Black Hole Sun

When I heard that these guys are working towards Armageddon, I thought the media had gone off on another wild tangent of ludicrousness. After reading this report about how CERN is using LHC to create the densest material in the universe (that's QGP, duh!) after black holes, I heard a distinctly ominous ring of truth.

Quark-Gluon Plasma is a kind of "soup" (seriously, it's called soup) of quarks and gluons which can exist only at unearthly pressure and temperatures, something like 4 trillion degrees Celsius. 4 trillion is more zeroes at the end of the string than I can count. I tried and I gave up. This is the kind of Fringe Science that caused Walter to mess up Walternate's universe...
Meanwhile, here's another Black Hole Sun by an awesome guitarist:

Anti-Bore rating: 3/5 Quarks

3 MILLION Pre-Orders, A change of history and 6 weeks of downtime

3 Million Pre-Orders!
Samsung Galaxy S II at 3 MILLION Pre-Orders | Android Community

I don't know what Samsung did right (or wrong) but to say that they under-estimated the demand would be an under-statement. For a handset they predicted to sell 10 million units of in a year, getting 3 million pre-orders is something of an overkill. I'm guessing that some sales managers are popping the cork this entire month. Probably taking a bath in it.

Woe to the market forecast people though ;)

A Change of History

In other news, a bunch of idiots did this: Hillary Clinton Photoshopped

Not on your best day can you justify this. This is actually trying to change history. I am not concerned about whether they were trying to prevent "sexually suggestive" images of women appearing on a mass publication. What I am concerned about is the fact that whoever does follow this crap would forever be under the impression that women don't make world-changing decisions. How would they ever know that women have come a long way from the biblical times. In fact, they were already there if you consider Deborah, the first woman judge of Israel.

I'd love to see how they handle the headline when America gets her first POTUS (President of the US, for u neophytes who haven't stampeded to the nearest bookstore to pick up Tom Clancy's books after the recent Osama operation).

6 weeks of downtime

And the last bit of news which really pisses me off: SONY PSN to come up by May 31st

It'll take 6 weeks for PSN to come online. 6 weeks! By the time I am able to go online and head-to-head against my friends in Battlefield Bad Company 2, I'll be a bloody noob! It'll take me a week to get back to "headshots only" form. But leave that aside, I still have two burning questions:

1. What did the hackers do to bring PSN down for six weeks? If they can do it to PSN, there are way more critical systems which can be brought down like it.

2. How is Sony handling the loss of revenue? That's an estimated $20 million of revenue, from just one attack (Cost of Sony PSN downtime)

Services like MS Xbox Live, WoW, or even non-gaming one's like Amazon MP3 and online Magazines better sit up and take a look at how vulnerable they are. Cos I don't thint Sony would have had to shell out $20MM for protecting their system, but they sure did lose it for not protecting it.

Aamasutra

Am I the only one who sees how they are blatantly portraying oral sex in this ad (Rasiya, wink wink)?If you think I'm being paranoid, see the clip at around 0:30, in black and white.


I just wonder which marketing guru came up with this. Were they trying to separate the customer segment from Maaza which clearly targets the family and kids segment? Is Slice trying to tap into the "latent sexual desires" of the urban youth? Or simply put, what the hell were these guys smoking?

Slice is a great drink. I prefer it over Maaza anytime. However every time I look a Katrina doing various weird things to that mango which no normal woman would do, I am left with this slight feeling of having witnessed something dirty. Which oft puts me off Slice. Go figure.

Wierdness rating: 5/5 Mangifera

Rotten Apples

I just read this article: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-responds-to-location-scandal-2011-4

The "official response" from Apple really pisses me off. I am constantly amazed by their audacity to think that the consumers are a bunch of nit-wits.
"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so".

Is that way people have been creating maps of their location history based of location data gleaned from their iphones?

And what about the reports where people noticed their iphone taking anonymous candid photos?

"Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date"
Users are confused? The only ones confused are the marketing boffins at Apple. When addressing a public issue, you don't go about calling your customers confused. Users were the ones who pointed this out in the first place. And if this is an official statement, why is Apple dragging in the other "creators" of this technology?

"anonymous and encrypted" -bullshit.
"This is a bug" - more bullshit.

I am an Android fan. I am waiting to see how google addresses this issue (even though they don't track your location info if you opt out of it). Probably cos they didn't "build" a bug into their OS.

Rotten rating: 3/5 Anti-iPhones

Source Code - The Movie

Source Code got some rave reviews and I have to check it out. I have to admit the first part of the movie was filled with bouncers. Eight minute long bouncers to be precise.

That said the premise of the movie is brilliant. The science behind it is ridiculous to say the least and they could have come up with something better than "source code" to explain the theory. However what they did was to completely ignore explanations and jump into the thick of things right from the start. Which is good because the result was a meticulously planned technological thriller.

I do lament the fact that Hollywood sometimes does not follow the Bollywood formula of creating 3 hour movies cos this movie could have been fleshed out a bit. And the fact that the movie has no foreground or background is glaringly evident.

It's still a good watch though. Do check it out.