Ric on Twitter

  • 10 September, 2012 - 10:55
    Any watch freaks out there? Time for some early Xmas shopping! http://t.co/kM5C8cyx
  • 25 July, 2012 - 10:14
    Have you kicked the tires on the Joomla 3 Alpha? If so, I'd love to know what you think.
  • 17 July, 2012 - 17:25
  • 17 July, 2012 - 16:18
    The Alpha release of the new Joomla! 3.0 is out now. The release is primarily intended for extension developers... http://t.co/eX31fk0o
  • 9 July, 2012 - 23:45
    My latest book is out: Joomla! Search Engine Optimization http://t.co/3lToGUhh #joomla #seo

Feed Roundup - The Essentials

Microsoft melds SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint

The Register - 19 min 26 sec ago
Local access still matters

Microsoft has released a new SkyDrive Pro client that offers users of Office 365 and SharePoint the chance to store files locally. The application is the heir to the My Site feature from previous incarnations of Office 365.…

Categories: The Essentials

Teens, Social Media, and Privacy

Slashdot - 41 min 31 sec ago
antdude writes "Pew Internet reports that: 'Teens are sharing more info about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past, but they are also taking a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information. Despite taking these privacy-protective actions, teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-parties (such as businesses or advertisers) accessing their data.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Categories: The Essentials

Yahoo! Oz! PAYS! Punters! Pittance! To! Search!

The Register - 51 min 26 sec ago
Toolbar tie-up with supermarket yields 50 cents a month

Yahoo!'s Australian outpost, a joint venture with the Seven Television Network dubbed Yahoo!7, has teamed with a local supermarket chain in a scheme that pays punters to use its search engine.…

Categories: The Essentials

AMD's three new low-power chips pose potent challenge to Intel

The Register - 1 hour 13 min ago
Is AMD (finally) getting it's groove back?

AMD is showing off its latest round of APUs – accelerated processing units that combine compute and graphics cores on the same slice o' silicon – that it hopes will be reinforcements in its battle for the consumer market against its main competitor, Intel, especially at the low-power end of the market.…

Categories: The Essentials

Social network bins Beijing's banned buzzwords

The Register - 1 hour 17 min ago
Japan's 'Line' scares international users by complying with Chinese law

Japanese Whatsapp-like service Line has come under uncomfortable scrutiny by international users after appearing to prepare self-censorship capabilities for its Chinese service Lian wo.…

Categories: The Essentials

Footy lovers hit in Wembley playoff card snatch scam

The Register - 1 hour 42 min ago
Man on - in the middle, claims club

Provider Ticket Zone is continuing a joint investigation with Brentford Football Club after it emerged that card details used to buy tickets for the League One playoff final last weekend were subsequently used for fraudulent purchases.…

Categories: The Essentials

Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" music video

Boing Boing - 2 hours 29 min ago

Somebody leaked the video for Daft Punk's "Get Lucky!" (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)    

Categories: The Essentials

Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist At the Same Time

Slashdot - 2 hours 45 min ago
sciencehabit writes "Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or 'state,' of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, says that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. 'It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Categories: The Essentials

Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist At the Same Time

Slashdot - 2 hours 45 min ago
sciencehabit writes "Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or 'state,' of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, says that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. 'It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Categories: The Essentials

Empathy explained by David Foster Wallace

Boing Boing - 23 May, 2013 - 11:38

UPDATE: "Vimeo has removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust claiming that this material is infringing: THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace."

Here's a beautifully made video accompaniment to "This is Water," an excerpt from a David Foster Wallace commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, in which Wallace exhorts his listeners to empathize with the people around them, using examples and languages so beautifully chosen that they just about break your heart.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (via Lifehacker)     

Categories: The Essentials

Fairphone goes on sale to all

The Register - 23 May, 2013 - 11:36
The Android handset that's PC can be yours

When is a phone PC? When it's a Fairphone, the smartphone “that puts social values first” and has a rather politically-correct (PC) attitude.…

Categories: The Essentials

SCADA security is better and worse than we think

The Register - 23 May, 2013 - 11:08
'Kill chains' are long and attack-stopping weak links are many

AUSCERT 2013 First the good news: for all the known vulnerabilities that exist in the SCADA world, exploiting them in a way that can actually “shut down a power plant” is harder than most people (particularly including media) realise.…

Categories: The Essentials

RIAA losing money, firing employees, giving execs raises

Boing Boing - 23 May, 2013 - 11:00


The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization's precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises):

The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today.

The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives. RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591.

...The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years. In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group.

Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such.

RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]     

Categories: The Essentials

Masturbation 'at the root of culture wars'

Boing Boing - 23 May, 2013 - 10:42

The Atlantic's Hugo Schwyzer has a theory: that masturbation, as the most common sex act, is the heart of modernity's war between Christianity and secularism.

Many progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia's blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality" might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.    

Categories: The Essentials

Herschel Space Observatory spots galaxies merging

The Register - 23 May, 2013 - 10:30
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away

VIDEO The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory has beamed home pictures of two galaxies inexorably moving towards each other and boffins offered simulations of what happens next.…

Categories: The Essentials

Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange

Boing Boing - 23 May, 2013 - 10:23
An advertising agency is suing the creators of Cartoon Network's The Annoying Orange, accusing them of ripping off a character, The Talking Orange, that they created for a 2005 public information ad. [Mercury News]    

Categories: The Essentials

Missile Test Creates Huge Expanding Halo of Light Over Hawaii

Slashdot - 23 May, 2013 - 10:06
The Bad Astronomer writes "A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Categories: The Essentials

Ctl-P for pizza

The Register - 23 May, 2013 - 09:57
NASA dials up dollars to invent 3D printing for astronaut food

A small company in Austin, Texas, has received a $US125,000 grant from NASA to develop 3D printed food for astronauts.…

Categories: The Essentials

Anatomical pinball table

Boing Boing - 23 May, 2013 - 09:44


Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:

The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.

I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.

“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”

Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]

(via Kadrey)     

Categories: The Essentials

Report: China IP theft now equal in value to US exports to Asia

The Register - 23 May, 2013 - 09:33
Stricter security testing, sanctions and legal counterhacking needed

China is responsible up to 80 per cent of US intellectual property theft, which a government report has estimated accounts for $300bn in lost exports, roughly the equivalent of the current American trade balance with Asia.…

Categories: The Essentials
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