Useful U3 applications; ‘American IT Idol’

* Gearhead: Useful U3 applications * Backspin: ‘American IT Idol’ * The past 7 days on Gibbsblog

Gearhead: Useful U3 applications

While application loading is noticeably slow, as long as the application’s reading and writing to the U3 drive is what we shall term ‘casual,’ operational performance will be adequate.

To read this week’s Gearhead in its entirety, click here.

Backspin: ‘American IT Idol’

What if there were a TV show called “American IT Idol”? Which high-tech leaders would wilt under the withering words of Simon Cowell?

To read this week’s Backspin in its entirety, click here.

The past 7 days on Gibbsblog

Time Sink #7

I had thought that the juggler I referred to in my posting Time Sink #6 was really good but it was pointed out that he only used three balls. Moreover according to afficianados he’s apparently not very smooth. So, check out this guy: Same routine but with five balls!

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Time Sink #6

Check out this juggler! Prepare to burn just under four and a half minutes of your valuable time …

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Live Webcast of Total Solar Eclipse

A total solar eclipse is scheduled for March 29th but unless you happen to be in Brazil (where the show will start)or Ghana followed by Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Libya, Egypt, and finally Turkey you are going to miss it — that is, unless you care to “tune in” to a live Webcast sponsored by the San Francisco Exploratorium.

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Password Frees Data Held Hostage to Cyber Criminals

Press release: “SophosLabs [has] deciphered the password needed to free data encrypted and held hostage by the authors of the Zippo-A Trojan horse (also known as CryZip).”

“Zippo searches for files, such as Word documents, databases and spreadsheets, on innocent user’s computers and moves them into password-encrypted ZIP files. It then creates another file instructing victims to pay $300 dollars to an eGold account to recover their data.”

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I Swear This is True #2

OK, it is a few years old but all the same “Drifting Rubber Duckies Chart Oceans of Plastic” definitely has a timeless quality.

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I Swear This is True #1

“Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames”

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We’re not alone!

Yep, the club of all who have been given the run around by our telephone and broadband providers continues to grow!

The kind of nonsense where everyone at the disservice provider shrugs their shoulders and tells you that nothing can be done until you have pulled out all your hair and have to struggle with barely suppressed homicial tendencies is happening to more and more people. A few of us manage to publicly air our grievences …

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Wireless Tech for Feet?

You could have guessed such a thing was going to appear but only if you were in the thrall of a fever or otherwise out of it. Yes, it is what the world has been waiting for: The inevitable, inescapable, and somehwat incongruous marriage of footwear and wireless technology …

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Deaths by Accidents

Odds of Death Due to Injury, United States, 2002…

Who knew that it was safer to travel in a three wheeled vehicle than to use hot tap water or that it is more likely you will be executed than die in a flood. Anyone spot any other interesting comparisons?

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Red Hat Virtualizes

Network World article: “Red Hat on Tuesday laid out its strategy to make it easier for customers to run and manage workloads in a virtualized Linux environment.”

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Virtual Virus

Red Herring article: “Researchers announced on Tuesday that they created a computer simulation of a virus, claiming to have built the first complete model of any entire life-form … [the model] elucidated the key physical properties of the viral particle as well as providing crucial information on its assembly.”

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Stats: Number of Active Home Broadband Users

Press release: “Nielsen//NetRatings announced today that the number of active broadband users from home increased 28 percent year-over-year, from 74.3 million in February 2005 to 95.5 million in February 2006.”

“Broadband composition among the U.S. active online population has seen vigorous growth during the past three years, increasing at least ten percentage points annually and hitting an all-time high of 68 percent for active Internet users in February 2006.”

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Rootkits for VMs

As if everyday rootkits such as Sony’s recent Digital Rights Restriction, er, sorry, Management attempt weren’t annoying enough now we have the possibility of a rootkit being installed as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) on a host operating system such that the rootkit is undetectable to the guest OSes running inside the VMs.