brad's life

X Prize evolves into annual competition

....
"In 10 years, everyone will know that if they want to, they can go to orbit in their life," SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan told NBC's "Today" show on Tuesday. "

...

Teams will compete in five different categories to win the overall cup: Fastest turnaround time between the first launch and second landing, maximum number of passengers per launch, total number of passengers during the competition, maximum altitude and fastest flight time.

Rad. (the second quoted bit at least ... not sure I'll hold my breath for affordable space tourism in 10 years....)

Via BoingBoing:

http://www.isbushwired.com/

Is Bush Wired? is a site that speculates on whether the President has a teeny earphone that prompts him during speeches and conferences.

More discussion here:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/125456/index.php

(from the Open Newswire): "In the middle of an answer last night bush said, "now let me finish" as if someone was interrupting him- yet nobody did- he was talking to the person in his earpiece.

From isbushwired.com:

The agreement set by the debate commission barred shots of the candidates from the rear of the stage. The networks refused to comply with the camera angle rules, broadcasting occasional shots of the candidates from behind.

Many viewers thus saw a squarish bulge the size of a large battery pack under the back of Bush's suit jacket, with an S-shaped cord appearing to snake up the right side of his back. Several blogs have carried speculation that it was an audio receiver.

And here's a mirror of that picture:
http://www.picpix.com/brad/pic/006aq9sb

Also good reading here:
http://www.rense.com/general35/voices.htm

If you've been curious what this MogileFS I'm always talking about is, or you know it's our distributed filesystem, but don't know anything else:

http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/

It finally has a website.

And its mailing list, which I previously pimped.

Before throwing a lot of money away on an expensive vendor product, check out MogileFS. It works pretty well for us, at least.

I have a diskless, fanless computer, right? No noise, in theory.

So I'm switching back and forth between two screen windows, with my terminal emulator maximized. Black text on white background.

One screen window is empty, with only a bash prompt at the bottom. This window is silent.

The other screen window is full of numbers, taking up the whole page. This page has a high pitch tone.

That's right, I can hear my LCD monitor's A-D converter or scanlines or whatever the fuck LCDs do. But if it has a lot of mix of black and white, it's noisy. If it's a solid color, it's quiet.

Oh, and at work I can hear memory accesses. It comes in useful because I can hear runaway processes in the background.