2^25,964,951-1: 42nd Mersenne Prime Found

It's now Official. The possible Mersenne Prime discovered last week has now been confirmed(zh-cn). This prime has 7,816,230 digits, which makes it not only the largest Mersenne Prime, but also the largest prime of any kind ever discovered. For those who don't want to take time to read the article, the prime is 2^25,964,951 - 1.

Stop Buying Fur

Documentary by EAST International, Care For The Wild International, Swiss Animal Protection. Jan. 2005 Warning: Explicit killing and skining of animals in this footage.

Father of "Final Fantasy" is Microsoft FTE

Video Game Legend Hironobu Sakaguchi Joins Microsoft Game Studios as a Developer for Next-Generation Xbox Platform Father of "Final Fantasy" Series and AIAS Hall of Fame Inductee Will Develop Role-Playing Games

"REDMOND, Wash. - Feb. 24, 2005 - Microsoft Corp. today announced that Hironobu Sakaguchi, video game legend and president of Mistwalker game studio, has joined with Microsoft® Game Studios to develop role-playing game (RPG) video games exclusively for the next-generation Xbox® video game platform. Sakaguchi is best known as the creator of the "Final Fantasy" franchise, which has sold more than 60 million units worldwide, and was executive vice president in charge of game development at Square Enix Co. Ltd. until February 2001..."

Firefox 1.0.1 Released

The wait is over. Firefox 1.0.1 empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser. Join more than 25 million others and make the switch today — Firefox imports your Favorites, settings and other information, so you have nothing to lose. View: Release Note View: unofficial Firefox 1.0.1 changelog

Wired 13.02: The Firefox Explosion

The Firefox Explosion It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.) By Josh McHugh

Leica in financial crisis: Digital Photography Review

German website, Spiegel Online, has reported that Leica is in financial crisis after many banks cut its credit lines following an announcement last week, which said it stood to lose half its operating capital. The company, which introduced the first 35mm still camera in 1924, is also expected to close the financial year with an operating loss of €10 million (approx $13 million). Last year it reported a loss of €1.6 million (approx $2.1 million). Shareholders will hold a meeting on May 31 to discuss the future of the company. Spiegel Online says that Leica has missed the boat where digital photography is concerned and it is also suffering due to the low rate of the US dollar versus the Euro.

iPod photo and iPod Mini Updated

Google movies: now playing

Just in time for the Oscars, Google created a new "movie:" operator that enables you to find movie-related information faster and more easily, whether you're looking for titles or actors, director or genre, famous lines or obscure plot details. Can't remember the name of that film where Tom Hanks made friends with a volleyball? Search for [movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball] and Google will tell you: it was Cast Away. Want rental recommendations? Try searching for [movie: awesome car chase] or [movie: good chick flick].

强啊强，用易拉罐做定向天线

Sweet, however, a Pringles can should do this better.

Wikipedia Outage

We're currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on serveral servers and running recovery. Back soon... Update: slashdot coverage.

Smart Tag Creator Behind Google's New Autolink Feature

Jeff Reynar at Google is behind the Google Toolbar's controversial new Autolink feature. Ironically, he's the same person who was behind the similar SmartTag feature that Microsoft tried to build into IE. Reynar co-authored Microsoft's Smart Tag FAQ in 2001 and his home page identifies him as a current Google program manager. Update:Robert now says this is in fact not true.

PMA 2005 Show Report On DPReview

Introduction: PMA 2005 Show Report: Digital Photography Review Welcome to the Digital Photography Review PMA 2005 show report. The Photo Marketing Association Annual Show will be held this year at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando between the February 20th and 23rd. PMA is the photography industry's most important annual event, it's the place where the new year's hottest digital photography products are announced. As usual we have also included several products announced at CES 2005 (suffixed [CES]), the main reasoning behind this is that these products join those announced at PMA to make up a manufacturer's new line-up. Note: This is not designed to be comprehensive report of the entire show but rather a summary of the new digital photography related products announced around and shown at PMA. PMA 2005 trend 'predictions'

New differentiation points - Large LCD's, Image Stabilization The beginnings of a move away from increasing megapixels (although still more to come) Widening of product offerings, more cameras with medium to large zoom (6x - 12x) Mostly five and seven megapixel CCD's MPEG-4 video still won't arrive fully, we'll see it in some models but not enough More cameras with built-in flash storage (and no supplied storage card) Beginnings of wireless connectivity provision but still limited Lots of digital SLR's this year, although perhaps not all announced at PMA

18 Months After 300D: Canon EOS 350D, $899

DPRview: hands-on preview of the Canon EOS 350D (Digital Rebel XT)

IE7

Nothing more than a developing announcement, that is, "hold on switching, we'll have some even more confusing security features for you morons one year later", and highly doubted if it can deliver really before longhorn. More on IE group blog

Intel Announces Laser Breakthrough: Silicon laser runs non-stop

Intel has just announced a breakthrough in laser technology allowing a continuous laser wave on a silicon chip. Apparently they devised a method to sap the interfering field of electrons previously generated in silicon by the lasers. Intel says that hardware exploiting the advance might begin appearing at the end of the decade.

The world's first silicon chip capable of producing a high-quality continuous laser beam. Eight lasers are built into a single chip.

Intel researchers test the laser chip - the beam exits through the thin optical fiber on the right.

"Our silicon laser runs continuously at room temperature for as long as the power is on," says Rong, whose results are published in this week's Nature1. "This is a significant advance for the development of practical silicon lasers," comments Jérôme Faist, a physicist at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

Google Toolbar 3 beta: Smart Tags on the web?

SpellCheck Check your spelling whenever you type in web forms WordTranslator Translate English words into other languages AutoLink (US only) Turn street addresses into links to online maps: The online review of a great new restaurant has the place's address but no map. You could type the restaurant's street, city, and ZIP code into the search box, but why bother, when clicking the Toolbar's AutoLink button will automatically create a link to an online map (US addresses only)? AutoLink can also link package tracking numbers to delivery status, VIN numbers (US) to vehicle history, and publication ISBN numbers to Amazon.com listings.

Lessons Learned From Google Blogger Who Got Fired

If you're thinking of writing about your job in a Weblog, let Mark Jen's mistake be a lesson in what to avoid. Jen is the 22-year-old blogger whose career at Google was cut short after he went too far in writing about a company sales meeting, his pay package, and other things best left for quiet hallway conversation on, of all places, his "Ninetyninezeros" Weblog. On Jan. 28, only 11 days after he started at Google, Jen was fired.

Lesson #1: Know your company's corporate culture before you blog about it. Lesson #2: Blogs may feel like a whispered conversation with a few close friends, but they're more akin to speaking aloud in a crowded public place. Lesson #3: If you post sensitive content on your blog, it may not be enough to revise or remove it. Content gets cached on the Web. It may already be too late. Lesson #4: If your company doesn't provide a blogging policy, ask for one. At a minimum, have an open discussion with your manager and maybe even an HR person before getting started. Lesson #5: When it comes to blogging about work, don't make the same mistake twice.

Firefox 1.0 smashed through the 25 million download milestone in 99 days

On February 15th, exactly 99 days after it was released, Firefox 1.0 smashed through the 25 million download milestone.

"With a minimal set of tools—an affiliate system, a small donations fundraising system, blogs, galleries, forums, and the good old human larynx—you all are spreading Firefox to a quarter of a million people a day. More than 500,000 sites now link to Firefox according to Google—a fivefold increase from six months ago. What was just a small flame 100 days ago has since exploded into a phenomenal demonstration of the power of open source. Tens of thousands of devoted users and fans are a powerful and capable force of change. We have created a special commemorative image if you would like to mark this milestone on your own site. In celebration of this 25 million downloads milestone, and in celebration of each and every one of you, the Mozilla Store is offering a 25% discount on Firefox t-shirts, polo shirts (non-launch), plush toys and hats. This discount is available now and will last until 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, February 17. As an additional "token" of our appreciation, we are also pleased to announce that the kind folks over at CoinsForAnything have offered to provide us with 100 free collectors' coins to commemmorate this milestone in Internet history. We have provided a mockup above of how these coins will look. We will be awarding a quarter of these coins to the top 25 most active SpreadFirefox members, where "most active" is defined by the number and quality of the member's posts (as rated by the community), how many comments he's posted, whether or not he has engaged the community by rating other users' posts, and how much affiliate traffic he has generated for Firefox. We have placed much greater emphasis on how a member has helped grow the sfx community than on how much traffic he has sent to Firefox."

2004 A.M. Turing Award to TCP/IP Creator

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols. The Turing Award, first awarded in 1966, and named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, carries a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation. Cerf and Kahn developed TCP/IP, a format and procedure for transmitting data that enables computers in diverse environments to communicate with each other. This computer networking protocol, widely used in information technology for a variety of applications, allows networks to be joined into a network of networks now known as the Internet. “In this paper, we present a protocol design and philosophy that supports the sharing of resources that exist in different packet switching networks…”

Be My Google

5th Google holiday logo for the Valentine's Day.

Current Development Over At TLF

“最近一段时间论坛都不太正常，基本上已经维持了快两个月了.从1月22号开始，论坛连续关闭20天，这其中有很多原因, 首先,论坛一个个功能被迫关闭,最近参与，搜索，附件，头像,.....,21号发生了一次事件，论坛数据库丢失了两周，以此为导火线，我觉得实在无法忍受了，所以决定重新建立新的论坛，要求不高:保持现有的论坛程序基础上把那些功能恢复，尤其是搜索功能.如果现有论坛程序做不到，则更换论坛 其次,22号开始论坛受到ddos攻击，提供web服务器的管理员决定收回服务器，由于这是tlf仅有的一台web服务器，所以当时我们已经没有服务器继续提供服务 再次，以此为基础，重新招募了论坛技术员和web服务器,经过相关人士不懈的努力，论坛基本可以恢复正常，但是ddos供给仍然在继续,我们只好不断的搬迁再搬迁.论坛数据也在一次次搬迁测试中越来越混乱.所以有不少在测试期间的内容都丢失了 最后，迫于一些外界压力和技术要求，不得不更改论坛程序，现在用了新的论坛程序phpwind 新论坛的一些说明: 新论坛基本上把数据转了回来，2月4号以后的帖子丢失,投票有些故障,其他基本正常.另外把原来的发贴数对应现在的金钱，供娱乐.原来的积分对应现在的威望，对应升级活跃会员(除此之外积分/威望没有任何用处).相应的奖罚有一些更动大家慢慢体会 数据丢失的善后处理: 由于论坛数据库丢失,以及论坛的现状，作如下特殊处理: 1.论坛完全恢复正常前不审核工作两，不会被降级，升级可以 2.会员级别丢失的，请找当时给你该会员级别的人修正 3.威望在tlf只是一个摆设，在此期间损失的就不补了，如果你觉得实在不公平，希望补回威望和金钱，请找lynn 4.号召会员补回挂记期间的内容 现在论坛暂时半正常，很多功能还在重新设置中，也不定什么时候就挂了.我们能做的就是尽力坚持，也希望大家理解 由于论坛挂的时间太长，很多ftp关闭了，还有不少机主联系不到，现在整个下在体系混乱中,tlf相关功能都受到了很大影响，但是只要论坛还在，那么ftp还会有的,内容也会重新分配整理的，唯一需要的只是时间,请耐心等候. 紧急招募启事: 招募提供web服务器,要求必须是中国电信,100m带宽，linux/bsd系统为佳,win也成，配置要好.服务器数量越多，我们越有可能重新开放，请大家支持，提供者一律vip会员奖励 另外由于论坛关了这么久，很多ftp也关闭了，造成ftp栏目有很大的缺口，现在急需有能力提供ftp的人帮助补上这些缺口.要求100m ftp,80g以上空间，现在提供ftp的一旦采用为主力ftp一律奖励topsite账号 最后声明,我自始至终坚持论坛非商业化,永远不会改变,因此我们不可能拥有完全属于自己的服务器(硬件有线路没有),我们的服务器都是靠别人提供的，谁也不知道什么时候就关闭，别人都说是因为tlf坚持这种免费共享的信念才会受到这么多攻击,没错我想也是.但是有一点可以肯定，只要还有人愿意提供服务器给我，只要还有人愿意帮助建设tlf,那么tlf永远都会继续站起来.无论什么攻击或者其他事情不会改变我的理念，tlf不会长时间关闭注册，也不会有任何商业性质.”

Inside Google Maps

as simple as possible, but no simpler: Mapping Google If you're a techie type, you'll enjoy Mapping Google—a web developer's investigation of how Google is pulling off its new maps feature:

"By now, many of you will have gone and tried out the new Google Maps application. By and large, you have to admit that it's pretty damned slick for a DHTML web application -- even my wife was impressed, and that's not easy with geek toys. So, in the spirit of Google Suggest and GMail, I've decided to have a quick peek under the hood to figure out what makes it tick. The first thing I noticed is that it doesn't quite work like GMail. Whereas GMail uses XMLHttp to make calls back to the server, Google Maps uses a hidden IFrame. Each method has its benefits, as I'll discuss below, but this difference of approach does seem to imply that it may not be the same team doing the work..."

Google on Maps

Blog Tour

Happy Googling in the Year of Chick!

Abdallah关于印度洋海啸事件之问答录

北京时间公元二零零四年十二月二十六日八时五十分，印尼苏门答腊岛西北的印度洋海底深处发生里氏八点五级地震，引发大海啸，随即席卷印尼、马来西亚、泰国、缅甸、斯里兰卡、印度、孟加拉国等国家的印度洋沿岸地区，影响甚至远达东非等地。造成巨大损失和伤亡，死者现已超过15万。如今海啸已过去近一月，围绕着海啸前后，Abdallah对其中的一些物理、政治问题进行了解答，现录出供参考。 Q1：海啸的本质是什么？ Q2：海啸起因是什么？ Q3：在许多沿岸地区，很多人发现海啸前海水先落后涨，why？ Q4：海啸发生后，传播速度有多快，有时间逃跑吗？ Q5：海上的船只如何躲避海啸？如果船正好在震源附近，那是不是在劫难逃？ Q6：那么除了地震测量单位，海中的船只能否发现海啸波而及时通知岸上？ Q7：既然海啸在深海引起的破坏如此之小，为什么会对岸上的破坏如此之大？ Q8：海啸来的时候如何逃生？ Q9：这种人家惨剧，该不该捐款？ Q10：既然您不捐，那是否号召别人不捐款？ Q11：派军舰去救灾好不好？

Mozilla Control

Mozilla Control: "This site contains information on a number of projects that allow you to use Mozilla in an ActiveX environment and vice versa: 1. Mozilla ActiveX Control Embed the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko) into any ActiveX application. This control implements the same APIs as the Internet Explorer control making porting of existing applications reasonably straightforward. 2. ActiveX Control For Plug-ins Embed plug-ins in any ActiveX application. This control can host most Netscape Plug-in API (LiveConnect) plug-ins, allowing them to use them in your existing ActiveX applications, including Internet Explorer. 3. Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application. This plug-in hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera."

Firescape?

First Look at Firefox-Based Netscape - MozillaZine: "The Netscape Browser prototype is based on Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3. Netscape are very careful to use the term 'prototype' as opposed to 'beta' but the FAQ for the release suggests that they anticipate a shipping product based on the technology to launch in 2005. On Windows XP (the prototype is available for Windows 98, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP), the user-agent string is 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20041122 Firefox/0.5.6 '. We're not sure where they got the '0.5.6 ' from or why 'Netscape' isn't included."

New PowerBook G4

8x SuperDrives, comes standard with 512MB RAM, 802.11g, and bluetooth. 128MB Video RAM and Dual-DVI optional. Ready to Scroll Scrolling through web pages or large documents on a trackpad can challenge even the most nimble fingers. That’s why every PowerBook G4 features a new trackpad with scrolling capability. Just drag two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window. Change this feature to suit your needs: Customize your trackpad settings or turn off scrolling completely via System Preferences. Takes the Fall Now every PowerBook G4 is equipped with Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor to help protect your most valuable asset: your data. The Sudden Motion Sensor senses change in axis position and accelerated movement. In the event of a drop or fall, the Sudden Motion Sensor instantly parks the hard drive heads so they won’t scratch the disks on impact, lessening the risk of damage and improving your chances of retrieving valuable data. When the Sudden Motion Sensor senses your PowerBook is once again level, it unlocks the hard drive heads automatically.