"The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to 'exercise' the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time. '"What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," says Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University.
Rezipping Web Resources for Fun and Profit « Lickity Split
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:52 pm EST, Nov 30, 2009
Rezipping Web Resources for Fun and Profit
One large area of web performance optimization is reducing the size of your content. Most people know about obvious techniques like HTTP compression, minifying, or removing extra data from images. However there is one size-reduction technique that does not seem to be common knowledge for most web performance junkies: Rezipping
Simply unzipping and rezipping with a higher compression ratio can save you 10%-25% off of Silverlight apps, Microsoft Office Files, Applets, and more! You are stupid not to do this!
Books for Entrepreneurs: Bargaining for Advantage - Venture Hacks
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:16 pm EST, Nov 27, 2009
This is the first in an ongoing series called Books for Entrepreneurs. We’ll use these posts to recommend books that we’ve found useful as entrepreneurs (duh).
Hip deep in reading about DrawingML and what do I find but non-sense like this:
Coordinates are measured in EMUs (914400 EMUs per inch), and can be positive or negative.
Do you know what you have to do to figure out if an image embedded in a PowerPoint file has been scaled or not? Harder than it should be.
1- Unzip the PPTX 2- Find the images 3- EMU = image dimensions X DPI X 914400 4- XPath slide[\d+].xml files for <a:ext > and see if the cx and cy EMUs are less than the dimensional EMUs.
More sexy performance stuff you should check out. By examine the web server logs you see exactly what your web server is doing and can identify all sorts of performance problems that page-based performances tools like YSlow or Page Speed cannot see.
Last time we covered the most important question you should ask a hosting provider: What control do I have over the web server. This time we will be showcasing another important question to ask a hosting provider:
What access do you provide to web server logs?
The main reason you want access to log files from the web server is to learn how visitors are accessing your content. This will reveal a wealth of knowledge about the raw traffic patterns of your web application and expose various performance issues and limitations. Often these performance issues will not be detected by page-based performance tools like Yahoo’s YSlow or Google’s Page Speed.
Lack of cross-platform support in Silverlight 4 explained
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:59 pm EST, Nov 24, 2009
In Silverlight 4, Microsoft has also implemented Component Object Model (COM) automation, introduced by Microsoft in 1993 as a binary-interface standard for software componentry that can be used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages. It's a feature only available on Windows. Again, this is counterintuitive for a plugin that is meant to be cross-platform, so we asked Microsoft about it. "Microsoft is committed to providing full cross-platform and cross-browser support with Silverlight and to optimizing Silverlight to light up every platform on which it runs," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. Well that's all nice and dandy, but the Silverlight team is breaking cross-platform support so they can support COM.
Silverlight is never going to be as popular as Flash. Period. Don't be fooled by "penetration" numbers. People don't want a Windows-only interface to a Windows-only web. This is not going to work.
Use of a pig model to demonstrate vulnerability of...
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:15 pm EST, Nov 19, 2009
Use of a pig model to demonstrate vulnerability of major neck vessels to inflicted trauma from common household items.
Or: You gave us a grant to stab a pig with all the random crap we could think of and all you got was this stupid report.
Joking aside, this looks like a cool study.
Commonly available items including a ball point pen, a plastic knife, a broken wine bottle, and a broken wine glass were used to inflict stab and incised wounds to the necks of 3 previously euthanized Large White pigs. With relative ease, these items could be inserted into the necks of the pigs next to the jugular veins and carotid arteries. Despite precautions against the carrying of metal objects such as knives and nail files on board domestic and international flights, objects are still available within aircraft cabins that could be used to inflict serious and potentially life-threatening injuries. If airport and aircraft security measures are to be consistently applied, then consideration should be given to removing items such as glass bottles and glass drinking vessels. However, given the results of a relatively uncomplicated modification of a plastic knife, it may not be possible to remove all dangerous objects from aircraft. Security systems may therefore need to focus on measures such as increased surveillance of passenger behavior, rather than on attempting to eliminate every object that may serve as a potential weapon.
Hopefully the take away from this is "Airport security precautions are worthless security theatre" and not "we should make airline passengers fly naked, and drug them during the flight..."
