Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 13, 2005 by CyberNet.

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100 kilowatts of piercing light isn’t something to sneeze at, even fired for just a few seconds, but Northrup Grumman’s long-awaited weapons-grade laser recently ran for a full six hours. That milestone is the feather in the company’s cap as it prepares to ship the hulking machine to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where it will presumably begin doing what it does best — turning things into crispier, more exploded versions of themselves in no time flat. PR after the break.

Update: Though we originally read this to mean that the potent ray fired for six hours straight, Northrup Grumman has since informed us that’s not quite the case. “The correct info is that the 100kw solid-state laser has operated for a total of 60 minutes over a period of months as we continued refining it and preparing it for relocation to White Sands Missile Range,” said a company rep, who promised to explain the nuances of military-grade lasing on Monday. We’ll let you know what we hear.

Continue reading Northrop Grumman’s 100 kilowatt laser fired for six hours (update)

Northrop Grumman’s 100 kilowatt laser fired for six hours (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

A few days ago big news hit that Microsoft wants to help Open Source developers, such as Mozilla, make their applications compatible with Vista. It looks like the Microsoft Open Source team had troubles contacting Mozilla through email so they decided to use the Mozilla Developer’s thread in Google Groups instead. Now we all get to see it.

The Open Source Software Lab Director at Microsoft, Sam Ramji, started off the message in a wonderful way:

I sent this invitation to s…@mozilla.org as well, but in case their
spam filters are set to block @microsoft.com email addresses, I’m
posting here.

Mike Beltzner, the User Experience Leader for Firefox, responded by saying “Heh, no such blocking exists, I assure you.” That was the more amusing part of the ‘conversation’ so let’s move on to the interesting stuff.

Beltzner then goes on to respond to the invitation that Microsoft has offered:

As Mike Schroepfer indicated, I think we’re already in discussion with
someone on your team about this, but for the record: yes, we’d
definitely be interested in getting some 1:1 support. We have, of
course, been testing on Vista, and Rob Strong has done some work with
Ed Averett to ensure that we take advantage of the new “Default
Program” infrastructure.

Ah ha! The answer to the article I wrote about two weeks ago now arises. It was quite a heated topic and I was hoping that it was something Mozilla had to fix. I guess it is and hopefully I will soon be able to ‘easily’ set Firefox as my default browser in Vista.

A few other areas that Beltzner said they would like to integrate Firefox and Thunderbird into Vista:

– effects of running in the new application security mode
– interacting/integrating with InfoCard
– integration with the common RSS data store and services
– integration with the Vista calendar and address book

Hey, the more stuff that Firefox and Thunderbird are compatible with the more people that will use it, hopefully. Beltzner is a pretty cool guy and was nice enough to ask whether other open source groups that are based on Firefox, such as Flock, could get an open spot to for some help from the Microsoft product team developers.

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This article was written on January 28, 2009 by CyberNet.

The odds are pretty good that you’ve come across the Experts Exchange site while trying to troubleshoot some sort of problem. You probably got frustrated when you noticed that the question being asked was visible, but you couldn’t find the answers without registering first. That may not be a big deal if registering was free, but they actually charge $13 a month to get an account.

The good news is that you don’t have to pay just to see the answers. Experts Exchange obviously wants search engines to be able to see both the question and answers so that they can get a better ranking. Google, for example, forbids that a site show different content to their crawler than what the user sees. So Experts Exchange had to figure out a workaround.

What they ended up doing is checking to see if a user is coming from a search engine like Google using referrer information provided by your browser. If that’s the case the solutions are indeed displayed on the page, but you just have to scroll all the way down to see them. Here’s what I’m talking about…

You’ll see the question just as you’d expect:

If you scroll a little farther you should see the hidden answers/solutions, followed by a long list of categories:

After you scroll past the categories you should see all of the answers/solutions:

Now there’s a catch. If you try linking directly to an article you won’t see the solutions. Experts Exchange is specifically looking for the referral information in your browser to ensure that you’re coming from a search engine. That’s why this will work if you click the first link in these Google search results, but won’t if you try to jump directly to the article by clicking this link. Similarly this won’t work if your browser is set to hide the referrer information from websites.

So there you have it. You can view the answers from Experts Exchange without needing to register, and you don’t have to try to use a cached version of the page.

Thanks to Michael and Cory for giving me the idea to write this article!

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Switched On presents a short quiz to determine your content-delivery personality.

It’s most important that my on-demand entertainment:
a) is easy and accessible
b) is not blocked
c) is available at the optimum bitrate
d) offers a new navigation paradigm
e) advances the species

The place I usually find entertainment is:
a) the cloud
b) my PC
c) the NAS connected to my TV
d) the long tail of the Web
e) Madagascar

Continue reading Switched On: Which connected TV box are you?

Switched On: Which connected TV box are you? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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