I care. USENET is still the only viable place to find older software that has fallen from the realm of existance. It's also the fasted download feed I have. I download all my Linux ISOs from a.b.w.linux or a.b.l.iso because I get a little over a meg a second from Giganews to my cable modem. Shoot..it's faster for me to download movies and store them on my machine than it is to rip the physical DVD.
USENET is in a unique position to attack the spam problem if anybody cared. Since everybody sees roughly the same feed, you could set up a global killfile and have people flag spam messages. If a message meets your personal criteria (# of flags, keywords, bayesian filter, etc) then your client hides it. There hasn't been any real innovation in non-theft-oriented newsgroup readers in years.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
We haven't heard of Dutch design outfit Crealev before, but the company says it's developed a "new levitation concept which is able to produce a very high levitation height combined with a low power dissipation and excellent stability" -- and apparently the best way to show that off is this series of levitating lamps. Unveiled at last week's Dutch Design Week event, the lamps are the product of designer Angela Jansen. We're assuming they're magnetic in some way, but Crealev's website is pretty cagey with the details, only saying that it's a "proprietary technology." Either way, we want one.Permalink | Email this | Comments
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Announcements
You've already heard our impassioned plea; we won't go over that again. You know all the details of the challenge; we're not going to rehash them here. This is just a quick heads up that today is your last chance to contribute to the Engadget Energizes Education charity drive on DonorsChoose.org, as well as a gentle reminder that we're still far from our goal. Forty-nine generous souls have banded together to donate almost $6,800 as of this writing, funding a variety of projects that will impact over one thousand disadvantaged public school children. But our goal is $25,000, meaning that as it stands, thousands of additional students will go without the critical technology they need to start life on an even playing field. Please, do whatever you can to help this worthy cause reach as many young lives as possible. Thanks for your time, and your selflessness.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Christian Böhmer of University College London, in the UK and colleague Kevin Vandersloot of the University of Portsmouth in the UK used computers to approximate what would happen to matter falling into a black hole using the Loop Quantum Gravity theory.When matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests.
More at New Scientist."We were very surprised about the results," Böhmer says. Instead of a boundary around the singularity, they got two other kinds of solutions — both bizarre — that replaced the singularity
There's nothing worse for your business than extra Santa Clauses smoking in the men's room. -- W. Bossert