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Sean the Koreanong ROTC

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]]> http://karlpox.com/2008/11/programming-practice-java-1/feed/ http://karlpox.com/2008/10/10-amazing-coincidences/ http://karlpox.com/2008/10/10-amazing-coincidences/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:24:53 +0000 admin http://karlpox.com/?p=162 What’s in a Name?

A computer error gave two women in America called Patricia the same social security number. When the two women were brought together in an office to rectify the blunder they discovered that

• They had both been born with the names Patricia Ann Campbell
• Both of their fathers were called Robert Campbell
• Their birthdays were on 13th March 1941
• They had both married military men in the year 1959 (within eleven days of each other)
• They each had two children aged 19 and 21
• They both had an interest in oil painting
• Both had studied cosmetics
• Both had worked as book-keepers

Bullet With Your Name on It

In 1893, Henry Ziegland ended a relationship with his girlfriend.

Tragically, his girlfriend took the news very badly, became distraught and took her own life.

Her distressed brother blamed his sister’s death upon Henry, he went round to Henry’s house, saw him out in the garden and tried to shoot him.

Luckily, the bullet only grazed Henry’s face and embedded itself in a nearby tree.

In 1913, twenty years after this incident, Henry decided to use dynamite to uproot a tree in his garden. The explosion propelled the embedded bullet from the tree straight into Henry Ziegland’s head - killing him immediately.

Lucky Hughs?

On December 5th 1660, a ship sank in the straights of Dover - the only survivor was noted to be Hugh Williams.

On 5th December 1767, another ship sank in the same waters - 127 lost their lives, the only survivor was noted to be Hugh Williams

On 8th August 1820, a picnic boat capsized on the Thames - there was one survivor - Hugh Williams.

On 10th July 1940, a British trawler was destroyed by a German mine - only two men survived, one man and his nephew - they were both called Hugh Williams.

With a Quack Quack Here

Mr McDonald was a farmer who lived in Canada - nothing extra-ordinary in that - until you learn that his postcode contained the letter sequence EIEIO.

‘Til Death Did Them Part

In 1996, Paris police set out to investigate a late night, high speed car crash, both drivers had been killed instantly.

Investigations revealed that the deceased were in fact man and wife.

Police initially suspected some kind of murder or suicide pact but it became apparent that the pair had been separated for several months - neither could have known that the other would have been out driving that night - it was just a terrible coincidence.

She’s Behind You!

Michael Dick had been travelling around the UK with his family to track down his daughter, Lisa - who he had lost contact with ten years earlier.

After a long fruitless search, he approached the Suffolk Free Press, who agreed to help him by putting an appeal in their newspaper.

Fortunately, his long lost daughter saw the appeal and the pair were reunited. The odd thing was, his daughter had been right behind him when the free paper took the photograph - shown in the photograph above. What are the chances of that!

Licensed To Thrill

A fifteen year old pupil at Argoed High School in North Wales was to sit his GCSE examinations in 1990.

His name was James Bond - his examination paper reference was 007.

What Goes Around….

In 1965, at the age of four, Roger Lausier was swimming off a beach in Salem - he got into difficulties and was saved from drowning by a woman called Alice Blaise.

In 1974, on the same beach, Roger was out on a raft when he pulled a drowning man from the water - amazingly, the man he saved was Alice Blaise’s husband.

Lightning Never Strikes Twice?

British cavalry officer Major Summerford was fighting in the fields of Flanders in the last year of WW1, a flash of lightning knocked him off his horse and paralysed him from his waist down.

He moved to Vancouver, Canada, six years later, whilst out fishing, Major Summerfield was struck by lightning again and the right side of his body became paralysed.

After two years of recovery, it was a summers day and he was out in a local park, a summer storm blew up and Major Summerfield was struck by lightning again - permanently paralysing him.

He died two years after this incident.

However, four years after his death, his stone tomb was destroyed - it was struck by lightning!

Practice What You Preach

Businessman Danie de Toit made a speech to an audience in South Africa - the topic of his speech was - watch out because death can strike you down at any time.

At the end of his speech, he put a peppermint in his mouth, and choked to death on it!

The British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a new Apple iPhone TV advertisement misled consumers, and hence should never be aired again.

The advert claims that iPhone gives you access to “all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone”, but the ASA ruled that the iPhone’s lack of Java and Flash support means that this claim is misleading.

Apple had argued its claim referred to availability of webpages, rather than their specific appearance.

The advert “gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone”, said Olivia Campbell, a spokesperson for the ASA. “Because the iPhone doesn’t support Flash or Java, you couldn’t really see the internet in its full glory.”

“They made a very general claim that you can see the internet in its entirety, and actually that’s not quite true - so we’ve upheld.”

Google today launched Google Chrome, a new open source browser intended to create a better web experience for users around the world.

Available in beta in more than 40 languages, Google Chrome is a new approach to the browser that’s based on the simplicity and power that users have come to expect from Google products.

In the early days of the Internet, web pages were frequently little more than text. But today the web has evolved into a powerful platform that enables users to collaborate with friends and colleagues through email and other web applications, edit documents, watch videos, listen to music, manage finances and much more. Google Chrome was built for today’s web and for the applications of tomorrow.

“We think of the browser as the window to the web - it’s a tool for users to interact with the web sites and applications they care about, and it’s important that we don’t get in the way of that experience,” said Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, Google Inc. “Just like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome has a simple user interface with a sophisticated core to enable the modern web.”

Google Chrome was designed to make it easy for users to search and navigate the web for the content they’re looking for.
- A combined search and address bar quickly takes users where they want to go, often in just a few keystrokes.
- When users open a new tab in Google Chrome, they’ll see a page that includes snapshots of their most-visited sites, recent searches and bookmarks, making it even easier to navigate the web.
- Each browser tab operates as a separate process; by isolating tabs, should one tab crash or misbehave, others remain stable and responsive, and users can continue working without having to restart Google Chrome.
- Google also built a new JavaScript engine, V8, which not only speeds up today’s web applications, but enables a whole new class of web applications that couldn’t exist on today’s browsers.

“While we see this as a fundamental shift in the way people think about browsers, we realize that we couldn’t have created Google Chrome on our own,” said Linus Upson, Director of Engineering, Google Inc. “Google Chrome was built upon other open source projects that are making significant contributions to browser technology and have helped to spur competition and innovation.”

Google Chrome is being released as an open source project under the name Chromium. The intent is that Google will help make future browsers better by contributing the underlying technology in Google Chrome to the market, while continuing to develop additional features.

Google Chrome is being released in beta for Windows in over 100 countries in the following languages: Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America), Turkish, English (US), English (UK), Arabic, Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Estonian.
Google Chrome for Mac and Linux users will be available in the coming months.

Nvidia released today the GeForce Power Pack a free compilation of games, demos, and mod packs for PC that takes advantage of CUDA and PhysX on GeForce 8 and higher Nvidia graphics cards.

On the PC, PhysX technology harnesses the power of any CUDA-enabled general-purpose parallel computing processor, including any NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series or higher GPU, to handle 10-20 times more visual complexity than what’s possible on today’s traditional PC platforms. All of the 80 million plus GeForce 8 Series and higher GPUs in the field are CUDA-enabled, the largest installed base of general-purpose, parallel-computing processors ever created.

PhysX technology can leverage the best of both CPU and GPU architectures to deliver the best end user experience possible. Upcoming PC titles that incorporate PhysX technology include Cryostasis, Backbreaker, Aliens: Colonial Marines, with close to 20 more PC titles expected before the year-end holiday seasons.

“Game physics is essential in enabling deeper interactivity and real-world effects in any game. Epic is pleased to offer PhysX as a standard feature within Unreal Engine 3 to enable such effects,” said Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games. “The introduction of GPU acceleration for PhysX promises both additional potential effects and faster performance. You can get a glimpse of the possibilities of what PhysX is able to do with the special levels for Unreal Tournament 3 where damage effects greatly enhance the gameplay.”

The GeForce Power Pack released today is the first of many planned GeForce Power Packs and it includes:
* Warmonger-Full free game! Destroy walls, floors, and whole buildings to open up new paths or close existing ones. Destructive power is more than eye candy here-it’s a tactical weapon in this ground-breaking action game.
* Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack-includes three maps with amazing effects that fundamentally change the gameplay (requires full version of Unreal Tournament 3)
* A sneak peek at the upcoming Nurien social networking service, based on the Unreal Engine 3 (with built-in benchmark)
* A sneak peek at the upcoming game Metal Knight Zero (with built-in benchmark)
* All new NVIDIA “The Great Kulu” tech demo that showcases the use of PhysX soft bodies in a real game play environment
* All new NVIDIA “Fluid” tech demo-a simulation of realistic fluid effects with a variety of liquids

In conjunction with the release of the GeForce Power Pack, NVIDIA has also released new WHQL-certified drivers that enable PhysX acceleration for all GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 Series GPUs. This new driver also adds support for PhysX-accelerated features in the commercially available Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 game.

“The use of physics in games is highly effective in enabling new levels of interactivity and gameplay options. Gearbox is excited about these developments and we are rapidly finding new ways to use NVIDIA PhysX to improve the game’s immersive feel and overall excitement factor,” said Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software. “The addition of GPU acceleration allows us to add even more effects whilst maintaining great performance. Gearbox titles, including Borderlands and others, will feature increased use of PhysX and we look forward to developing more with the support of NVIDIA.”

“Seeing really is believing and is the reason why we compiled all of this great PhysX content into a free download for our end users,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce GPUs at NVIDIA. “We want GeForce owners to experience for themselves these amazing effects to get an idea how PhysX will make games much more lifelike in the years to come. Physics-accelerated content is already here, and there are a ton more titles on the way. We can’t wait for our customers to jump in, get wet, and tell us what they think!”

Less than 2 weeks in market and it is no secret that iPhone 3G faces trouble with 3G calls and high rate data transmission.

When the problem was first reported, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs belittled it as he declared that it affected only 2% of the iPhone 3G user base i.e. just around 60,000 users. Nonetheless, Apple was quick to release update 2.0.1 that failed to solve the problem, followed by update 2.0.2 that did.

As usual with Apple, no details or explanations were given regarding the whole matter, but luckily for us, an AT&T insider agreed to explain it all to RoughlyDrafted Magazine.

Here is what he said (and don’t worry, we’ll explain it in simpler words afterwards):
“In UMTS (AT&T 3G system) power control is key to the mobile and network success. If the UE (User Equipment = mobile phone) requires too much downlink power then the base station or Node B (base antenna) can run out of transmitter power and this is what was happening”.

“As you get more UEs (phones) on the cell, the noise floor rises and the cell has to compensate by ramping up its power to the UEs. If the UE power control algorithm is faulty then they will demand more power from the cell than is necessary and with multiple users this can cause the cell transmitter to run out of power. The net result is that some UEs will drop their call. I have seen the dropped call graphs that correspond to the iPhone launch and when the 2.0.2 firmware was released. The increase in dropped calls, (were the result of) dropped calls due to a lack of downlink power.”

Put simply, a bug in iPhone 3G caused it to ask the network for more power than necessary. When several iPhone 3Gs connected to the same node do that, they drain the network’s power, forcing it to drop calls and use lower transmission bandwidth.

“This is one of the reasons why AT&T has been sending text messages to users to persuade them to upgrade to the 2.0.2 software. In a mixed environment where users are running 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2, the power control problems of 2.0 and 2.0.1 will affect the 2.0.2 users.”