Skip to main content

Tech Snippets

I always interesting pieces I never get to share to avoid creating a million little posts about non-original material. So, I will instead contain them all in this one post.

Browser market Shares - Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads
"Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark. From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent."
Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit
"Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit. The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable. The concept of the Singularity sounds more daunting in the form described by statistician I.J Good in 1965: 'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'"
USB 3 in 2008, 10 Times as Fast
"Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires." "The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second." This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use."
TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems
"While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Distribution of Wealth in the US

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I heard this statement quite a bit lately particularly in light of the sub-prime mortgage and general housing crisis in the US. The country has enjoyed significant economic prosperity and both Clinton and Bush boasted economic growth under their reign. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of the economic boom are not people from all economic backgrounds, but rather the top 10%. To make things worse, Bush gave tax cuts mainly targeting the top 10%. Being more of a numbers guy, I always wanted showing the validity of the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer statement. Thanks to Wikipedia , I have finally found it!! Both the mean and median net worth of families for the bottom 50% of the population has remained absolutely flat while the 75th-90th percentile see a decent growth and the top 10% enjoy the most appreciation on their net worth. So, if you factor in inflation, the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer probably holds true. The g...
1 comment
Read more

IPtables, SVN, and NMAP

I reviewed some material on IPtables, SVN, and NMAP just for the sake of keeping my mind busy. Here are some useful notes: IPtables - best resource found at HERE SVN - best, as in the quickest and simplest intro could be found HERE NMAP - I honestly don't see in using it for more than port-scanning in a few instances. Anyway, here are a few other options that might come in handy at some point. nmap -sT/sS/ sX/sF/...[-P0] IPADDRESS(range) == to check which ports are open nmap -sP IPADDRESS(range) == a simple ping scan for availability nmap -sO IPADDRESS(range) == check what IP protocols are available nmap -sV IPADDRESS(range) == a scan with version detection Other useful flags: -O == detects OS, part of -v (verbosity) flag as well -A == detects OS and versions -v == request high verbosity/detail -F == performs a fast scan of only a few common ports Installing Perl modules Perl modules may be installed using the CPAN module or from source. SOURCE...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reasons to Vote for Barack Obama

Not that I am eligible to vote or anything ... but if I could, I would vote for Barack Obama for the following reasons. He listens to experts . He has assembled a group of smart and practical intellectuals to advise him on all sorts of topics. Hillary has her own agenda and ambition which appears to keep her from entertaining any "elitist" agenda. He is a good manager. The way he hired very intelligent people to run a nearly flawless campaign to beat an established and seemingly unbeatable opponent in Hillary Clinton is commendable. He really knows how to surround himself with a smart group of people who can get things done and that is exactly what this country needs. Hillary hired people on the basis of their loyalty and counted on friends of the Clintons to win her the nomination. Unfortunately, all that influence and political capital could not overcome the grassroots movement Obama initiated. He is not an ideologue . That allows him to make good decisions for this...
Post a Comment
Read more