numbers
Phones
IPhone 3GS Selling As Quickly As IPhone 3G
10:54PM Mark Wilson | I don’t know that the iPhone 3GS will see as much demand as the iPhone 3G over the first few months of its release, but as of now it’s off to a strong start. More »
Software
Palm Pre Nears 700,000 App Downloads In Less Than Two Weeks
12:45AM Dan Nosowitz | Medialets is reporting that as of June 17th, a mere 11 days after its launch, Palm Pre users have downloaded well over 650,000 apps. Now hurry up and expand that App Catalog, Palm! More »
Entertainment
Movie Theatre Popcorn, It Really Is That Expensive
6:40AM Mark Wilson | Here you see a movie ticket and kernel popcorn, as scaled to their price increase over the past 80 years. On your left, 1929. On your right, 2009. Needless to say, things have changed. More »
Software
Apple Sends iWork to the Clouds, Introduces iWork.com
4:13AM John Herrman | Just as rumoured last week, Apple is taking iWork ‘09 online, with file hosting and group editing services. Think of it as MobileMe, but for your documents. And that’s not all.
Phones
Old American Telephone and Telegraph Report Shows What Keypads Could Have Been
7:30AM Jack Loftus | You probably don’t think about it much, but there was an intensive selection process that went into the telephone push button keypad. Ironically, the one we use today featured a fairly high error rate. More »
Gadgets
Techie Visa Card Features Buttons and Screen to Generate CCV Dynamically
5:35AM Mark Wilson | In the interest of thwarting credit card theft, Visa is testing some pretty interesting card technology with a handful of European banks. Using what appears to be Visa’s mutant hybrid of a credit card and a pocket calculator, users can enter their PIN into the card itself and have a security code generated on the fly. More »
Design
Math Lamp Requires You To Number Crunch For Light
5:30AM Adrian Covert | The arithmetic-challenged should avoid this lamp at all costs, because to turn it on, you’re required to correctly solve a math problem. From the looks of this Mingyu Jeung creation, problems appear to be of the simple add/subtract/multiply/divide variety, so you don’t need to be a math major to safely navigate your home. But if you’re really bad at math, look on the “bright” side—you’ll save a lot on your power bill! [Yanko Design] More »
Gadgets
Numbers Behind the War on Piracy Could Be Completely Bogus
2:30PM Gizmodo US Edition | Ars Technica did an in-depth investigation into the numbers behind the war against piracy and found that Congress might as well be telling people counterfeit goods cost the economy eleventy billion zillion, for all the truth behind its figures. The oft invoked $US250 billion and 750,000 jobs lost because of intellectual property theft have been repeated for over a decade, with virtually no research to back it up. More »
Science
1:34PM Nick Broughall | I knew there was a reason I didn’t become a mathematician! Researchers in the US have discovered a new prime number (that’s a number that can only be divided by itself and one, in case you forgot). It has a cool 13-million digits in it, and required the processing power of 75 laptops running XP to work out.
The number is way too long to write out, but can be notated as 2 to the power of 43,112,609 minus 1. Two seperate networks of computers have verified the number.
Even stranger than the fact people spend their time looking for Prime numbers is the fact that the researchers stand to win a $US100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a prime number with more than 10 million digits. I mean, why not, right? 100K for getting 75 computers to do some long division for you?
Actually now I’m wishing I was a mathematician. Damn.
[SMH] More »
Got 75 Spare PCs? Start Looking For 13-Million Digit Prime Numbers
1:34PM Nick Broughall | I knew there was a reason I didn’t become a mathematician! Researchers in the US have discovered a new prime number (that’s a number that can only be divided by itself and one, in case you forgot). It has a cool 13-million digits in it, and required the processing power of 75 laptops running XP to work out.
The number is way too long to write out, but can be notated as 2 to the power of 43,112,609 minus 1. Two seperate networks of computers have verified the number.
Even stranger than the fact people spend their time looking for Prime numbers is the fact that the researchers stand to win a $US100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a prime number with more than 10 million digits. I mean, why not, right? 100K for getting 75 computers to do some long division for you?
Actually now I’m wishing I was a mathematician. Damn.
[SMH] More »
Design
