Webonaut

Facebook is close to jumping the shark. IMO it is where MySpace was it '05 and steaming towards it's own doom. Why? Two things... 1. The cool kids will shortly not be thinking that hanging out with their parents (or other dweebs) is what they want to do, and fickle, shallow scenesters want exclusivity - or at least to be PART OF an exclusive group 2. People naturally have (in these days at any rate) multiple, fractured groups of real-life friends - and have a persona with each of these groups that is inherently different. You have your parents on Facebook and suddenly you don't want to post pictures of your night out; or tell your work-colleagues what you get up to, etc. Whichever service comes up with a slick way of offering these multiple personalities will be next to take up the batton - (so long as they are also cool to fulfil 1. and drive the early adopters)

Not a great deal of thought seems to have been expended about what the wider effect will be when hard-drives, SSDs, Processors etc reach their natural limits. Our storage devices go up in density (according to Moore's law still?) and our processors accelerate because with each new cycle they are further miniaturised - packing more TB in and reducing the distance travelled by electrons round a circuit. So what happens when they reach the molecular level? I'm thinking of two things here - 1. Whether or not a theoretical physical barrier exists and 2. If it does, what are the implications for human progress, the economy, society as a whole. 1. Is There A Physical Limit To The Speed & Storage of Computers? - At first glance, you would have thought that things cannot be miniaturised past the atomic level. This may be true - or can smaller sub-particles support computation? - Will there be work-arounds - for example Quantum Computing taking over from traditional Von-Neumann CPU a

After some considerable mucking about, I've cracked a particularly annoying and not much documented issue with sending HTML e-mails (in my case via PHP, but applies to any sendmail system) to Outlook Express / Windows Mail boxes. It's all to do with the headers - and specifically what characters you use to escape them. ALL lines should end with a \r\n escape sequence EXCEPT the MIME-Version: 1.0 which should be ONLY \n. Got it? This PHP works (certainly from a *nix server): ini_set("sendmail_from", $fromAddr); $headers=""; $headers.="From: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="Reply-To: ".$fromAddr."\r\n"; $headers .="Cc: ".$ccAddr."\r\n"; $headers.="MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; /* v.important NOT to put \r\n at the end as Outlook ends up escaping the WHOLE header */ $headers.="Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n"; $headers.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit;\r\

This is amazing : http://www.ted.com/talks/carter_emmart_demos_a_3d_atlas_of_the_universe.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-07-06&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email I love anything that takes a complex subject matter and makes it simple to understand without removing that complexity. It's a trick to "Add Simplicity" but these guys have done it, and I admire and aspire to that.