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Posted by usr.c on Monday, November 12, 2007 (2:39 AM) |
 You won't want to miss this. Google has a useful directory service called GOOG-411, which unless you live in the U.S. you've probably never heard of, but that's ok. As it turns out, one of the highlights of the service is the strange sound it makes while it's searching. Now, and for the first time ever, brace yourselves everyone, Bill Byrne, the engineer behind the sound, who I'm sure is a great guy, spills the beans and reveals all!
"We call it the ‘biddy-biddy-boop’ sound", says Byrne.
Why thank you very much, Bill. That's good to know.
“The system working sound is a particularly difficult sound to do. You have to have just the right tone, the right mood, the right signal. It can’t be busy or too monotonous...It has to be a quick noise to evoke efficiency. It can’t be too uniform, l (continued...) |
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Posted by Mario on Friday, October 26, 2007 (7:31 PM) |
Seagate Technology, the world's largest hard-drive maker, is offering customers a five percent refund on drives bought during the last six years following a lawsuit over the definition of a "gigabyte". As an alternative, customers can choose to receive free backup software.
Four people sued the company, saying they expected its drives to offer greater capacity than that actually provided. Seagate manufactures its drives based on powers of ten, with 1KB equalling 1,000 bytes. The claimants argued that 1KB of storage should compromise 1,024 bytes.
On a 1GB drive, this would make the difference between one billion bytes of storage, and 1,073,741,824 bytes. Other manufacturers, such as Samsung and Hitachi, also measure hard-drive capacity with 1KB equalling 1,000 bytes, whereas all operating systems are based on 1KB equalling 1,024 bytes.
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LEGO brick curiosities:
"1/1: On this day in history, transmission control protocol. Did you know? TCP/IP is the basis of almost all Internet communication, and it was adopted by ARPANET on January 1. ARPANET was the ancestor of the modern Internet.
According to a report published by Swedish researcher Dan Egerstadt, preying eyes may be spying on your transmitted data once you flick that TOR switch on, reminding us once again that plug-in security, as one slashdot reader put it, is non-existent. More 
From wkyc.com: "Pitzer College in Southern California is offering what may be the first-ever course about the video-sharing site. The 35 or so students not only study the videos, they're encouraged to make their own. In typical YouTube style, one student has posted about a minute and a-half of himself juggling. Student Darren Grose says you can learn a lot about American culture from watching YouTube."