iWiW around the world · 2 November 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Altought I dislike iWiW (the oldest/bigest hungarian social network), because of the quality, but this initiate looks promising.
Origo is a news site (with the same owners as iWiW) publicating interviews with iWiW registered users living outside Hungary. They tell what they like or dislike in their new country.
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China Radio International · 4 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
CRI has been founded in order to populate chinese culture among non speakers of the language. They operate broadcasts in several languages.
More interesting to me is that they have a Hungarian channel. This has been featured on Index.hu (hungarian only). The footage reveals that the crew has hardly any native speaking personnel, but more local universities do offer Hungarian studies – which is loved among students – thus the number of speakers increases every year.
I had listened to the latest broadcast, and it is not bad at all. Funny at some parts, but mostly understandable for a hungarian listener.
Now they plan to buy broadcast time in Hungary.
Legacy of Voyager · 14 September 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Some days ago a Seven Wonders of the IT World article was posted, where Voyager 1 was named as ‘Computer farthest from Earth’. This started an interestin browsing for me.
Looking at the Voyager FAQ reveals a lot of interesting stories. Some are:
- when the satellite reached the border of our solar system, the cameras were turned back and captured the first pictures how it looks like from outside
- the data about the earth which is contained on golden phonograph records was released as a book and on cdrom too. see Carl Sagan: Murmurs of Earth
- part of the original team was frightened about sending so much information about us on the discs out there, however we are already giving life signs with the pollution our satellites create
and the most relevant part:
There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
Computer Command System (CCS) – 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.
Flight Data System (FDS) – 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each.
Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) – 16-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.
According to my calulations, that’s a total of about 541KB, or small potatoes compared to today’s microprocessors.
(Well, I think that is only ~541 kilobits or 66 kilobytes)
CC Books: 55 Ways · 10 November 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
After a quick look again on the Creative Commons site I took the time for browsing the Books wiki section. This page collects CC licensed books.
A book I found interesting – thus downloaded it instatly – was 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google written by Philipp Lenssen. It is the guy who runs the Google Blogoscoped blog and has written 220 pages of quirks, tips and fun stuff about the search engine.
Copyright absurdum · 12 June 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
In the past you could go to a library and read, borrow or copy any book. Today you’d get arrested for mere telling someone where the library is.
– Michael Niedermayer
Michael is/was an MPlayer developer, but does FFmpeg maintenance nowadays. He is a codec guru and explains things in his blog.