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University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers investigating the ingredients that go into a hurricane think they have found a reliable basis for predicting the overall strength of a hurricane season. Jim Kossin and Dan Vimont have found a basin-wide circulation pattern that offer one possible explaination in the previously unexplained differences in long-term hurricane trends. “Kossin and Vimont, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, noticed that warmer water is just one part of a larger pattern indicating that the conditions are right for more frequent, stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic. The atmosphere reacts to ocean conditions and the ocean reacts to the atmospheric situation, creating a distinct circulation pattern known as the Atlantic Meridional Mode (AMM). The AMM unifies the connections among the factors that influence hurricanes such as ocean temperature, characteristics of the wind, and moisture in the atmosphere.”

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Considering that Polonium has been the poison of choice in a number of high-profile cases, tinkerers who tend to spend some serious time enjoying themselves at the local pub may want to invest some time building one of these. The homegrown Polonium Pen doesn’t require a whole lot of hardware — just two darlington transistors, a LED, homemade ion chamber, one or two resistors, a battery and a power switch — and it allows the owner to hold it over their drink and watch for it to light up. Should the LED turn on, simply pass on the beverage, exit as soon as humanly possible and figure out why in the world someone in the mob wants you to vanish. Hit the read link for the full-blown how-to guide.

[Via HackADay]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Microsoft buys Toutonghi’s Seattle startup  —  Microsoft’s apparently still enthusiastic about the work of Mike Toutonghi, a former distinguished engineer who initiated the Media Center version of Windows before leaving for startup world.  —  With support from some early Microsoft executives …

Source:   Brier Dudley’s blog

Author:   Brier Dudley

Link:   http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley…

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Mozilla’s bug-munching mascot

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla on Friday released the third update to Firefox this month, version 2.0.0.11, to fix a stability problem in the previous version.

“We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release,” a post on the Firefox developer blog said.

The open-source Web browser update arrived swiftly after version 2.0.0.8, released October 18, version 2.0.0.9 from November 1, and version 2.0.0.10 from November 26. Which explains why I’m getting a lot of software update messages from my Web browser.

Version 2.0.0.10 broke a feature that lets images be displayed with special effects such as rotated pictures and image reflections, according to Mozilla’s bug-tracking site. The problem was fixed within a day and distributed within five, but not before some whose sites were affected by the bug had voiced frustration.

“Customers are complaining because their Firefox automatically updated to 2.0.0.10 and now they can no longer order photo prints in our shop. I think this is a very serious problem and I hope it will be fixed immediately in a 2.0.0.11 update,” a post by Klaus Reimer said.

In an indirect response, Firefox coder Nick Thomas pointed to mailing lists that people can use to test their sites with imminent new Firefox versions. Thomas also said that the five-day turnaround is “the fastest turnaround between Firefox releases to date.”

As long as the Mozilla coders are stamping out bugs, one that’s annoyed me has become more prominent of late because it shows up when I install a Firefox update.

When I restore my Firefox browser sessions upon rebooting my computer, it’s impossible to get rid of the “You’ve been updated to the latest version of Firefox” page. Even if I close that tab, it comes back later, so I have to start with a clean browsing slate to make it go away. It’s not a stability or security problem, but it’s not a credit to what is a notably influential project.

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The time-honored tradition of code scavanging has long been a way for new programmers to “break in” to a new language or task that they may not want to build from the ground up. The re-use of old code, cleaned up and tweaked to a new purpose can help developers learn many useful skills and accomplish tasks quickly, especially for small tasks that aren’t of vital importance. One blogger wondered if this process could be formalized and tools could be built to help foster and enable code scavanging on a mass level. Is this a viable option, or are there just too many things to consider?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: GPS, Transportation

If you’ve balked at the prices automakers are charging for integrated navigation systems, you should really take a look at what ¥300,000 ($2,746) would buy you in 1981. That atrocity you see above was an actual option in Honda’s Accord during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and while it didn’t sync up with any satellites, it did help to guide you along in some form or another. The Electro Gyrocator, as it was so eloquently named, accepted transparencies of maps and utilized a gas gyroscope that allowed the map to move with the motion of the car and plot your progress. Once a certain map ran out of road, you just popped the next one in and kept on cruisin’. And here we are kvetching about whether our portable navigator has 10 or 11 million POIs…

[Via Autoblog]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Storage

We’re not sure this is still relevant — the patent was filed in May of 2006 — but the USPTO has just published a patent application from Apple detailing a number of different 8cm to 12cm optical disk adapters. The application, credited to Tony Fadell, chief of the iPod division, says that since most software doesn’t take up all of the available storage on a disk, it would be cheaper and simpler to use the 8cm disks when appropriate — but that having to ship a standard adapter for slot-loading drives reduce any costs, because they’re the same size as 12cm disks. The solution is to make the adapters smaller when they’re not in use, and the filing goes on to detail several different folding and multi-part takes on the idea. Considering that such an adapter would make things slightly more complicated for the vast majority of Apple’s all-slot-loading installed base, we can’t see these ever actually shipping, but it’s still an interesting idea.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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For your company’s prospects, Marc Andreessen says “the market matters most“ — more than product, team, and even b-plan.

For your prospects as a leader, a terrific Op-Ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal illuminates the reasons why personal judgment trumps every other criterion — even experience.

“Leadership is, at its marrow, the chronicle of judgment calls,” [...]

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Roland Piquepaille writes “The European Union has funded an ambitious project related to wearable technology. The project, named WearIT@work, will end in one year and invested funds are expected to exceed 23 million euros. The goal is to replace traditional interfaces, such as screen, keyboard or computer unit, by speech control or gesture control without modifying the applications. This wearable system is currently being tested in four different fields including aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car production and healthcare.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We've noted for a while that just like every other DRM scheme, the AACS copy protection scheme at the heart of both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats accomplishes little more than irritating paying customers. The system got cracked within months of its release, and the studios have been playing a losing game of cat and mouse with hackers ever since. The AACS system is more ambitious than previous copy protection systems in that it attempts to control not just players but also any device connected with the player. If you try to play an AACS-protected disc on an unapproved TV, the player is required to reduce the quality of the video, or refuse to play the video altogether. As a consequence, there are a lot of customers out there who would like to play their legally-purchased movies on their legally-purchased TVs, but whose legally-purchased HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players refuse to cooperate.

Ed Felten notes that the limited functionality of the official players has created a market for software that will allow them to play their movies on "unapproved" hardware. And thanks to the DMCA, such players cannot be legally developed in the United States. So not surprisingly, overseas firms are taking up the slack. One of the leaders is Antigua-based Slysoft, which makes the AnyDVD HD software. It advertises that its software will allow users to "watch movies over a digital display connection, without HDCP compliant graphics card and HDCP compliant display." There's a basic lesson here about the economics of prohibition. As Hollywood develops ever-more-elaborate and restrictive copy protection schemes, those copy-protection schemes come to inconvenience more and more customers. That, in turn, creates a larger market for circumvention software, prompting software companies to invest more in developing more powerful and user-friendly tools for removing copy protection. All Hollywood has accomplished, in other words, is providing a small boost to the overseas software industry.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The First Year of IE7  —  It’s been a little over a year since we released IE7 on Windows XP and for Windows Vista, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about where we are after the year.  —  According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation …

Source:   IEBlog

Author:   Ieblog

Link:   http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first…

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Act II will follow a brief intermission  —  As of an hour ago, I am no longer affiliated with IAC/InterActiveCorp/Connected Ventures/Vimeo.  No hard feelings!  —  Goodbye to everyone at CV; you are wonderful and I will miss you.  —  And now, I will turn off my cell phone for the evening and catch up with everyone later!

Source:   Jakob Lodwick

Link:   http://jakoblodwick.com/post/20567228

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Filed under: Networking

Remember that blisteringly fast channel bonding modem Comcast showed off earlier this year? Turns out that the firm’s CEO is apparently aiming to roll out internet services that can reach up to 160Mbps down / 120Mbps up sometime in 2008. As in, next year. In a recent interview with Fortune, Brian Roberts stated that service based on DOCSIS 3.0 technology would start “rolling out” sometime in 2008, and casually noted that it should provide “more than enough bandwidth to do multiplayer online gaming.” Additionally, Cable Digital News explains that the firm has plans to cover some 20-percent of its footprint with the uber-quick service before 2009, and while we’re left to guess what areas will be covered, we’d bet locales fetching FiOS could entertain some competition. Granted, we’ve still got aways to go before we can go toe-to-toe with a certain Swede, but we’ll take any progress we can get.

[Via ArsTechnica, image courtesy of AFP / BBC]
Read - Fortune interviews Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
Read - Comcast closes in on 100Mbit/s

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Networking

Remember that blisteringly fast channel bonding modem Comcast showed off earlier this year? Turns out that the firm’s CEO is apparently aiming to roll out internet services that can reach up to 160Mbps down / 120Mbps up sometime in 2008. As in, next year. In a recent interview with Fortune, Brian Roberts stated that service based on DOCSIS 3.0 technology would start “rolling out” sometime in 2008, and casually noted that it should provide “more than enough bandwidth to do multiplayer online gaming.” Additionally, Cable Digital News explains that the firm has plans to cover some 20-percent of its footprint with the uber-quick service before 2009, and while we’re left to guess what areas will be covered, we’d bet locales fetching FiOS could entertain some competition. Granted, we’ve still got aways to go before we can go toe-to-toe with a certain Swede, but we’ll take any progress we can get.

[Via ArsTechnica, image courtesy of AFP / BBC]
Read - Fortune interviews Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
Read - Comcast closes in on 100Mbit/s

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Jakob Lodwick, the Vimeo founder allegedly fired today from the IAC-controlled online-video site loves to post racy photos of himself and his love, notorious New York nobody and Star editor-at-large…

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