Month: December 2004


Record Bandwidth Transfer


For the month of December, this site transferred over 2.5 Gigabytes of traffic. This is up from the average 900 MB average every month. I don’t know why its so much higher for this month, but it really doesn’t matter because it won’t max out too easily. Just a dumb statistic for you all to know.

And while I’m at it, have a Happy New Year.

You’ve Got to be Kidding Me


If you don’t feel like reading this whole article I can sum it up in two words: Get Firefox. If you want to read on about how IE sucks, then go ahead.

I decided to use IE just for the hell of it and see how crappy the internet is without Firefox. Since Service Pack 2 should have made it more secure, I decided to see how true that was. Apparently not.

ActiveX controls are the things that popup and ask you to install things, usually adware. Service Pack 2 blocks all of these by default but a little bar pops up on top telling you that it was blocked. Of course, IE is still vulnerable unless you go into Internet Settings and turn off ActiveX controls, but no one does this. So because a bar pops up notifying people when sites try to install bad software, this makes IE okay, right? Wrong…

Here’s what really pissed me off. Sites know that SP2 blocks their spyware, so now they provide detailed instructions on how to install it, bypassing all of SP2s new security features (which are weak anyway). Yes, it’s happening. “In order to continue using our site you must…” Check out the picture for the actual instructions given. Quick note about the picture – it is a real screenshot and a javascript detected Internet Explorer and those instructions popped up over the main content of the website. Dumb people would follow the instructions because they want to access the site. And here’s the kicker. The damn thing says security warning, and the instructions are asking you to install it. People are really dumb and would.

I can’t make this point any stronger: GET FIREFOX!!!! I went to the exact same site and every bad script and popup was blocked.


The i860 – New Junk for Lazy People


This isn’t the first time I’m bashing Nextel phones. Anyway, the i860 is crap and is for lazy people. The feature that pisses me off the most is the push-button flip mechanism. This is absolute junk and a waste of a feature. It proves people are too lazy these days. Whats the matter, takes too much energy to manually filp up your phone? I guess so. Some fat lazy engineer for Motorolla probably designed this because he was sick of burning an extra calorie by opening up his phone. He thought it’d be easier to push a button. Well it sucks. I saw the phone and used the push button flip. It opens so fast that it’s bound to wear out within a month. Just another thing to wear out and break.

Motorolla uses good marketing strategy build a phone that will wear out quickly and break, because lazy idiots will buy the phone, break it in a month, then buy another. I can get a Verizon LG phone for $60 that has all the same features minus the crappy flip option. Sigh… What’s happenning to society these days?


Engineers take the Fun out of Christmas


This is the best article ever written. Gruber showed it to us in Physics and it’s also around the internet a lot, but for the hell of it, I’ll post it anyway:

ENGINEERS TAKE THE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau).

At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, which comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least 1 good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second or 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them, Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). A mass of nearly 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.


Three More Days


Only three more days of classes. I really need a break and I’m sure everyone else does. This last week before break was a killer. A few essays and a test everyday. Ugh. It will all be over soon.

And happy winter