Technology

The race heats up to replace the jet turbine with a more efficient source of Mach-breaking airpower: the pulse-detonation engine. Read More : Popular Science | After Combustion: Detonation!

This guy sends out 2 billion emails a month. It’s all spam and he’s responsible for it. Read his interview. From his home office, where a dozen rack-mounted computer servers hum 24 hours a day, Scelson — in customary T-shirt and shorts — sends millions of e-mails to 50 or so computer servers in the USA, China, South America and Europe. It costs $20,000 a month to pump out e-mail hawking everything from insurance to toys to lingerie. Software plows through 165,000 e-mail addresses an hour, searching for the roughly 16% that are active. Automated e-mail is then sent to the accounts, asking subscribers if they want spam. On average, only 3,000 of 5 million respond “yes,” Scelson says. He says he continues to send e-mail pitches to those accounts and leaves others alone. ...

I want this in my apartment. Damn neat. he Wooden Mirror project is an art installation, and as such the goals leading to its creation are a bit vague. The piece explores the line between analog and digital. In the essence of the piece is the notion of inflicting digital order on a material that is as analog as it gets ñ wood. I was hoping to take the computational power of a computer and video camera , and seamlessly integrate them into the physicality warmth and beauty of a wooden mirror. The piece reflects any object or person in front of it by organizing the wooden pieces. It moves fast enough to create live animation. ...

Time to patch your XP and 2000 installations. By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Aug 11 2003 3:13PMA malicious worm that exploits last month’s RPC DCOM vulnerability struck the Internet Monday afternoon, targeting unpatched Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines. The worm, dubbed “Blaster” and “LovSan” by security and anti-virus companies, attacks vulnerable machines over TCP port 135, then spawns a shell and initiates a TFTP file transfer to retrieve the worm’s code. ...

Generating Texas Lotto numbers from your own randomness.

I just set up this Logitech MX700/MX500 howto for linux and xfree 4.2/4.3. I figured I’d blog it so google would catch it and then people could find it. This quick reference should be fine for setup on all linux distro’s as it is not distro dependent. Just for grins I am doing this on Gentoo.Also, this should work perfectly on the mx500 also. I have not tested it ’cause I don’t have one, but from what I hear, they are the same mouse. ...

Hmm.. looks interesting. Wonder if it will be good.. Gonna try it some time today. It even has a windows port for you inferior minds out there. prokyon3 is a multithreaded MP3 manager and tag editor for Linux / Windows. It was written in C using the Qt3 widget set (Qt2 on Windows) and the MySQL database. prokyon3 can access MP3 files on harddisk, CDROM, SMB and NFS. Files can be played using XMMS (WinAmp on Windows), and can even be played when the files are on CD as prokyon3 identifies CDs by content. The files view is customizable and favorite artists are supported. prokyon3 also offers an editor for ID3 and Ogg tags and has been designed to support tagging for multiple files en mass. ...

Static blogs are making a comeback

This site will generate all the necessary forms to send out to all the companies that send you bulk/junk snail mail. (in your mailbox. we’re not talking about email silly)Get Off The Lists! | CDT

Now this just kicks ass! Welcome to Mailinator(tm). No Signup. No waiting. No SPAM. Just email – your email – anytime you want it. No time wasted signing-up, just send an email to any address @mailinator.com. Your email address already exists. Get your email sent here, THEN come check mailinator. Your mail will be waiting. Check it out : Mailinator