Monthly Archives: March 2007

LinuxMCE — the new Media Center PC

Posted by on March 31, 2007 No comments

I stumbled across LinuxMCE, a free competitor to Windows Media Center Edition. LinuxMCE does what WinMCE does except it does much, much more. The features included in LinuxMCE go well beyond the simple Media Center PC.

Media Hub

WinMCE has the ability to catalog and organize your media, which means music, photos and videos/DVDs on the computer on which it is installed. But LinuxMCE has the ability to automatically search your network to find all the multimedia on all the computers in your network. Although I’m sure that means you will need to share your media files on windows computers or setup NFS on your other Linux/Unix machines, that’s a trivial thing to do.

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Stealing from the government

Posted by on March 29, 2007 7 comments

A quote from Benjamin Franklin sparked my curiosity on the amount of people who feel it’s OK to “steal” from the government.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government

So I entered the following search into Google: “statistics cheating taxes”. Click the link to see the full results, but here’s a sampling:

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I need to enter rehab

Posted by on March 28, 2007 No comments

It seems as if entering rehab is the cool thing to do these days. And it’s not just for drug/alcohol addiction anymore. Mel Gibson entered rehab for his anti-semitic comments to a cop when he was drunk. So rather than focusing on rehab for his alcoholism, he is going to rehab to also deal with his antisemitism.

Another example is Isaiah Washington and his “homophobic” remarks toward a gay co-worker on Grey’s Anatomy.

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The Air Car

Posted by on March 27, 2007 3 comments

Back in the good ‘ol days when my brother Dave used to torture me for fun. He also had some good ideas. One such idea was to build a car powered by perpetual motion — something similar to that desk toy with the balls that just keep swinging back and forth.

The MiniCATI still think eventually we will get to that point, but until then, it looks like a company from Spain is getting close. The MiniC.A.T is the worlds first car to run on compressed air. Talk about zero pollution! Moteur Developpment International has just recently signed a deal with India’s largest automobile manufacturer and will soon begin mass production of the MiniCAT.

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A new desktop environment… Mozilla

Posted by on March 26, 2007 No comments

Almost everyone has heard of Mozilla. The Mozilla organization is the descendant of Netscape and is the producer of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the little known technologies behind the Mozilla products is called XUL (pronounced zool). XUL is a scripting language (and interpreter) that provides all the user interface for Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s very powerful and several stand-alone applications have been built with it.

So recently, some Mozilla developers tossed around the idea of creating a new desktop environment built on the XUL technology. This would not only compete with Gnome and KDE, but also with Windows, Mac OSX and many of the other platforms. Because the heart of the Mozilla technologies has been ported to all kinds of different platforms, this new desktop could potentially run on many of the diverse kernels (the software that connects all other software applications with the hardware — the heart of an operating system).

This would be amazing! The Mozilla Desktop (has a nice ring to it) would provide a universal interface to many different platforms. Regardless of the underlying technology, the user experience would be the same. And XUL could handle all the intricacies of the diverse platforms. Windows users could more easily switch to Linux or Max OSX (or Solaris for that matter) without having to relearn an interface.

Of course, there are all kinds of issues that would need to be worked out in order for this to really work, but it’s the best start to a centralized user interface that we’ve ever seen.

So what do you think? For you tech guys, do you think this is feasible? And for you non-techies, is this something you would like?

Novell parody commercials

Posted by on March 25, 2007 No comments

So almost everyone has seen the set of Apple commercials portraying a hip and friendly guy named Mac and a stuffy, geeky and very business oriented guy named Windows. Novell recently produced a few commercials adding a third individual. She is called Linux!

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Making money count

Posted by on March 24, 2007 No comments

You know the saying…  in order to make money, you have to have money.  It refers mostly to making money in real estate and the stock market.  But Japanese billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto sees it a little differently.  He believes that you need money to help people.

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Terabyte of data on a DVD.. is it possible?

Posted by on March 20, 2007 No comments

Mempile, a company out of Israel wants to build a DVD that will hold one terabyte of data on a single disk. That’s the equivalent of 200 normal DVDs (not Dual-Layer, HD-DVD or Blue-ray). Wow!

The technology is amazing and includes the use of “light sensitive molecules.”

“…the technology allows for transparent layers where two photons of light can pass through the layers at the same time.”

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Global Warming Revisited – Inconvenient Truth or Swindle

Posted by on March 15, 2007 6 comments

Some of you may remember a previous post on global warming. In recent weeks I’ve seen an enhanced interest in climate change and have experienced some additional arguments against the much trumpeted predicted catastrophic weather changes. Let me rephrase that… the weather changes could possibly be true, but the cause of these changes are far from proven. In fact there are many that have proven the popular view as false.

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P. J. O'Rourke Quote

Posted by on March 15, 2007 No comments

Sometimes, incredibly profound things are said:

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Now if we could just get the legislators to actually see this problem.