Diverting Idle Hands (and Feet)
The News Review:
- Diverting Idle Hands (and Feet)
- Retired Web pages move into new mobile home
- Lawless Somalia draws influx of foreign fighters
- Automated systems offer convenience and conservation
- ’30 Rock’ Recap: ‘Apollo Apollo’
- Canton Ergo 609 DC
Diverting Idle Hands (and Feet)
New York Times
For people with no young fellow travelers there are many grown-up ways to make use of the time. If your next trip abroad will be to a place where you don’t speak the language you can easily find instructional CDs that may let you master some basic phrases. If you can plug your iPod into your car’s sound system you may want to download language lessons.
Retired Web pages move into new mobile home
Good Morning Silicon Valley
As you would imagine both the collection and the haul brought in by each new sweep have grown rapidly. The library now holds about 151 billion archived Web pages in a 3 petabyte (that’s 3 million gigabytes) database that is expected to expand at the rate of 100 terabytes a month (that’s 100000 gigabytes). That database is tapped up to 500 times a second by some 200000 visitors a day. Its mission guarantees that the archive always needs more closet space and processing power and that has meant adding to a traditional data center building that at last count housed 800 Linux servers with four hard drives each. But with issues of expense energy consumption and scalability all looming larger the archive has now moved its holdings to equipment that offers advantages in all those areas.
Lawless Somalia draws influx of foreign fighters
AFP
Somalia now shelters an estimated 450 foreign fighters who are working with the Shebab a home-grown hardline Islamist group that has spearheaded a bloody insurgency since 2006. While foreign fighters wanted for links to Al-Qaeda have long used Somalia as a backyard their numbers have swollen dramatically in 2009 experts say. “There were maybe 100 foreigners last year but now our estimate is up to 450″ said Ismail Haji Noor a former Somali security official who has established a secular militia bent on rooting out the Shebab and their foreign allies. Noor said the foreign jihadists come from the United States Europe the Middle East and Asia and often enter the country on regular airlines from the northern semi-autonomous state of Somaliland. Most of them are concentrated in Garowe in the northern breakaway state of Puntland and the southern towns of Baidoa Merka and Kismayo.
Automated systems offer convenience and conservation
Virginia Business Magazine
”Touch the first and automated shades in the Charlottesville home of Michael and Prue Thorner roll down to provide nighttime privacy. Touch the second and the shades track upward allowing the morning sun to stream in through their wall of windows. Too much sun? A touch of the finger adjusts the gauzelike shades. “They filter the light on sunny days and yet they enable you to see outside” says Prue. Automated lighting and shade systems in the Thorner home provide convenience and conservation yet they were the children of necessity when the home was built in 2005.
’30 Rock’ Recap: ‘Apollo Apollo’
Starpulse.com
“Muppet Jack” however is not a metaphor but an actual puppet we see standing in front of Kenneth because suddenly we are seeing through his eyes. It’s the best four-point-five seconds of this show ever and I wish I had screencap software for it!! It is also when Jack realizes he has already surpassed his wildest dreams and now just has a big house full of material goods from business associates to show for it. He gets Adam West to appear at his party but Adam gets his name wrong and suddenly Kenneth’s world looks even better even to him!Liz arrives at Jack’s after he has kicked everyone out and is just staring at a freezeframe of himself at six years old on one of the home movies. He wonders what happened to that happy little tyke and how he can get it back. He tries to figure out what was in the box that six year old Jack received for his birthday that made him so happy; he goes so far as to call in the kid who gave him the gift (who thinks it is a job interview) and then a deaf woman (who also thinks it is a job interview) to read six year old Jack’s lips on the no audio DVD. He also mentions Benjamin Button-ing himself to which Liz exclaims: “We’re not meeting in the middle!” But personally I think it would be more productive to just have her use her “TV magic” to take him on a fake journey back in time to relive his youth. When Jack reveals that the toy that made him so happy was a model of the Apollo command and lunar module which he pays seven thousand dollars to get back from a vintage toystore everything comes full circle.
Related from Processdes: No chemistry for Huntsman Apollo
Canton Ergo 609 DC
AVRev.com
Even before the company was founded in 1972 the main four men who created Canton were working in the field of audio design for many years and each founding member was a huge enthusiast when it came to audio. The Canton name roughly translates to mean “To sing music” in English so you can see how much passion for the musical element of audio design these founders were bringing to the world even in the nascent beginnings of Canton. Audiophiles who regard top quality low-end as the main driving component of their entire audio system have grown to hugely respect Canton for bringing out the first satellite subwoofer system in 1979 that pretty much set the standard for subwoofer design even thirty years later. To ensure that their engineers could thoroughly calibrate the exact measurements needed to further push audio design to new heights the owners of Canton built their own anechoic chamber in the late 1980’s. Not a company to rest on its laurels their next step was to design its own PC software that would lead to the development of DC technology which actually improved substantially the impact and overload tolerance of the bass reproduction found in every speaker in the Canton product line. It was at the beginning of the 1980’s that saw the first floor standing speaker from the Ergo product line being manufactured for mass consumption and Canton’s engineers developed their own version of a hybrid-amplifier to drive each speaker chassis installed into the Ergo loudspeaker line. The Ergo 609 DC contains a wood-veneer cabinet that is designed to deliver clear and precise audio for the price of $3200 a pair.