Monday, February 26, 2007

BitTorrent does a Napster

BitTorrent are about to offer legitimate downloads seeling downloads of filmsna dn TV showes licensed from the studios, although the films will only be for rental not for sale.
They are aiming to give a price that feels like good value relative to what [their target demographic] were getting for free. See

Wired: AP Technology and Business News from the Outside World on Wired.com

Thursday, February 15, 2007

One is NOT a Prime Number

I used to be right (until 1999) but now I'm not.

The number 1 is a special case which is considered neither prime nor composite (Wells 1986, p. 31). Although the number 1 used to be considered a prime (Goldbach 1742; Lehmer 1909; Lehmer 1914; Hardy and Wright 1979, p. 11; Gardner 1984, pp. 86-87; Sloane and Plouffe 1995, p. 33; Hardy 1999, p. 46), it requires special treatment in so many definitions and applications involving primes greater than or equal to 2 that it is usually placed into a class of its own. A good reason not to call 1 a prime number is that if 1 were prime, then the statement of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic would have to be modified since "in exactly one way" would be false because any n==n.1. In other words, unique factorization into a product of primes would fail if the primes included 1. A slightly less illuminating but mathematically correct reason is noted by Tietze (1965, p. 2), who states "Why is the number 1 made an exception? This is a problem that schoolboys often argue about, but since it is a question of definition, it is not arguable." As more simply noted by Derbyshire (2004, p. 33), "2 pays its way [as a prime] on balance; 1 doesn't."

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

"The Soup Is Too Salty"

I don't normally do links to video sites, there are far too many blogs full of those already but this "The Soup Is Too Salty" advert for Visa reminded me of the similar scene from "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" as it is intended to and I really like it.

While you're there, check out this video of the amazing signing voice of 11-year-old Bianca Ryan singing on NBC's America's Got Talent.

While we're on this subject I might as well do a whole bunch and then go back to not touching them as usual.

Here's a clip from a call to a HelpDesk circa 1500 on YouTube

and finally an amazing bit of accordion playing of (part of) Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Chain Reaction Game

Saw this ages ago, just been reminded of it.

  • You get 3 goes.
  • Each go has 50 "balls".
  • You get one shot to make an explosion and blow up as many balls as possible

My Best 125

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Case Mod - The Ultimate List

Case Mod - The Ultimate List Some that I've seen and some that I haven't. This is more interesting than figuring out how to get all my old blogposts back.

New Blogger

Changed to new Blogger from old. Let's see if it totally screws up the entire blog.

EDIT: Yes it did but that's because I didn't see the SWITCH OVER button on the home dashboard ('cause it wasn't there) and I created a new account, set up a new blog with the same name and details as the old one and published it. This totally overwrote the web pages with the articles published in the new blog database. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

How did I get all the old stuff back? Well, of course I had a local backup of my entire site but more importanlty the old blog account was still active, so I just opened that and re-published the entire blog again. Then I checked out what I should have done and waited until I saw the Switch Over button and converted from the old to the new blogger.

Windows 10 Start Menu disappeared

Recently noticed (after a Windows 10 Update) that my st6art menu had disappeared and the Cortana search was retuinring results but not letti...