Just wanted to thank you and commend your efficiency in getting things around the other side of the world in record time. I ordered some gear late on a Friday afternoon, and it was on my desk in Australia by Wednesday morning. Impressive!
Interesting Top 10 list over at toptenz.net about lost technologies, including my personal favorite, the Antikythera Mechanism. On a potentially sadder and more controversial note, what up the Apollo/Gemini thing?
Less than 10% percent of the visitors here who use Internet Explorer, use Internet Explorer 6, while we’re not going to purposely add features that break anything in IE6 it is no longer supported on the adafruit sites… Here’s a bit of history to this famous browser -
Internet Explorer 6 (abbreviated as IE6) was the sixth major revision of Internet Explorer, a web browser developed by Microsoft for Windows operating systems. It was released on August 27, 2001, shortly after the completion of Windows XP.
It is the default browser shipped with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and was also made available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. IE6 SP1 is the last version of Internet Explorer available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. Although IE6 has now been superseded by newer versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft still supports it in Windows XP SP3.
This version of Internet Explorer is widely derided for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in “worst tech products of all time” lists, with some publications labeling it as the “least secure software on the planet.” Because a substantial percentage of the web audience still uses the outdated browser, campaigns have been established to encourage users to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer or switch to different browsers. Some websites have dropped support for IE6 entirely, most notable of which is Google dropping support in some of its services…
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.
We don’t take advertising on our site (and never will) but we do like to measure what’s happening and we don’t mind sharing some of this information – thank you to everyone out there who reads our blog each day, supports us with their orders of open source hardware and contributes the great comments/forum posts here.
GitHub launched with a simple pull request system on day one. You’ve used it to send 200 thousand pull requests in just over two years. Now we’re taking it to the next level with a re-imagined design and a slew of new tools that streamline the process of discussing, reviewing, and managing changes.
A neat video showing the location of asteroids as they are discovered, from 1980 – 2010. It’s really cool to see the newly discovered ‘roids follow the Earth around the sun.
As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in `computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. [...] The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that’s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you? [...]
When I started building this, I thought “Oh, I’ll just swing by the ol’ Internet and find some groovy 70’s-era software to run on it.” It turns out I was wrong. One of the sad things about pre-internet machines (especially ones that were primarily purchased by 3-letter Government agencies) is that practically no software exists for them.
After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Museum and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90’s. I filed a couple of FOIA requests with scary government agencies that also came up dry.
An interesting discussion at the diyAudio forums about the quality of NASA audio. Panomaniac writes:
So what’s up with the rotten audio from the NASA missions? It has bugged me for years. Ever notice how bad it is? Why?
Now the old moon mission maybe I can understand, but the ISS and shuttle stuff? They are in low earth orbit, for crying out loud. How hard would it be to get pristine audio back down to earth?
A geostationary orbit, where the communication satellites sit, is 35000 Km above the earth’s surface, and they can beam 100s of SD and HD video and audio channels. The Space Station is only about 350Km up and they can’t get better than 1934 radio quality.
There’s also a summary at EE Times. So what do you think? Why is NASA still so lo-fi? We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t understand him when he gets there.
(and yeah, it’s an astronaut with a banjo — happy Friday!)
We’re playing around with the new Digg v4 – good stuff, easy to add your own feed as a publisher, fun to explore / share. If you want to follow us on Digg we are http://digg.com/adafruit
Wow. Y’all are awesome! I can’t believe the level of customer service you provide. I told my friends about your store and they have since ordered from you and had great experiences also. Thanks again – H.
Printable catalog (PDF)
