The Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA’s last great space observatory to have been lauched into Earth’s orbit, is now celebrating its fifth anniversary. To celebrate the event, NASA has released this multigenerational shot of a stellar nursery located in the Cassiopeia constellation, 6,500 light-years from Earth.
Jaw-dropping, isn’t it?
[Via Cosmiclog]
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
It seems that all that “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advertising by Apple has finally pissed off Microsoft to the point where they feel the need to get some payback. So they have signed up Jerry Seinfeld to joke around with Bill Gates in a series of adverts for which he will be paid a cool $10 million. Joke around with Bill? Does Bill Gates do humor?
The hope is that finally Microsoft can bury the stuffy “I’m a PC” suit guy that Apple has built up in their adverts and promote Windows as the “cool operating system”. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but there is apparently lots of optimism over at Redmond that they can pull it off. Well with Jerry and Bill, the two jokers, getting it together, who knows what can be accomplished eh?!
What do you think? Can Seinfeld do the impossible and make Windows look totally drop dead cool? Or is Microsoft throwing $10 million down the toilet?
[Via Guardian Media]
Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
In a move which will do no harm to the Apple share price, some US universities are starting to hand out free iPhones and free iPod Touches to new students. The benefits are obvious – be seen as a cool cutting-edge university, and at the same time, encourage your students to use the devices in their education. But not everyone is on board with the idea.
The opponents are obvious – the professors – who are concerned that their students will spend more time fiddling around with their new toys than listen to the lectures. But they seem to be outnumbered by the supporters of the scheme.
The first supporter is obviously Apple who are keen to snag students as early adopters of Apple technology. Get them now while they are young and hopefully they will continue to buy Apple products for the rest of their life.
The second supporter are the universities themselves (minus the grumpy professors) who want to attract more students to their campuses. They are also exploring the possibility of making useful learning applications which students can download to their iPhones, making their devices useful learning tools. As far as the universities are concerned, this is the way of the future so what’s the point of fighting it? Better that they get on board and go with the flow.
The lucky students who receive a free iPhone have to pay for the contracts. They only get the phone free, and once they have paid for the contracts, they can then connect with the campus wireless network.
So is this the way of the future? Should universities be handing out free iPhones to incoming students? Or are professors right to call them a distraction?
[Via Washington Post]
AJAX developers, get your game on. Firefox version 3.1 will deliver massive speed improvements for JavaScript, the language behind many of the cool interactive effects on today’s web pages.
Andreas Gal and Michael Franz of the University of California, Irvine invented a novel approach to Just-In-Time compilation called “tracing”. Put simply: rather than compiling complete, individual methods at runtime, they record trace paths through the code that represent loops, then compile those based on how often they’re called. That means that the code that gets executed repeatedly is the code that gets compiled — and the compiler doesn’t need to waste time on compiling anything else.
While the theory behind this is pretty advanced, the speed improvement is certainly more than academic. Mozilla has already built tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey (Firefox’s JavaScript interpreter), re-christening it “TraceMonkey” — with the following results:
As you can see in the graph above, a global loop is almost 40 times faster with TraceMonkey than in Firefox 3.0, and an empty loop is 20 times faster. With a 22x performance boost on function calls, maybe we’ll see more thorough functional style in JavaScript scripts down the road (yeah, sure).
Don’t use much JavaScript, you say? Don’t be so sure. If you use GMail or any number of other online services, you probably run JavaScript. Most widgets (including ad services) and plugins for WordPress and other blogging platforms use JavaScript. If you’re curious, do a “View Page Source” in your browser and search for “javascript”. Much of the implementation of Firefox itself is in JavaScript, as well as its extensions. So if you’re a Firefox user, this improvement could noticeably speed up your browsing.
And just how many people use Firefox? According to this graph, almost 19% of web surfers use either Firefox 2.0 or 3.0, up from under 14% last September. While Internet Explorer 7 still holds a comfortable lead at 47%, we all know that those are the non-geeks who don’t count. Maybe faster browsing in Firefox will win them over, too.
[Chart Source: Brendan’s Roadmap Updates]
Offered by online retailer Forbidden Planet international, the Star Wars MP3 player features a slick, black design, 512MB of internal memory and an integrated FM radio. Unfortunately, at $80, this piece of the Dark Side comes with a very hefty price tag. My guess is that only hardcore Star Wars geeks will be interested in the device, since similar MP3 players usually cost around $20 now.
[Via PopGadget]
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Do you want to compare your salary and give the honest truth about your employers to a worldwide audience? Well now you can at Glassdoor – and some employers are getting the shakes just thinking about it.
More than 50,000 employees from more than 11,000 companies in 80 countries have already contributed to the site, including workers from some of the world’s leading brand names. Now the site is about to add British salaries if anyone from Britain feels like revealing what they earn.
There’s even an “advice to senior management” section if anyone feels like anonymously giving advice to their boss (“you can take your lousy pay increase and shove it up your….”)
So why not check out your company, see how much your colleagues are earning and what they are saying about the boss. Then get your own review in!
Later on, if your boss is stomping around in a bad temper, you’ll know why.
Ever wondered what auto mechanics were truly thinking when explaining to you the work they did on your car? Hit the play button for the whole truth.
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Normally a virtual world such as Second Life or Lively is seen by some as a bit of a lawless land, where you can say or do whatever you want without punishment. I mean, who’s going to stop you, right? But a virtual world for mobile phones called Cellufun has decided to change the rulebook by starting a “virtual justice system” for anyone who steps out of line. Yes boys and girls, the new sheriff is coming to town!
Here’s a sampling of a few crimes that can land you in the proverbial Dog House :
Defendants go before the “courthouse” and are tried by a jury of other community members. If convicted, sentences range from being mute for 20 minutes to being banished.
I applaud the effort to rein in troublemakers and make the virtual world more trouble-free. But you have to look at it realistically and ask yourself “how much trouble is it for banished members to start up a new account and avatar, then start again?”. Not much trouble I’d imagine.
As this Washington Post article points out, most virtual worlds have their own self-appointed sheriffs / keepers of the peace….call them what you will, and places like Second Life have their own forms of “time out” for troublemakers (“The Corn Field”).
So do we need the management of virtual worlds creating their own official justice systems or is the present unofficial system fine the way it is? What do you think?
I’ve used various external HD enclosures in the past, but nothing quite as nice as this one. The Vantec NexStar HD Dock is a sexy-looking piece of hardware that not only supports USB 2.0, but also SATA II, so you can now enjoy the full speed offered by the SATA technology, even if your drive is plugged externally. Video Review after the jump.
Some of them are staged, others are not, but one thing is for sure, everyone loves to watch these videos. Sometimes, watching others do things that we once dreamt about doing is the best way to let some steam blow out. Videos after the jump.