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Dec 14 2004
Slashdot:
: “According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, a FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at hul.harvard.edu.”
Dec 9 2004
Morse Code Alphabet: “A .-
B -…
C -.-.
D -..
E .
F ..-.
G –.
H .…
I ..
J .—
K -.-
L .-..
M –
N -.
O —
P .–.
Q –.-
R .-.
S …
T -
U ..-
V …-
W .–
X -..-
Y -.–
Z –..
0 —–
1 .—-
2 ..—
3 …–
4 .…-
5 .….
6 -.…
7 –…
8 —..
9 —-.
Fullstop .-.-.-
Comma –..–
Query ..–..“
Just because.
Dec 8 2004
Today I found myself in the most obscure of situations. I was walking down the local high street, perusing in the shop windows – admiring the steel kitchen freezers and the 2 for 1 offers at Iceland. I walked onwards past groups of children coming home from school, students back from university and old ladies with their karts rushing as quickly as they could carry themselves. All were wrapped warm in their scarves and coats, for at the moment it is November and bitterly cold.
I found myself ever fortunate, being present in a futuristic and technologically advanced environment. My mind wandered onto strange thoughts as I saw the latest gadgets bouncing around the hallways of the gadget shop. I thought of flying cars and five storey buses that could swim underwater. Life was grand and I was genuinely happy to be there. In following the daily tradition of walking down the high street towards the bus stop, my mind wanders to all sorts of realms I never knew existed. It was today, in a futuristic daydream that I didn’t look where I was going and fell down an uncovered manhole.
I fell and I fell, twisting and twirling down a helter skelter slide. I tumbled all over the place and kept falling. As I fell I had time to wonder why I was falling. I thought about how far I was going, where I was going and I had a sneaky suspicion that I was not going down the usual hole into the sewers. This slide was painted with murals, artful masterpieces alongside school children’s doodles. Music played, a random playlist it seems, country blues spliced with television theme tunes. It was most eclectic and I knew that at the end of my fall I would be safe.
I landed with a soft bounce. It seems I was traveling at a slow speed, akin to a moving sloth. It is here that I found my peculiar situation. I was in a sandy town surrounded by short small flat top houses with open windows and doorways. People were wearing strange robes and head bands. I felt quite silly in my scarf and Wellington boots. As I wandered onwards, trying not to bring myself too much attention, I noticed a crowd had gathered around a tall hill with three trees atop of it. It was a while away but I galloped across and made the ground in good speed. My heart was all aflutter, I hadn’t ran that fast or far for a very long while.
The large crowds were all angry, tanned men were jeering and grinning evilly towards the three trees on the hill. I, like a wailing police car, passed easily through the crowd, people kindly moving aside and letting me pass. I wanted to see what was wrong with these three trees, so I followed the windy road up to the top of the hill. I took this trip slowly and made sure I was composed and ready to duel with whatever evil lay ahead. My mind conjured three headed dragons, two headed snakes and an odd bald man who liked plaid shoes. At the very top I found a small gathering of important looking people, they wore what looked like an ancient version of black tie dress. I politely introduced myself to them all, yet none of them spoke back. Some were crying and I feared the dragon or snake or bald man had already destroyed the world. An old man pointed towards the middle tree.
Squinting without my glasses, I made out a poor starved man hanging on the tree. He looked ever so helpless and no one was letting him down. I felt very sorry for him and I decided I would speak to him to find out why he was hanging on the dead tree. I was stopped suddenly though, there were vibrations in my pocket and the air ran thick with the jaunty tune of a polyphonic popcorn tone. I reached into my side and withdrew my mobile; I had a new text message:
“HELP! I think my work is corrupt, should I save it as an untitled document or leave it. My computer is dying and I don’t know what to do.”
I replied telling her to use my computer and to start again. Behind me, the gatherings had fallen to their knees and were proclaiming me as a great prophet, musician and angel from God. I gave a stifled smile and backed away into the poor man in the tree, knocking off his hand made leafy crown. I apologized and he said no worries. The crowds were now chanting like a hooligan would at a soccer match, they wept and cried and asked what God wanted them to do. They asked if I was going to save their king. I thought to myself, “maybe I should have told her to save it”.
Dec 8 2004
Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV: “Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV
Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check
By Daniel DeNoon — WebMD Medical News
Nov. 29, 2004 — It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.
The vaccine is made from a patient’s own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient’s own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.
HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are ‘loaded’ with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.
Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts — a crucial measure of AIDS progression — were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.
After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients’ blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients’ T-cell counts stopped dropping.
The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.
‘The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection,’ Andrieu and colleagues write. ‘The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance”
Dec 8 2004
BBC NEWS | Technology | Halo 2 heralds traffic explosion: Halo 2 heralds traffic explosion
The growing popularity of online gaming could spell problems for net service firms, warns network monitoring company Sandvine. It issued the warning following analysis which shows that Traffic on the Xbox game network increased fourfold on the launch day of Halo 2. The 9 November traffic explosion has continued into December, said Sandvine. Service providers now need to make sure that their networks can cope with the increasing demands for bandwidth. As well as being a popular single-player title, Halo 2 can be connected to Microsoft’s subscription-based broadband network, Xbox Live.
Bandwidth hungry
But the surge in numbers and huge demands for bandwidth should be a wake-up call to the industry which must ensure that their networks can cope with the increases in traffic, said Sandvine’s chief technology officer Marc Morin.
Broadband
In a bid to cope and ease congestion, providers are increasingly making their networks intelligent, finding out who is using bandwidth and for what.
It could become common to charge people for the amount of bandwidth they use.
‘The explosion in Xbox Live traffic attributed to Halo 2 should be seen as a clarion call,’ he said.
‘ISPs need to enhance the broadband experience for these high-end users by prioritising or reserving bandwidth for games,’ he added.
Online gamers are bandwidth hungry
One of the main factors that spoils online gaming is ‘lag’ in which there is a noticeable delay between a gamer clicking on a mouse or keyboard and what happens in the online gaming world.
Gamers tend to migrate toward networks with the lowest ‘lag’.
Analysing traffic will become increasingly important for service providers if they ”
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