Some crazy folks have managed to overclock a Pentium 4 to reach (just slightly) over 6Ghz. Apparently, it can calculate Pi to a million decimal places in just under 25 seconds.
I bet it gets a good frame rate on Doom3 too…
Monthly Archive for September, 2004
An interesting look into the shoot-em-up genre, outlining the games which have defined action gaming for the past two decades.
I was impressed that they didn’t just list the Doom's, Quake's and Half-life's as definitive, they actually looked at the whole spectrum right back to the days of Astranoids, unfortunately I wasn’t fortunate enough to have played their all-time top game.
This may have more to do with the DieBold Voting systems which can apparently be hacked with just 5 lines of VB code, by a chimp.
But the OSCE, more wildly known as the 'independent monitors' who say whether they think an election was rigged or not in a small third-world country, will be monitoring the American Election in November. This will be the first time ever the supposed centre of democracy for the world has had to be watched.
Seems a disgruntled employee, customer or just anyone else who has ever had to deal with NTL had some fun by changing the companies customer service introduction message.
Unfortunately, what they said is just too true…
Well, this is why I have only just got around to updating the page today…because I have spent the past three hours reading this page about a true Englishman, columnist for The Guardian and the trials and tribulations of living with a German girlfriend. The page is called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Arguments About, which seems to cover pretty much everything…
"Margret thinks I'm vain because… I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn - Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, 'None of the other men I've been with,' (my, but it's all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) 'None of the other men I've been with used a mirror to shave.'"
I have to say, I havent laughed at a webpage so much in my life, it is hilarious!
A great way of explaining virtual worlds to students would be to conduct the class in a virtual world…it makes sense.
Didn't realise that people were actually doing it though.
This could make teaching so much more fun, and do wonders for visual explanations of complex concepts. It could also reduce students into anti-social recluses i guess…
Another great way for salesgits to bother people with products they don’t want. Spit is the new acronym for 'SPam over Internet Telephony'. The idea being that if lots of people use VoIP then a spammer can send out one message which could potentially 'speak to' millions of people.
This article talks about it, and what is already being done to thwart it.
A truly great album by the Pakistani artist Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, a legend in his time. The album was produced with Canadian guitarist Michael Brook to give it a slightly westernised feel. People tell me that Massive Attack had something to do with the post production as well.
Best track on the album has to be Taa Deem, a rollercoaster of beat-based lyrical music.
According to this article from Tom's Hardware Guide a company called Silvas Digital has produced a monitor which can display 30-bit colour.
The current standard is 24-bit colour which produces 16,777,216 colours, so this is quite a substantial jump.
It uses a method of temporal dithering to create a 'new' colour by rapidly flicking between the darker and lighter colour either side of it. This means it can produce over 3 million shades of green 
Worth1000.com's latest contest is to replace everyday items with images of insects using photoshop, there are some true classics in here. They are rated by other users and ordered accordingly, so the further down the page you go the more photoshopped the images look.
There is a fascinating exhibition currently touring (hopefully it will make it to London) showing subversive digital culture as art, this is interesting because it looks like it was created by people who actually understand the culture as opposed to just being scared of it.
The exhibition shows a graphical representation of a virus spreading through the world's computers, plays interviews with hackers, virus writers and no-doubt a few script kiddies, contains a history of past virii and even allows the exhibition goers to create their own virus to be unleashed in a controlled area.
One of the exhibitors in this show is 0100101110101101.org (such a catchy domain name, i believe it is 19373 in binary). They are a group of social-engineers who create 'artistic' hoaxes, they most recently conned an entire city into believing their town centre was going to be renamed to 'NikePlatz' as part of a sponsorship deal. Also a lovely 'artistic' con on artists, where they swapped a whole pile of different peoples work around through FTP so it displayed the artists works and names randomly during an exhibition.
Found a collection of seriously intricate clocks created by a fellow named Roger Wood. Frankly, if you put these in a trendy west-end gallery and limited the edition to 10 or so for each clock they would be a very impressive one-man show. Not to mention selling for ten-times what they are on sale for here.
As part of the promotion for their new radio series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy the clever people at the BBC have updated the classic text-based Hitchhikers Game by Douglas Adams (circa 1984) to be playable over the web. It also has images (by the original artist), which add a certain something to the gameplay.
This particular one was a little before my time when it first came out, although the text-based adventure takes me straight back to playing the infamous Leather Goddess of Phobos which I played for months and probably didn’t get anywhere.
Also the new episodes are available to listen to here, although opening the window to listen to them crashed my firefox quite nicely.
Found this interesting artistic project all based around the classic Pac-Man game.
The artist has looked at the game from the ghosts point-of-view, at the bottom of the page is a wonderful acrylic on wood picture showing one of the ghosts at one end, pac-man at the other and a power pill in the middle. Begging the question, who will reach it first, who will live and who will die (or lose a life anyway).