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350 Is The Upper Limit
"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted... CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
Jim Hansen, NASA

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2 Ten Minute Links

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a couple of great places to spend 10 minutes when you’re looking for something new on the net. Science, history and just plain fun are only a click away.

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A Little History, Loads Of Fun

I’ve been spending a little time over at the National Science Foundation’s website, and I found a interactive piece called ‘NSF and the Birth of the Internet’. With images and some well-written text, it allows you to trace the history of of what we now call the web, from the initial questions about connecting two computers together, to researching the next generation of the internet. Definitely worth taking a few minutes to check out.

I was especially interested in the second photo in the 70s section. That’s a Cray 1 supercomputer. (That’s it over on the right.) At the time it was about the fastest thing on the planet. Looking at it’s specs shows that most of us have more power than this on our desktops, and some of us have more on our phones. I liked it because it had a built-in couch. From their website:

The first Cray-1™ system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory. The Cray-1’s architecture reflected its designer’s penchant for bridging technical hurdles with revolutionary ideas. In order to increase the speed of this system, the Cray-1 had a unique “C” shape which enabled integrated circuits to be closer together. No wire in the system was more than four feet long. To handle the intense heat generated by the computer, Cray developed an innovative refrigeration system using Freon.

Playcrafter

Another cool site I found (through GigaOm) is Playcrafter, where you can build your own games…

I started to write a short thing about how to use their site, but they’ve already done a much better job by creating this really short (less than 2 mins) video.

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- Jon, hoping you like the links.

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August 28th, 2008 Posted by Jon | Fun Stuff, The Net | 3 comments

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Kaminsky’s DNS Repair Video

Image via WikipediaDan Kaminsky

Regular readers at Wordout will probably not recognize that name. For the last several years, Dan has spent his time doing security analysis for some really big firms. He’s good.

As a matter of fact, he’s world-class good. A couple of months ago he discovered a vulnerability in the Domain Name System which, if I understand it correctly, could have been used to exploit practically every computer on the internet, regardless of operating system or browser. It was a seriously big hole.

Thankfully, Dan is one of the good guys. He worked with engineers from around the world to fix the problem. Then he did something really neat. He posted this video on his site DoxPara Research, showing the repair progress worldwide. Want to see what it looks like when the internet backbone gets fixed? Check it out… here’s the color key:

Red — Unpatched
Yellow — Patched, but the NAT is screwing things up
Green — OK

I just think that’s one of the coolest videos I’ve seen on the web.

I am Jon, and thanks to Dan, my DNS is just fine.

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August 7th, 2008 Posted by Jon | The Net | Leave a Comment

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Help I Need Help

Are You Bored?

Everyone needs a little help from time to time. At least, that’s what it says over at Help I Need Help dot com. These guys are a new startup company which aims to supply light first aid products on the web. Two reasons why I like these guys:

1. Their ethics statement.
Basically, they’ve put in writing a commitment to be good people, and create a good company. Their first statement is this: “Everything we do should actually help people.”

2. Their humor.
That link takes you their “bored” page. If you don’t click another today, click that one.

And that’s about it for this post. Just a neat little out of the way place on the web I thought you might like.

I am Jon, and I am bored alot.

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June 9th, 2008 Posted by Jon | Fun Stuff, The Net, The Net | Leave a Comment

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