MetaFilter posts tagged with BrokenLink and computers

The first one's free...

FormlessOne — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 08:48:15 -0800

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.

Before coming here, had you thought of a place like this?

amberglow — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 16:07:30 -0800

Cybermohalla --really interesting group project in and around Delhi, bringing young people together via "Compughars" (fully-equipped media centers in their neighborhoods). Located in LNJP Basti (an illegal neighborhood) in Delhi, and Ambedkar Nagar (a resettlement colony) at Dakshinpuri in south Delhi, and cyberspace, and created by ANKUR - Society for Alternatives in Education (an NGO) with Sarai, the New Media & Urban Culture Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, they've created everything from texts, collages, posters, animations, and publications, to videos, and large-scale installations. Don't miss by lanes --collected excerpts of some of the kids' personal and public diaries (pdfs), and the scratchbook (55-page pdf) and the animated gifs.

Pop goes the Gmail

sunexplodes — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:00:19 -0800

Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.

Whizzkid develops Linux application for Windows

Postroad — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 16:42:25 -0800

Whizzkid develops Linux application for Windows [...]The significance of the development is that Linux and Windows are able to work in parallel on the same computer or server. To[sic] now, the computer world is divided into systems that operate either with Windows or with Linux. [...]

Worldbuilder

majcher — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 01:59:09 -0800

Worldbuilder (no relation to the old Mac adventure game toolkit) is an excellent way to start off the week by completely crippling productivity. I've played many games from these guys before, and they're always great. I envy the independent game designer that gets to work with Lego so often. Via GTA.

Illegal operation THIS, mechafecha!

Orange Goblin — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 06:18:45 -0800

PC Problems? Use this handy troubleshooter.

Hey!

Ufez Jones — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:13:20 -0800

Hey! A thirteen year-old kid gets suspended for three days for using a DOS command to send a one-word message to all 80 computers on his school's network. Even more charming is that the computer teacher of his school apparently doesn't know much about the computicatin' machines.

Liquid Mouse Christ

srboisvert — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 19:21:06 -0800

Santa is trapped in a usb mouse.

i <3 apple

serafinapekkala — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 08:54:44 -0800

Lick Me, I'm A Mackintosh. One columnist's ode/rant re: Apple's design ethos.

Tiny digital drives

banished — Thu, 29 May 2003 12:46:51 -0800

Child Pornographers Using Small Storage Drives. Small drives like this are giving the police quite a bit of trouble. One of the more interesting quotes from the story, "Even if the photos are encrypted, computer forensics specialists can break through most encryption schemes these days anyway."

Eeeewwww!

dg — Sun, 25 May 2003 21:15:44 -0800

How clean is your computer?

Another Bad Day in Silicon Valley

Captain Ligntning — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:54:51 -0800

Applied Materials to Slash 14% of Its Work Force How many of you work in the Silicon Valley semiconductor business? How do you feel about an industry giant like AMAT having yet another layoff? Or, if you work for one of AMAT's competitors, what does this do to your own sense of job security?

Baked Apple

kirkaracha — Tue, 04 Feb 2003 09:45:41 -0800

Baked Apple. "PowerBook G4 cooked at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The machine still booted, video and all..." [details at MacFixIt; no permalink]

The Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning

patrickje — Mon, 09 Dec 2002 13:39:26 -0800

Do you have problems finding the cheapest flight? Well so do computers.
Carl de Marcken, the man who created the engine behind Orbitz and other travel search engines posits that finding the cheapest fare from one point to another is a NP-Hard problem. Even if you fix the specific route between destinations there can be as many as 10³⁶ combinations.

The Self-Healing Minefield

Armitage Shanks — Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:33:45 -0800

The Self-Healing Minefield From the current Village Voice: "Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and 'healing' software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics."

Bonus ubertasteless Flash animation courtesy of DARPA here. Color me fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.

thedailygrowl — Sat, 09 Nov 2002 00:16:14 -0800

Who Counts your Votes? This book published back in 1992 is a good launching pad to begin the quest regarding elections and election fraud in America. Joseph Stalin had a saying: ``Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.'' When I voted on November 5, I was handed a little card stuck it in to a Diebold voting machine and presto all the votes I submitted were counted correctly right? Well I'm not sure after I read the article Diebold: The face of modern balloting at http://www.bartcop.com/110702otter.htm and some of the articles at http://www.votefraud.org/. Perhaps we Americans have handed a bit to much over to computers and the people who own the companies that make the computers and that write the code. Perhaps to restore faith in our Democracy its time to to go back a simple hand counted system, with observers from multiple parties stationed in the local precincts counting the paper ballots.

nathan_teske — Wed, 18 Sep 2002 13:35:28 -0800

Tired of your office mate's irritatingly cute Hello Kitty USB hub? Balance the forces of cuteness with Hubzilla. (Via Macintouch)

RylandDotNet — Tue, 17 Sep 2002 06:38:22 -0800

Nüp2 Incorporated will revolutionize the electronic memory business. Using our patented memory technology and our patent-pending "Topolithographic" manufacturing process, we will develop and produce solid-state electronic memory having gigabytes of storage in a tiny package for just a few dollars per Gigabyte. Hoax? Vaporware? Revolution in data storage? You decide.

xyzzy — Tue, 13 Aug 2002 07:59:48 -0800

Tired of your black Dell prefab? Enter the world of extreme computing. Mod your CD drives, find amazing custom cases, and add a window. Timid about hacking up your box? Get inspired by browsing a gallery of "pimp rigs".

samsara — Wed, 07 Aug 2002 16:14:00 -0800

A computer aided simulation builds a spiral galaxy from its beginning. In all, 390,000 particles were placed in an arrangement similar to a newborn galaxy. The end result after three months is an event that is believed to take billions of years to occur. (animation)

mathowie — Fri, 12 Jul 2002 01:16:45 -0800

Using Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Outlook Express on a PC? There's a new hack in town, ready to exploit cross site scripts like nobody's business. Do yourself a favor and disarm ActiveX on your settings.

sherman — Sat, 08 Jun 2002 12:17:54 -0800

Meet Cyc. This endeavor to produce AI has been going on since 1984. In ’86 it asked if it were human; it later asked “if any other computers were engaged in such a project”. It’s strength lies in a database of assumptions and generalities, in the hopes that it will eventually “generalize as much as possible until further generalization would be false”. Is this going to be the breakthrough, or does it just seem really cool? (yes, via Slashdot)

gloege — Mon, 20 May 2002 06:41:42 -0800

Overcome Depression: The New Computer -Cognitive Treatment Overcoming Depression is the world's first self-educative computer program for understanding, dealing with, and preventing depression using a unique dialogue mode that allows you to express yourself freely in your own words and that responds in meaningful every language characteristic of a therapeutic context. So much for the personal therapeutic process. My question is - can this program prescribe meds??!??

Su — Sat, 30 Mar 2002 19:53:52 -0800

The Read_Me Festival 1.2 shortlist has been posted, and includes such projects as Carnivore(not the government one, though that was part of the concept), and the DeskSwap screensaver. While this is a "software art" exhibition, it's of particular note that patches or even just instructions for making existing software do things not originally intended are allowable entries. I haven't been through all of them to see if any patches were entered, but it'd be interesting what the publishers might think of these, since it would basically constitute hacking and/or reverse engineering.

robzster1977 — Thu, 07 Mar 2002 04:11:00 -0800

Hi-tech webserver platfrom unveiled! Seriously though, a webserver running on a Commodore 64... what will people think of next?