Completely silent and powerful workstation, spring 2013

Someone in my close family needed a update for a workstation primarily used for emailing, browsing, audio and light video editing. The computer was never used for any 3D demanding games, so no separate GPU was needed, provided that I could find a CPU with a on-die GPU. Furthermore a recently bought NAS took care of all the large files, so the objectives for the build was to create a silent, very fast booting computer that could also handle heavier problems as audio and video editing. MORE

Don't "File:///"

Open Radar Community today reported a bug in Apple's Mac systems. According to a post, a eight characters text will crash almost any application on your Mac. When you type "File:///" (The capital 'F' is important) in some Mac application like TextEdit, it will crash the screen. It is figured out that, the bug is inside Data Detectors, a feature that lets apps recognize dates, locations, and contact data, making it easy for you to save this information in your address book and calendar. Since the bug has been reported to Apple, it will likely be patched at some point. A reader copy posted the crash dump at Pastebin.

Via

On Automation

The Tyranny of Algorithms

Do we want a world where a software program 

picks the next pop-music star and legals system 

run on opaque pieces of code?

By EVGENY MOROZOV

In "Player Piano," his 1952 dystopian novel, Kurt Vonnegut rebelled against automation. For Vonnegut, the metaphor of the player piano—where the instrument plays itself, without any intervention from humans—stood for all that was wrong with the cold, mechanical and efficiency-maximizing environment around him. MORE HERE

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972)

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo.

rip steve jobs

Darwinian evolution of computers and other inorganic machines

One of the most important discoveries of the last 200 years was Darwin’s theory of evolution. You are almost certainly educated in the ways and whys and wherefores of evolution, but here’s a quick recap: through multiple generations of a species, there is a process which ensures the survival of the fittest and the demise of the weakest. At its most basic, this process whittles out bad DNA mutations and embraces the good — but extrapolated out through billions of years, and it is the reason that girls prefer taller boys, and why we instinctively revere the leaders and generals of our society.
MORE HERE

Appsterdam A haven for indie app makers?

It’s hard to get the famously phlegmatic Dutch excited but Mike Lee had a room full of them (and other nationalities) clapping and whooping Saturday in the style of an old-school preacher. Why? Appsterdam, Lee’s attempt to create a new home for app makers in city of Amsterdam. more

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