Anthology of Ideas

  You are most like Darren Rowse! You are like Darren Rowse. You are relatively mild mannered, confident in how you operate and choose not to “rock the boat”. Your ego does not flair often. Instead, you choose to assist other bloggers as much as possible. In some cases, you may find it to be your mission in life. You do not participate in a large amount of social networking and if you do, you’re not particularly aggressive about “friending” people.

Friday, Osama bin Laden released his first video in three years, and it has been posted, in full, online. Unlike his fire and brimstone videos in the past, this one is more relaxed and he talks in a calm, definite manner as if he was trying to teach people his beliefs rather than indoctrinate them by force. Bin Laden doesn’t directly attack America as a whole—as he is prone to do—but instead attacks certain aspects of American culture and history that he disagrees with and which demonstrate the faults he believes America has.

Wi-Fi with speeds of 15 gigabits per second? Coming soon to a computer near you. (AP) — With a wave of his hand over a homemade receiver, Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar shows how easily – and quickly – large data files could someday be transferred from a portable media player to a TV. Poof! “You just moved a movie onto your device,” Laskar says. While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have emerged as efficient ways to zap small amounts of data between gadgets, neither is well suited for quickly transferring high-definition video, large audio libraries and other massive files.

When XHTML was first released nearly everyone, myself included, rushed headlong into it. Countless websites were shredded, old HTML code was stripped out and rebuilt using XHTML syntax under the watchful eye of the W3 validators. When it was over, the dust settled and, for a time, everyone tried to pretend HTML no longer existed — scorning those who had the audacity to still use HTML. Time passed. People began realizing that XHTML wasn’t the save all and be all that it was supposed to be: some popular browsers (cough: IE) couldn’t even properly render its content type of application/xhtml+xml, so developers were stuck calling it XHTML and pretending that it was truly XHTML+XML, but they were really just dishing out HTML that was properly formatted.

The image resize software demonstrated in the video is meant to enable a web browser to resize images without removing context or quality. It does this by removing areas of the image deemed less important by using algorithms that detect curved lines instead of normal straight lines. I’m very impressed with the software and I think it will profoundly effect web design and even amateur photography: who hasn’t wanted to erase an ex from pictures?

Before Western society was introduced to the “Arabic” — technically, the number system originated in India — numeral system, it used the Roman system which uses six symbols to represent a base 10 numeric system (repeats every 10 digits) I,V,X,L,C, and M which referred to the numbers 1,5,10,50,100,and 1000 respectively, and the placement of the symbols determined their value. If a symbol with a smaller value came before a larger, it was subtracted from the larger; if it cam after it was added, so IV meant 4 while VI meant 6.