Home
acemarke 's Library tagged → View Popular
Vaporware 2009: Inhale the Fail
The "annual roundup of the tech industry’s biggest, brashest and most baffling unfulfilled promises". Sadly, Duke Nukem Forever is no longer on the list, due to its apparent death. However, I agree with one of the commenters: "Like the Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Oscar, etc; the award should be a golden statue of Mr. Nukem, in honor of the patron saint of Vaporware. They could still keep the name “Wired Vaporware Awards”, but like the Oscars, they would be known colloquially as “the Dukes”."
Washington D.C. - Snowpocalypse
A time-lapse video of the snowstorm that hit the east coast. Neat!
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
Sounds promising. Faster, please!
This Dumb Decade: The 87 Lamest Moments in Tech, 2000-2009
A rather amusing list of tech screwups, from the Y2K bug that wasn't, to AT&T suing over Verizon's map ads.
Automated to Death
A look at how reliance on automated systems (plane autopilots and such) can lead to operator carelessness, which can result in disaster if anything goes wrong with the system.
Have smartphones licked the language barrier?
This sort of technology would have been extremely useful when I was in China. Eventually, you'll be able to do audio translations in real time, and have camera video overlaid on the screen with written translations.
Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
They were only intercepting the video feeds, but that would still be very bad.
Green traffic lights hide the, er, green lights
"Let’s use our heads. LED lights work well in warm-weather areas and should be pursued there. Incandescents have to remain available to cold-weather areas like Illinois, Minnesota, and much of the northern areas of the country. Salt has to go down on roads in order to ensure driver safety when ice and snow cover the asphalt. Common sense would go a long way in applying environmental solutions."
Scott Adams Blog: Business Card Forensics
The author of Dilbert makes a point about how much you can learn about a person: "The point I was trying to make with the comic is that people routinely do forensics on business cards. For example, you can. 1. Google people's name for news stories 2. Look people up on Facebook and other social sites 3. Do research on people's employers 4. Estimate people's incomes, and even personalities, based on job titles. ... If you know someone's address, you can check out his house from a Google satellite picture. You can even find its approximate value on Zillow.com. If you know what college a person attended, you can make judgments (albeit often wrong) on that person's career potential and intellectual capabilities. And for a few bucks, you can do an online search of criminal records."
Code Humor Challenge
An older post, but still very amusing. A couple of samples: "One of my previous employers had, for historical reasons, the requirement that all class names be prefixed with "Mc" (McUser, McCheckbox, etc.). I created the class McNugget, complete with methods like McNugget.dip(McNugget.BBQ_SAUCE). Unfortunately, I was unable to incorporate this into the telecommunications billing software the company was writing. It did, however, stay in the version control system long after I left the company. ... I worked on some software for a travel agency once with classes like Booking and Hotel and Resort. I did my best to find an algorithmic requirement to get the last object from a list of resorts, but I never could incorporate a getLastResort() or isLastResort() method. "
The World's 18 Strangest Roads
A fascinating list, including roads like an oceanside highway in Hawaii, a Bolivian mountainside, San Fran's Lombard Street, and the Canadian ice road.
13 Interesting Infographics for Web Workers
Pretty nifty collection of Internet-related infographics. Includes images like a map of major undersea cables, the "Life Cycle of a Blog Post", the "Web Trends displayed in the form of the Tokyo subway system" image, and the classic XKCD "Map of Online Communities".
Travels of Code Monkey
Brilliant! Fans of Jon Coulton's song "Code Monkey" mailed a stuffed monkey around the world and took pictures at every stop, then put them together into a video using the song as the soundtrack. Great stuff! (And as a code monkey myself, I highly approve.)
DIY Larger-Than-Life, Soccer Ball-Controlled Guitar Hero Game
Wow. These guys tore apart guitar game controllers, put the sensors in boards on a wall, projected the game above the boards, and kicked soccer balls at the boards to play the game. Very, very impressive.
Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way
Another, slightly saner look at why parsing HTML with regular rexpressions is a bad idea.
Color: The Next Limited Resource?
A look at how companies are trademarking colors (Starbucks green, T-Mobile pink, etc). There's a fascinating infographic showing where company logos fall on the color spectrum.
Bad Apple: Five Classic Apple Marketing Tactics That Lock You In
These pretty well capture why I don't intend to buy an iPhone or Mac any time soon (also because I'm perfectly comfortable with my Windows setup).
Hacking C++ From C
What a horribly disgusting piece of code hacking. Lots of groveling around inside type definitions so he could call a hidden C++ function from a C program. I applaud this guy's efforts, but surely there had to be a better way to do this.
Why do we have an IMG element?
A look back at the conversation that led to the creation of the <img> tag for HTML, way back in 1993.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in technology
-
Web 2.0
This list compiles some of ...
Items: 189 | Visits: 917
Created by: Jennifer Dorman
-
Elearning
A collection of helpful sit...
Items: 19 | Visits: 816
Created by: Maggie Tsai
-
Technology Tools in the Classroom: Using Computers to Engage Your Students
Emerging technologies hold ...
Items: 25 | Visits: 2703
Created by: Jeremy Price
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo