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And if you pay you're the one getting the annoyance.

http://img.labnol.org/di/pirat...

The blast radius is not limited by the curvature of the earth, as dispersion of an overpressure wave of sufficient magnitude would 'hug' the earth.

The blast zone is limited by energy deposited into the atmosphere surrounding the device following the chemical reactions which remove the transparency of the air surrounding the weapon, and former weapon materials.

Your statement does not agree with the actual results observed during nuclear tests:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/damage-caused-by-nuclear-bomb/6176/

I was able to register for a single-user free account this morning by doing this.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-apps-free/26926/

How to Get the Free Edition of Google Apps

Alternatively, here’s a quick and simple workaround that will still let you sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps even though Google has officially retired the free edition – all you need is a free Gmail or Google account.

        Go to appengine.google.com, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Application. You may fill in any dummy date and click the “Create Application” button.
        Open the “Dashboard” and on the next screen, click the link that says “Application Settings.”
        Scroll down a little (refer to the video tutorial) and choose “Add Domain” to associate a domain with your App Engine application.
        That’s it. Now you should see a special link* to sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps. You may either use your existing domain or buy one through Google Apps.

[*] You have to access this link through App Engine as Google Apps checks the HTTP Referrer information before serving up the sign-up page for the free edition of Google Apps.

Sit someone down who's been using office since the 90's with Office 2010 while still being saddled with Windows XP (extremely common in the corporate environment even today). Tell them to find Save As. Watch even the most mild mannered person get physically angry because it's not in an obvious place.

Someone who'd been using Office since the 90's would start looking at "Save As" by looking for "File". Which, in Office 2010, is not only in the same spot as it was in XP/2003 (top left corner - it's the first Ribbon tab from the left), and has the same "File" caption on it, but it's even highlighted in blue. And, after you click on it, "Save As" is prominently featured among the list of actions on the left side of the screen (which looks like it's a menu coming out of "File").

Screenshot.

This is a bad idea, and it's being deceptively promoted. The OpenDNS site says "DNSCrypt is a piece of lightweight software that everyone should use to boost online privacy and security." This is willfully misleading.

This isn't a way to make the existing distributed DNS infrastructure more secure. It just establishes an encrypted connection between your machine and one central DNS server farm belonging to OpenDNS. One that makes its money by redirecting nonexistent domains to ad sites.

There have been slimy DNS providers before. Comcast is notorious for this. The Wikipedia article on OpenDNS summarizes the privacy issues, conflicts, and problems with OpenDNS. At one point, OpenDNS tried redirecting address bar searches to their own search page., which is apparently permitted by their terms of service.

OpenDNS isn't that bad. They're only a little evil. But they're also unnecessary.

If you can live with a 4" display when leaving your house, just bring your phone. If you will be doing something which needs a bigger screen, bring the display to create a "tablet".

Like this? http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/asus-padphone/19460/

Cool, a guy who was there. Then a few graphs:

http://www.labnol.org/wp/images/2008/02/total-number-websites.gif

Annual growth in # of sites:
1996 : 0.6%
1997 : 1.2%
1998 : 2.2%
1999 : 5.9%
2000 : 17.6%
2001 : 9.1%
2002 : -1.3
2003 : 10.6%
2004 : 12.1%
2005 : 17.1%
2006 : 31.6%
2007 : 48.7%
2008 : 29.9%

And yes that does represent more usage:
http://www.packet.cc/images/Internet%20Traffic.gif

Unless you noticed that similar approaches were already used in things like this (of course that their new minion will sue them, but still)

There seems to be a few 3rd party services that rely on Wikipedia's data. I'm sure there are many commercial services too (I've seen many pay-per-click sites simply barf wikipedia content surrounded by ads).

Instead of ads, could Wikimedia charge for a it's APIs to allow access to Wikipedia's data? Like most services, you get your developer key for a limited number of queries, but as the request volume goes up, you pay more. Bulk-exporting several pages? Pay a small fee. If the fees are low and reasonable, maybe businesses would pay for them and not result to screen-scraping?

The data itself is still covered under CC/FDL licenses; the charge is just for friendly access to it.

Just a thought.

Okay, fine -- I'll post to undo the moderation.

It's four colors, but they're four completely different colors in completely different shapes. The MS Windows logo has red-orange, green, blue, and yellow, in different window-pane-like configurations depending on version. (In older versions, the orange was more red, and the blue and green were darker -- clearly the four perceptual primary colors.)

The Fedora glyphs are a navy blue, a magenta-tinged pink, definitely orange, and bright green. They're decidedly off-primary, and not in the same way that the Windows 7 and other recent MS logos are.

If you think I'm being pedantic, look at them actually side-by-side and you'll see that the comparison is ridiculous.

Surprisingly, Microsoft doesn't actually own the concept of using four colors for a logo. It reminds me of this silliness. So yeah, I thought you were trolling. And I'll give you a half apology, because even if you weren't trolling, it's pretty silly.

I agree. I just wish we Americans had more of the colorful insults of the Queen's English: http://septicscompanion.com/showcat.php?cat=insults http://www.labnol.org/internet/insult-anyone-in-shakespearean-english/7251/

You can definitely create new documents in Office Web Apps preview in SkyDrive. Indeed, I just tried that a moment ago - there's a "New" button on the toolbar while browsing folders, which expands to the list of document types. Here is even a blog post from the team explaining this and showing a screenshot.

I do wonder where that FUD comes from - there seems to be a proliferation of posts in this discussion claiming that this functionality is missing, so, apparently, people are getting it from somewhere?

I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is. It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office. Rather than install Office, they can be pointed toward whatever URL accesses the online version of their application.

It is already here. Problem is, it's still nowhere near as full-featured as a desktop version of Office, so it is more of a supplement, rather than replacement. You can view any Office document with the thing, but editing is rather limited.

What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those?

Those what? Wikipedia articles? Someone is but it's only the top 400 articles I think. Anyway, once you print wikipedia it's not wikipedia anymore. Wikis are living documents. It's some sort of Snapshot of a Wiki.

I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents.

Get a printer and get ready to spend lots of money. There are resources out there to help you format wikipedia. But seriously if you want Wikipedia on your bookshelf, burn a snapshot cd (newest ones are torrented) of the HTML and put that in a jewel case and put that on your bookshelf and update it yearly ... for free. Yes, you can't just flip pages but you have it "on your shelf." Although it's cheating, that's your best bet.

I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.

What follows is my opinion. Books tend to fail when they set grandiose objectives. "All of gaming" is setting up an author to fail. Seriously. Hard. Embarrassingly so. That's why we get books limited to dates and ranges and specialties. It's possible. Sometimes you get great books written by groups like the gang of four and they complement each other. Sometimes you get complete trash that is badly titled and that's what's happening in this article.

My advice is not to look for one be-all-end-all book on gaming but instead to seek out the gems that cover your most interested specialties and then augment them with online works. Yes, you have to do work. Like a lot of things there's no silver bullet for something so large. I'm a nerd, such research is fun.

since there isn't any way to say "repeat"

Actually, there is.

link. 10 hours battery life playing video, reading books or browsing the Internet on WiFi.

I like Apple, but I don't think you could consider me a fanboy. I don't do iTunes, own any of their products for myself personally, or really expect to buy any. I like what the stock is doing over the last decade relative to, well, everybody, but I don't hold any. Like I said, I'd prefer an Android slate and would probably wipe and install real Linux on it. If I can't get that, I'll probably muddle along with a Tux'd HP slate before I'd buy an Apple product of any kind. I am however a geek, and I know good tech when I see it.

Specifically to the point, I follow the trends and I can see us turning the corner on power and utility to the human vs ever increasing clock speeds and cores. ARM derived processors since only just recently have the power to deliver a good and lasting experience in the 12" display form factor on battery. It takes time to design this stuff, and more time to build the business relationships. It can't be an accident that Apple bought an ARM shop when they did and so has this in-house Apple A4 ARM-Cortex processor tech to put in their iPad.

Ok... given you stipulate users have to use your applications and it is practical to do so (otherwise the calculation becomes void). You assume that you can collect more data to target ads better in order to increase significantly the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of the ads. Can you really collect more data? The device would be marketed most successfully to people already using google accounts, I think. Other people would not be so much interested in a google netbook ("where is the internet here? where is word?"). If netbook users are already google users there would be not so much to gain. If you don't annoy people with additional ads, you would hardly gain any more to get returns from your investment. Let's assume to the contrary that CPM will not significantly increase. Though there are stories about people gaining about $25 CPM, I think adsense CPM is usually much lower, say about $0.4. Now if you want to get back your money for the netbook in one year (say $150) you'll have to show many additional ads to people. I calculate 375000 impressions/year at a CPM of $0.4 or 1027 a day. If people use their netbooks in their free time, 4 hours a day (sounds ok?), that would be 4 ad impressions per minute. That sounds very high and unrealistic. I would think that in order to get back your money from the netbooks they'd really have to annoy people with full screen ads and more. I am skeptical about the business model.

The SONY readers can show PDF files which is great, but those screens are too damned small. You might as well carry around a Netbook. The good news is Amazon have finally backed off their proprietary+DRM stupidity and allowed PDF on Kindles' too:

http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/amazon-kindle-dx-for-pdf-documents/8455/

Now they should go the next step and give you an oyster fork so you can pry out their BigBrotheresque Wireless connection which from the 1984 debacle we've seen has more cons than pros.

No, do not use OpenDNS. They are worse than Comcast. Not only do they hijack DNS, making OpenDNS not a solution at all, but they also hijack your web searches to spy on you.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/best-online-storage-live-skydrive/5771/ has a positive appreciation of Windows SkyDrive "The Best Online Storage Service"

Extract from the above blog post: "5. SkyDrive is Microsoft service and an integral part of their larger Windows Live strategy so you really don't have to worry about its future existence."

Actually you can already Convert Scanned PDF Documents to Text with Google OCR, though it is not immediate, unless you have control of the indexing frequency of your site. http://www.labnol.org/software/convert-scanned-pdf-images-to-text-with-google-ocr/5158/

It depends. There are two kinds of "cat captchas" that I'm aware of. One is the one where you have to identify whether a color image is of a dog or cat, as in KittenAuth or Microsoft's Asirra. That would be very impressive (though the Asirra team points out that KittenAuth is weak because it uses too few images).

The other is the kind where cat & dog icons tell you which letters to pick from a string. If you've actually seen these captchas, it's not *that* hard to believe. Here's a link showing you what one looks like.

All the captcha-breaker has to do is learn to recognize the reused cat & dog icons and separate them out from the letters. It's not that hard compared to recognizing distorted and warped letters, in my opinion.

Um, you do slipstream a DVD for each computer you have don't you after the first install? Saves many hours of work.

Now that we have that inflammatory title out of the way, lets look at . And no, the pictures are not fake, I saw them in the keynote video at Apple.com a while ago when Safari beta for Windows was announced. I think this is what Mozilla is worried about.

So, if I'm a citizen of the EU, I have to pay money to Microsoft to participate in my government?