At my home office, I used 3 screens, the laptop connected to a second screen and a Mac (shown on the left). This is a big boost to my productivity as I can process more information at the same time (my internal bio-memory is small and leaking).
via Gismodo, I now learnt that there is a dual screen laptop. May be this is the beginning of multiple screens...
via BoingBoing
BoingBoing listed the first 11 numbers. Here is the next 10.
11 is the largest known multiplicative persistence.
12 is the smallest abundant number.
13 is the number of Archimedian solids.
14 is the smallest number n with the property that there are no numbers relatively prime to n smaller numbers.
15 is the smallest composite number n with the property that there is only one group of order n.
16 is the only number of the form xy = yx with x and y different integers.
17 is the number of wallpaper groups.
18 is the only number that is twice the sum of its digits.
19 is the maximum number of 4th powers needed to sum to any number.
20 is the number of rooted trees with 6 vertices.
Abundant Number [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AbundantNumber.html] is a positive integer n for which
s(n)=sigma(n)-n>n,
where sigma(n) is the divisor function and s(n) is the restricted divisor function. The quantity sigma(n)-2n is sometimes called the abundance. The first few abundant numbers are 12, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, ... (Sloane's A005101). Abundant numbers are sometimes called excessive numbers.
There are only 21 abundant numbers less than 100, and they are all even. The first odd abundant number is
945==3^3.7.5.
That 945 is abundant can be seen by computing
s(945)==975>945.
Any multiple of a perfect number or an abundant number is also abundant. Every number greater than 20161 can be expressed as a sum of two abundant numbers.
Here is another paper about failure of disk drives - and this one won the best paper award.
StorageMajo has a good summary. Robin Harris's conclusion is
After these two papers neither disk drive or array businesses will ever be the same. Storage is very conservative, so don’t expect overnight change, but these papers will accelerate the consumerization of large-scale storage. High-end drives still have advantages, but those fictive MTBFs aren’t one of them anymore.
Further, these results validate the Google File System’s central redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times. If I’m an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should be very attractive. [my emphasis]
google's engineers are presenting a study of disk drive failure at a conference and the 13-page paper is online. If you don't want to read the whole report, TG Daily has a fairly good summary.
The most interesting observation is:
temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances.
In this part, I will describe my understanding of the technology behind the current state of play of Web 2.0.
Mesh up of data - mixing of data sources:
A decade ago, I embarked on designing a framework for creating interoperable component for creating educational webpages. See Virtual Apparatus Framework.
The key for co-operative interoperability is to enable the components to share data and hence can act on what other component is doing. The technology I have chosen 10 years ago is based on the Netscape's LiveConnect. Different vendors have different level of support of this and hence the VAF has been working and breaking continuously.
Today, I jumped on the idea of sharing via DOM. Here are the experiments:
page from http://www.ipa88.com and page from http://www.scormplayer.com. These pages are exactly the same. Please verify using view page source.
The page loads two scripts, one from www.ipa88.com and another from www.scormplayer.com. All scripts from ipa88.com are numbered oddly while those from scormplayer.com are numbered evenly.
Does this method post a security risk? I don't think so because the loading page has explicitly requested the loading of scripts from two domains - i.e. that's by design!
I have tested on windows XP with only Firefox and IE6. Please let me know your testing result on other platform/browser combination.
This is a great tutorial by Andrew546. I am glad that it is illustrated using GIMP too.
[photo from one of the comments, by Kandykornhead]
from Google Video
BLOGUMENTARY playfully explores the many ways blogs are influencing our media, our politics, and our relationships. Personal political ... all » writing is the foundation of our democracy, but mass media has reduced us to passive consumers instead of active citizens. Blogs return us to our roots and reengage us in democracy. Shot in candid first-person style by director Chuck Olsen. NOTE: This film is presented here for non-profit, educational use only.
Click play. The next 4 minutes 31 seconds will be definitely a worthwhile and rewarding time for you - to understand what the web will be / should be.
vi many sources
I have argued that Commerical Off the Shelf Games Will Not Work in Education. This position may need to change in light of the following program. But I am no music teacher, so I don't know how useful it may be.
MaestroLive is a Music Game. From the website:
MaestroLive is a music game that lets anyone play songs by tapping the rhythm of the song on a computer keyboard or on an attached MIDI keyboard. MaestroLive gives you a score for your performance. When you finish playing a song you can save your score to the MaestroLive network and compare it with previous scores of that song or with other player’s scores. Each song has its own set of scores.
# Choose a song from the MaestroLive Song List.
# Pressing any key on your computer keyboard will play the correct next event (an event is a single note or a group of notes).
# The rhythm radar in the center of the MaestroLive window provides you with a visual indication of when to play the next event.
# By pressing the computer keys in the correct rhythm (using the rhythm radar) you will be playing the song.
# You’re performance score updates while you play – when you finish playing the entire song you can save your final score to the MaestroLive network and compare it with the scores of other players of that particular song.
# MaestroLive can also teach you how to play "for real" if you attach a MIDI keyboard to your computer.
