, the description is likely to change on Dell’s website once Microsoft’s marketing team gets across to them.
The BBC reports on a rather bizarre incident in the country’s capital, where a horde of marauding monkeys attacked the deputy mayor at his residence and caused his death as he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home.
The unfortunate incident illustrates a problem that has grown out of hand, in part due to the fact that monkeys are revered by Hindus as they represent Lord Hanuman, and perhaps more importantly due to the severe encroachment of urban development upon the monkeys’ natural habitat. Forest cover is an endangered resource in India, due to decades of poor regulation and feckless enforcement. While deforestation may have been arrested since the National Forestry Policy was adopted in 1988, cover still exists for just about 19.39% (the world average is 27%, and the policy ambitiously targets that 33% of India’s land mass be brought under forest cover).
While the rest of the world is just beginning to realize the importance of a conservationist attitude and the value of being green, this change in attitude becomes even more imperative for our country and it can only be hoped that extraordinary incidents such as this one would help draw focus towards the grave ecological issues at hand.
Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle has written an interesting article on the debilitating effect of overprotective parenting on the development of children:
…If two 12-year-olds were seen traveling on the roof of a car in 2007, it would likely trigger an Amber Alert, four dozen cell phone calls to Child Protective Services and a viral YouTube video to be played endlessly on “Nancy Grace.” But I’m sort of glad it happened. Being perched on the top of that slow-moving Ford Country Squire was a small risk (remember, this was the pre-Ford Taurus 1980s, when station wagons had giant luggage racks that were practically made for passenger travel), but there was also a reward. Riding on the roof of that car made me a little bit less of a wuss.
Due to primarily using a Macintosh at home, which is also the machine of choice to design and maintain my website, I have been taking the aesthetic advantages of using OS X for granted. Apart from testing for general structural integrity of my website in Windows-based browsers, I rarely examine the look and feel that Windows portrays for my site.
OS X uses a font rendering and screen smoothing mechanism that is unparalleled. My choice of images and fonts for the website was not accurately displayed across all platforms, as I recently found out. Certain images with lower resolutions seemed to have jagged edges (notably, the RSS feed button in the sidebar). A side-by-side comparison of ssaidoor.com, with Safari on Mac OS X and Internet Explorer (and Firefox) on Windows XP, evinced glaring differences in the font and image rendering, with the illustration being of generally inferior quality on Windows.
I’ve made some changes to mitigate these differences, such as adding a new higher-resolution image for the RSS feed button. I need to experiment with some new fonts for the website.
I caught this significant bit of news on MPR while driving home today - the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg of the Forschungszentrum in Jülich, Germany, for their discovery of the phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR).
GMR was coincidentally and independently discovered by the two physicists in 1988, which rapidly led to the science of spin-based electronics, or ‘spintronics‘. Spin-valve GMR is the physical phenomenon that makes gigabyte hard drives a reality today, and the prospect of Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) more promising.
According to this Ars Technica article:
While the GMR phenomenon was only discovered 20 years ago, it has already found many practical applications, mainly in the read heads used in high density computer storage. Other uses are still in the development phase; nonvolatile, low-power, high-density magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is based on GMR materials may be the successor to DRAM that is found in most PCs today. The applications of this technology are still in their infancy, but some suggest that materials that exploit this phenomenon could eventually lead us to practical optical or quantum computers.
It seems like Google Finance is getting started early on the Halloween celebrations for tech stock investors this year 
Each year, Seagate sends 250 employees from its operations around the world, into the wild to face raging rivers, 80-foot gorges, and miles of unforgiving mountain terrain - all as a part of a really unique team building exercise. One of the most challenging events that most people can expect themselves to embark upon, Eco Seagate is an annual morale-athon adventure that also serves to offset office ranks and egos. Grueling training that builds employees for leadership roles with a true test of teamwork - with miles of cross-country mountain biking, white water rafting, and rappelling.
This year’s Eco Seagate Challenge, in Queenstown, New Zealand, had some extra coverage for people who couldn’t make the selection (by random drawing), through the experiences of three volunteering video bloggers. The videos have been added on YouTube in a 3-part series. Watching them just makes me hope to make it to Eco Seagate next year (fingers crossed!).
