This article addresses a very specific problem involving people matching the following criteria:

1. You live in Switzerland.
2. You are a Cablecom customer.
3. You send mail using their SMTP relay.

If any of the conditions above fails to apply to you, there is really very little need for you to read further, unless you wish to be bedazzled by scintillating prose unlike any you have likely ever seen. If so, by all means, read on.

Rejected!

If you do match all of the conditions above, you have... [More]

Another game that’s been in development for a long time is Crysis. Earlier this year there was a pretty good review of it, Crytek’s Jack Mamais on Crysis by Chris Remo (Shack News), where the reviewer noted that “running on a beefy DirectX 10-capable NVIDIA 8800, the game was never short of gorgeous.” Granted, an NVidia 8800 is no shrinking violet of a graphics card—with the top-of-the-line version weighing in at $600+ and 177 Watts—but still, it was running the game “at a fluctuating framerate in the 20-30fps range” at... [More]

“It’s better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often credited with the blustery threat to “wipe Israel off the map”. Though the mainstream press is pleased as punch to press this citation into service again and again, in myriad forms, it was noted in more responsible circles quite some time ago that the president of Iran had said no such thing. As meticulously documented in ’Wiped off the Map’ – The Rumor of the Century by Arash Norouzi (AntiWar.com), the statement he made, translated directly and faithfully from the Farsi, was:

“The Imam said... [More]”

The first screenshots of Halo 3 are floating around, showing it to be a next-generation game ready to squeeze every drop of performance and visual effects out of the graphics horsepower found in the X-Box. One in particular (shown below), reveals an impressively cinematic quality, with good material detail, reflections and very natural depth-of-field effects. Notice how the focus is on the right knee, with everything else appropriately softened. It’s not clear how well this level of detail... [More]

The annual chance for Europeans to embarass themselves in a no-holds-barred music contest finished up on Saturday evening. Ukraine and France were clearly having the most fun, with France entering a band singing French in a horrible British accent and English in a horrible French accent while a very bald guy ran around with a stuffed cat attached to his neck. The Ukraine was led by a transvestite in mirrored silver with awesome Boogie Nights sunglasses who sang in several languages—though... [More]

This marvel of technology is only about a year and half old, so it had at least a decade of cell phone software to build on when it came out. Still there are enough usability problems in the software—which, honestly, doesn’t have to do very much other than send bits of text to peopel—to frustrate even the calmest person. Some say that the iPhone has nothing to offer a market already saturated with hundreds of models; that the big touch screen and other hardware doodads aren’t enough to... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

The term DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself—has become more and more popular lately as a design principle. This is nothing new and is the main principle underlying object-oriented programming. As OO programmers, we’ve gotten used to using inheritance and polymorphism to encapsulate concepts. Until recently, languages like C# and Java have had only very limited support for re-using functionality across larger... [More]

Street Installations has a list of pictures of street art involving mannequins posed in realistic & strange positions.

The one below—with a walker kryptonite-locked to a parking sign—is probably the best of the bunch.

Locked-up Walker

It is not difficult to find patterns in small data-sets. In fact, one can see patterns in any amount of data—the trick is to find patterns that are useful in predicting the future. For example, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, conquered it, installed a government, then proceeded to lose any semblance of control over the next four years. 16 months later, the United States invaded Iraq and repeated the pattern. The State department has not yet given up on Iraq in the same way that... [More]

Soldiers involved in America’s imperial maneuvers throughout the world have the heretofore unknown privilege of making their voices heard in real-time on the Internet. Their blogs are in a variety of styles, covering a variety of topics, revealing both remarkable sensitivity and ignorance for that which is not American. There is naturally a lot of filtering going on—this is, after all, the US empire’s military—but some really good stuff does get through. On Being Home by SGT Derek McGee (The Sandbox) is the most recent... [More]

According to MacBook Battery Is Toast After Being Fully Drained by Dan Benjamin (HiveLogic), Apple brings a whole new meaning to the term “dead battery”. According to the article, OS X can sometimes drain a battery so irrevocably that it can never be charged again. It’s a hardware problem that affects a small percentage of users. What’s interesting is the reaction to the problem by Benjamin, one of the Apple faithful. Instead of tearing Apple a new one for not addressing this clear software/BIOS/whatever issue, he lamely... [More]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the ripe old age of 85. Despite explicitly asking for the following epitaph, “the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”, bloggers around the Internet are tossing around his catchphrase, “and so it goes…”, ad nauseum instead. He made the request in his most recent book, a slim volume of thoughts he published after returning from retirement in a fit of pure frustration at the way the Bush administration was sullying America and doing such a crass,... [More]

If you’ve ever thought that PHP was too fast or used too little memory or that Java’s class encapsulation was too restricitive, boy has Quercus: PHP in Java got the solution for you. At last, PHP developers can enjoy the benefits of enterprise computing complete with abominable startup times, appalling refresh speeds and PermGen errors every 15 minutes. And Java developers can finally leave their half-assed web frameworks behind and get behind the ultra-organized global namespace with a little... [More]

As reported in I think therefore I am, I think by Stephen Cave (Financial Times), there are reports of repeatable experiments, which have the potential to obviate vast swaths of philosophical hypothesis and religious theory: science has its hands wrapped around free will’s throat and is starting to squeeze.

I Made You Read This

First, there’s the experiment by “American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet”, in which he tested brain activity of participants as they were performing various activities. Participants swore up and down... [More]

The universe is, apparently, quite big. This is made all the more amazing in light of how small its constituent components are, since it clearly takes quite a lot of them to make up something so mind-bogglingly huge as the universe. Brian Cox at LIFT Conference (LIFT07) gave a brilliant talked aimed at the layperson—if the lay-person happened to be versed in the basics of particle physics. Dr. Brian Cox explains nuclear physics is another, wider-shot video of the same event, on which you can... [More]

The problem with the free software/open source (hereafter referred to as FS/OS) is, as with most other movements, its fanatics. And, as with other movements, it’s not the belligerent—who are relatively easy to disregard—but the self-righteous—who constantly demand attention with arguments that are almost convincing—that really put you off. Case in point: the recent announcement that Apple will be carrying EMI’s entire music catalog with digital rights management (DRM) at double the... [More]

While America continues failing spectacularly in Iraq—despite pumping ungodly amounts of money into the venture—its eye wanders to Iraq’s neighbor, Iran. The lads in charge of the States have been grinding their war machine forward for months, nearly years, pumping themselves up, convincing themselves—which isn’t very hard—that this war will be much easier, that this war will go as planned, that this war will have a plan and that this war will be the beginning of the end of the Arabic... [More]

In the last several days, several polls have shown a remarkable turnaround in collective American opinion. Where previous polls have shown strong statistical divergence on important issues—both foreign and domestic—recent data suggests a much stronger alignment with the rest of world opinion on the following matters:

1. The number of Americans believing in the Rapture—that Jesus himself will return to Earth and lift believers to heaven while condemning unbelievers to a thousand years of... [More]

So that’s that; the big brouhaha over Steve Jobs’s stock options has finally, officially blown over. It seems the 6th generation iPod and 1st generation iPhone are both safe for now. Disney Board Clears Current Pixar Execs (Yahoo News) has more information, but it basically boils down to:

“Although the manipulation itself isn’t necessarily illegal, securities laws require that companies properly disclose the practice in their accounting and settle any resulting charges.”

That’s it? Just a little... [More]

The executive branch of our government has long since crossed over from brazenly illegal to just batsh*t[1] crazy. In this atmosphere, you’ve got to shout to be heard above the din of casual corruption and corrosion of all that once defined the US as a democratic power. And Mr. Gonzales is no shrinking violet. The consolidation of power under the ever more powerfully defined executive proceeds—nay, accelerates—apace under the highest-ranking cop in the land, the Attorney General. Ever since... [More]