The stakes have been raised. Mozilla has officially released Firefox 2.0 for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Of course I downloaded this. Time for you to do the same...click on the icon. Attention PC users: avoid Internet Exploder 7 like the plague that it is!

If Charles Babbage’s dream had actually come to pass, we’d have seen machines such as these oh, about a hundred years ago? That sounds about right.

Actually, it’s from Japan and it’s actually pretty cool. I ran the text through translation and, it seems, someone took an NEC laptop apart and turned it into this. Leave it to the Japanese....

HAT TIP: Hud’s Blog-O-Rama

Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic, unveiled a mock-up of SpaceShipTwo’s interior cabin in New York City yesterday; the spacecraft is three times the size of SpaceShipOne, the craft which won the Ansari X Prize two years ago.
Absolutely, utterly amazing. In less than two years, SpaceShipTwo will be built and ready to test, able to take passengers on suborbital flights a year after that. Amazing that we will see this final frontier opened up to regular people, not just astro/cosmo/taiko-nauts. And people can even trade in their frequent flyer miles for a flight...if they’ve got enough. One person already has.
People around the world will watch with eager enthusiasm the initial flight of this craft. I know I will. Click here for the special promotional video.

30 years ago, NASA’s Viking orbiter craft snapped a photo of Mars which, to this day, has caused controversy. Until now. New photographs of the “Face on Mars” mountain in the Cydonia area in the Arabia Terra region, released yesterday by the European Space Agency and taken by the Mars Express orbiter, show that there’s less of an artificial construct, and more of a natural topography that has evolved over a long time.
When NASA released the original photograph, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the following caption:

“The speckled appearance of the image is due to missing data, called bit errors, caused by problems in transmission of the photographic data from Mars to Earth. Bit errors comprise part of one of the ‘eyes’ and ‘nostrils’ on the eroded rock that resembles a human face near the center of the image. Shadows in the rock formation give the illusion of a nose and mouth. Planetary geologists attribute the origin of the formation to purely natural processes.”

In any case, it’s good to know that there’s less mystery to the Face on Mars. That way, we still have something exciting to look forward to when we finally land there. Whether that will happen in my lifetime...or my children’s lifetime...is another matter entirely.

Thanks to German ingenuity dating back to the 1920s, the US Air Force recently completed a test on a B-52 using synthetic fuel for two of its engines. Any technological enhancement we enjoy today, we have the military to thank for testing it prior to dissemination to the civilian level. Not only can we supply our fossil fuel needs from natural gas, we can also apply this extraction process to coal...and we sit on 120 billion tons of the stuff!
This is yet another example of how we can tell OPEC and the liberals (especially the environmentalists) to use the Middle East’s oil to lubricate themselves...if we develop the political will.

This sucks!

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet on Thursday when scientists from around the world redefined it as a “dwarf planet”, leaving just eight classical planets in the solar system.
Discovered in 1930, Pluto has traditionally been considered the ninth planet, and furthest from the sun, in the solar system.
However, the first definition of a planet approved after a heated debate among some 2,500 scientists and astronomers drew a clear distinction between Pluto and the other eight planets.
The need to define what it takes to be a planet stems from technological advances that enable astronomers to look further into space and to measure more precisely the size of celestial bodies in our solar system.
In addition to the categories of “planet” and “dwarf planet”, the definition creates a third category to encompass all other objects, except satellites, to be known as small solar system bodies.

I guess this august body of experts doesn’t like the idea of “grandfathering” do they?

Considering all which can be done with today’s cell phones, this relic (click on the thumbnail) is truly Ancient technology. I uncovered it a few hours ago while cleaning up my apartment. I had forgotten that I had it, and it once belonged to my mother about ten years or so ago! Of course I got in trouble with it when I ran the bill up while I was visiting some friends over in Detroit (it was supposed to have been for emergencies only)...back in the day when AOL was $4.95/hour. Yep you guessed it, I ran my bill up on that one too.
Perhaps I should donate it to some telecommunications museum or somesuch thing.

With Boeing’s upcoming planes, the 787 Dreamliner, and (if they had the nads) the 797, this would have been a cool addition for the passengers to use. Believe me, now that I have a WiFi-capable machine, I might have used it too.
Unfortunately, Connexion isn’t a profitable product as of yet, which is why Boeing is closing it down:

The company said it would take charges of up to $320 million to wind down the service, which analysts estimate attracted just over 1,000 users a day and cost as much as $150 million a year to run.
Boeing becomes the second large company to withdraw from the in-flight communications market in recent months. In June, Verizon Communications Inc. said it was canceling its on-board phone service by the end of the year.

Who all remembers ZapMail by FedEx? That was what FedEx called faxes back in the mid-80s. It, too was not a profitable product for FedEx because ZapMail, like Connexion, was a product and not a service. Give it a couple of years, and it’ll be back once Boeing and the airlines figure this out.

The International Astronomical Union is now debating a proposal to expand the number of official planets in our solar system from nine to twelve. Pluto’s status as a planet would be preserved, and three new planets would be added: Ceres (in the Asteroid Belt, and once termed as a planet in the 19th Century until it was “demoted"); Charon (Pluto’s companion), and 2003 UB313, the object discovered past Pluto’s orbit which got the whole thing going.
I got a chuckle when Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium in the United States and host of PBS’s “Stargazer” television show, explained it thus:

“The solar system is a middle-aged star, and like all middle-aged things, its waistline is expanding.”

Hmmm...twelve planets of man...I wonder if the Cylons would care to comment?

This post is for all those PC users out there who still use Internet Exploder...and have Yahoo e-mail boxes to boot. Please continue to use at your own peril. Thank you.

Due to a slight addition to my itinerary for my vacation next week, I’m breaking out the PDA I set aside for awhile (yes, even The Macker gets lazy sometimes!). The unit is of course completely discharged, which means a good overnight charge, plus doing some software downloads, and I should be good to go. It’s a 3-year-old Palm Tungsten E model with 32MB onboard, plus an SD card slot, and for that I have a 64MB card. Sufficient for the mission at hand.
This extended period without the PDA...almost a year...has also taught me a lesson to never let it get this far ever again.

Way back when I was in high school, one of my cousins married this hippie guy (who actually was pretty cool!) who had his own band. Whenever we went over to their house to hang out, we saw how decked out it was with beer can pull tabs forged into curtains, which ended up looking like chain mail in a way.
This reminds me of those days. No bongs here. God knows how many CD-ROMs I have laying around here that were messed up when I tried to burn files onto them and as a result they were messed up to begin with. But even bad CD-ROMs have good use...as coasters to protect your furniture from cold cups/glasses of water or other beverages of your choice, which would otherwise pockmark them from warping the (what is called) wood.
Have you figured out yet that this is a filler entry?

Now here’s an interesting story: on a clear, calm day in Cleveland, one can see clear across Lake Erie to the Canadian side! I can buy this because I once stood at Canada’s southernmost point, which was only 50 klicks southeast of Detroit. Never mind the photo...I had longer hair five years ago. Anyway, back to the story:

Eyewitness accounts have long been part of the city’s history.
“The whole sweep of the Canadian shore stood out as if less than three miles away,” a story in The Plain Dealer proclaimed in 1906. “The distant points across the lake stood out for nearly an hour and then faded away.”
“I can see how this could be possible,” said Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University.

When I stood at Point Pelee, I could have sworn I saw the other side of Lake Erie! I asked one of the locals about it and he said that happens sometimes. Point Pelee is directly north of Sandusky, Ohio, home to Cedar Point amusement park. I just hope these days, they don’t blame it on some global warming bulls**t.

“...what will we do with 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion IP addresses?” asked the Beav.
Wally replied, “Well, with over four billion IP nodes listed, and only 6 billion people on the planet, and with all those fancy electronic devices out there, they had to come up with more numbers, so they began to implement IPv6. I think they’ve taken care of that problem for the foreseeable future.”
Beaver asked, “But why now? What’s driving all this?”
“It’s because of the explosion of online gaming and file sharing, and Windows Vista is designing certain applications that will access IPv6 addresses,” said Wally. “Mac OS X is also good to go.”
“Does that mean I can still play Worlds of Warcraft? Or Civilization IV?”
“Yep,” smiled Wally, “all of those and lots more!”
“Gee Wally,” Beaver Cleaver grinned, “you’re not such a bad brother after all!”

Dang. I never thought I’d see this again:

Yes, it’s confession time. My first computer of my very own was indeed a Commie 64, thanks to my dad’s help; he had one for his inventory control at his appliance repair store he started way back in 1983. My favorite games included: The Seven Cities of Gold (hey, I only got as far as Governor General!) and Raid Over Moscow (now why would one be surprised at that one?). But the GEOS graphical user interface came out in 1986 and I immediately got it because of its resemblance to the Mac OS. It actually worked quite well.
I did enjoy working with the Commie 64 for a short while...until my ex separated from me. She gave me the disks and she kept the computer, thinking she would emasculate me because I didn’t have something I enjoyed. No matter; two years later, I got my first Mac. And that’s another story for another time.