The Oracle Space Sweepstakes have a grand prize of note: a flight up to 62 miles, for 5-10 minutes of weightlessness. (Plus $35k, if your desires are purely earthly) Closes at the end of May. Other prizes include PowerBooks, iPods, and Star Wars DVD sets.
sockscatt pointed out these video clips of a Japanese robotic cat. Well worth a peek. (Unlike Aibo et al, this one tries to look like a natural cat, rather than a 'droid)Rather a nifty animated rabbit GIF, by
mysterymrglenn. "40 frames of animation done by hand, 80 layers for the colors and effects."Walking a very thin line between being hilarious and horrifying, the 1951 On Becoming a Woman. (Just wait until the author starts talking about masturbation and homosexuality)
tilton: "Spotlight rocks my world so hard that my nipples have almost popped off several times."Just out of curiosity, I wondered whether I could run OpenVMS (née VAX/VMS) - silly question, really. There exists the multi-platform (in both senses) SIMH ("maintained by the arguably legendary Bob Supnik, who had a pivotal role in the original development of a number of Digital's machines, serving at one time as technical director for the Alpha and VAX groups at DEC"), available for a wide range of host OSs; an OS X suite of binaries can be found here.
And with a certain amount of surprise, I discovered OpenVMS 7.3, plus allied packages, is available to purchase, for non-commercial use, at a highly reasonable $30, including worldwide postage. This article covers the process for getting a useful OpenVMS installation up.
From last week's Have I Got News For You (praise BitTorrent): "It's hard to find a more disliked man than Blair, but the Tories managed."
I found this picture amusing, charming, and with a certain joie de vivre. ^_^ (Winner of "Safest Picture for Work 2005")
I think I'll try out QT7's H.264 (aka AVC, or MPEG-4 Part 10) encoding implementation sometime, but rather than aiming for HDTV resolutions, as found on some of Apple's newer trailers (supposedly very high quality, but similarly demanding of the computer), I'm more interested in seeing how it fares against "vanilla" MPEG-4 at low bitrates.
Amidst eps. 23-24 of Yakitate Japan, I noticed the translator's note for the phrase they'd given as "pearls before swine", originally inu ni nenbutsu neko ni koban, "saying prayers to a dog or casting gold before a cat".
