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Go Download It! Just so you know, you need a beefy machine. show requirements - PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
- 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
- 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance
- 1 GB of available hard disk space; 10 GB recommended for off-line features and higher performance browsing
- XGA (1024 x 768) or higher resolution monitor
- Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing and scrolling device
- Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
- Microsoft® DirectX® version 9.0c or later and .NET Framework 2.0 or later
- Required for some features; Internet connection at 56 Kbps or higher through either an Internet service provider (ISP) or a network. Internet access might require a separate fee to an ISP; local or long-distance telephone charges might also apply
hide requirements But OMG is it cool. I'll play with it over the next day or two and let you all know what I think. But here are some brief observations. 1. it's REAL time. The planets move. 2. It's very very smooth. 3. The UI is incredibly intuitive. Here is a little guided tour for you of a simple zoom in to Saturn. We start out fully zoomed out and looking at the constellation Leo in the center. 
In we go, we see Regulus come into focus, one of the key stars of Leo. 37 Leonis is the second brightest in the middle top third of the picture. 
Further in still too close now and Regulus has moved off the screen. 37 Leonis is just out of the picture above the center. 
And now you can make out Saturn finally. 
And there she is. 
This little experience in and of itself was enjoyable. This makes me want to go out and buy a machine for this software only. This is a compelling reason to upgrade your system.
Just type in a zip code number by number and watch it drive down to the specific location on the map. [linky] Example: 90210 
The black part in the middle of the picture is the Pipe Nebula. It is not a dark window into the background, but a foreground BLACK cloud of dust. Info here: panther observatory
At first you may think Clay Shirky is stretching the analogy between the industrial revolution and the interactive computer experience of the 21st century, commonly called Web 2.0. But as he continues and fleshes out his argument in the second half of the video, and especially the example of the 4 year old, I flipped my interpretation and thought the industrial revolution example may still be the wrong analogy, but because it is not STRONG enough.
if the video doesn't show, right click and click on play in the context menu. A couple of key quotes: On comparing WOW and Gilligan's Island:
"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." Television is the "heat-sink" of cognitive surplus:
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation." Another quote:
"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into." You can read the whole text at his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus ht: Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus
From RFC 2606, and I quote: There is a need for top level domain (TLD) names that can be used for creating names which, without fear of conflicts with current or future actual TLD names in the global DNS, can be used for private testing of existing DNS related code, examples in documentation, DNS related experimentation, invalid DNS names, or other similar uses. There are four such domain names set aside that are un-claimable by anyone. One of them is obvious: .test.com [.org, .net, etc] But there are three more: reveal .test
.example
.invalid
.localhost
".test" is recommended for use in testing of current or new DNS related code. ".example" is recommended for use in documentation or as examples. ".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a glance are invalid. The ".localhost" TLD has traditionally been statically defined in host DNS implementations as having an A record pointing to the loop back IP address and is reserved for such use. Any other use would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use. link: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt close up
It's a good list. But let's take one category for instance. Publishing:
They list 10 entries ranging from Picassa to WordPress. The two problems with this list (and the rest of the categories) is that some are there due to size and first mover status (eg. blogger) and some are missing even though they might have superior flexibility and functionality (eg. typepad or blogEngine dotNet). And with this list of 100, how in the heck is anyone supposed to make a decent evaluation of even one category. I mean you should spend some decent amount of time fiddling with the app. Could be hours or it could be days depending on the use. So you'll end up using the app with a network effect in place or the one that is "coolest" but maybe sub-optimal. Still...good list.
 Look! In the Sky. It’s a Rocket Racer.
eh...what? It wasn't you? Oh it must of been one of the other many daredevil astronaut/test-pilot types that read the rivet. It's one of our core demographics you know...the astronaut. Racers in rocket-powered aircraft will fly four laps around a five-mile “track” at anywhere from 150 feet to 1,500 feet above the ground. The planes, designed to fly at 340 miles an hour, will start side by side, two at a time. The pilots include professional test pilots who received their training in the military and a former astronaut. This is a great idea... Red Bull Air Race already has a competition with acrobatic prop planes. I guess that isn't hairy enough. I mean 240+ miles an hour, doing flips and stuff...not enough. Add rockets. Race 'em together. 50% faster. 100% louder. 100% more dangerous...what's not to like.
 Case in point.
In our research for ever more interesting facts and factoids to keep techRivet's vast readership entertained we dug up this little gem. »»» Pretty cool huh. Apparently the graphic is from Esquire magazine from a few years ago. This is pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. - I've done something similar to this as a child. My friends and I used to catch bumble bees and tie them to a string and go around with them flying on a leash. It's pretty cool.
- At one point we had a pet spider. Not one of the fancy dancy store bought models but one like this:
 Well she lived for more than two years in a little terrerium and we fed her spiders that we had at first frozen and then dropped inside her cage where they woke up and were eaten. It was gruesome and my daughter, the bug collector, thought it was awesome.
- Oh I've also taught my nephews how to catch and "fly" your own bees.
So I wanted to see if there was a more definitive site out there regarding how to freeze and fly your own flies or bees. Low and behold there is:
Flypower - These guys want to sell you a kit. ... I have some extra space down here... ... How ya doin? <whistle> Ok...good to see you to...um...talk to you later.
 So I found this link out there on the fabulous intertubes. Teh r0><or (that's translated into "the roxor", [that translates one layer further into "That Rocks!"]). But I digress...where was I again?
Oh yeah space shuttle. Well being the proud owner of a 3rd grader and a 1st grader the first section of the document regarding the Space Shuttle that I drilled into was the how-do-they-go-to-the-bathroom section: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/sts-eclss-wcl.html#sts-eclss-wcs You're welcome. You can go over the rest of the document here: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/ heh: Ironically named software platform upon which to build your Shuttle OS - The software programs are written in HAL/S (high-order assembly language/shuttle) especially developed for real-time space flight applications.
I saw this episode on Top Gear (which is an awesome show BTW) wherein they raced a Bugatti Veyron against a Euro-fighter. The fighter jet had to go 1 mile vertical and back and the Bugatti had to go 1 mile horizontal and back. Well here is a home video of the event. Pretty cool. Oh alright, here's the original:
This is a great chart showing the different energy transfers that occur in the universe. From the smallest wiggle of a photon to all the energy expended since ever in the whole Universe... http://www.circlon-theory.com/HTML/joules.html 
Some notable items on the chart: - 2.6845 * 106 - One horsepower per hour
- 1013 - Titanic fall to the bottom
- 1048 - yearly output of the Milky Way
The folks over at Dolores Blog have put together a dataset of Wisdom-of-Crowd named colors. Essentially asking what the people out on the intertubes would name each color. 
They have also create a tool into which you can enter a descriptive word and which then returns the colors that are correspondingly titled. Kinda neat. Try It! ...umm that's it, if you were looking for more...well... ooooooh look kittens: 
We did this in a marketing class for my MBA last fall. It is pretty neat. I can tell you that you will fail and you can do nothing about it. We'll talk about it in the comments.
Are you a fan of James Bond? Yeah me too. Do you dig the scene "The Spy Who Loved Me", where bond and lovely agent "triple-x" take their lotus and drive it right off the dock into the water and it becomes a submersible? Yeah me too. (even when dubbed in Italian) Well Rinspeed has made a concept car submersible out of a Lotus Elise.
 eh...so I think I might have mentioned in passing here once or twice that I'm a geek. So don't say you haven't been warned.
Here is a PDF of a Ringworld model. Just download, print and assemble. Isn't this just cool. It so deserves to be built and hung from your ceiling. [do it, ignore your wife, she told me she digs geeks, trust me.] Download this link and print this.
Well naturally if we have the International "Talk Like a Pirate Day" then obviously we need the "Annual Day of the Ninja". December 5th is the Day of the Ninja. Plague your co-workers with ninja-ness and wear a ninja mask to work! Got the day off? Run wild in the streets, or dress like a ninja at the mall! Just show the world that YOU ARE NINJA! December 5 - Annual Day of the Ninja Now go flip out and wail on guitars!! Be Awesome!!
Man it's cool. Could we make fully functional mechanical beasts? I mean think about it. We just need to design a way for it to search for a power source to get energy. A way to syphon said electricity. The procreation thing is the hard part. Air Ray PDF Air_ray is a remote-controlled hybrid construction comprising
a helium-filled ballonett and a flapping-wing drive mechanism. The
ballonett is a gastight bladder of aluminium-vaporised “PET foil”
with a specific mass of 22 g/qm; it can be filled with up to 1.6 cbm
of helium. Since 1 cbm of helium generates approx.1 kg weight of
buoyant force, Air_ray’s overall mass must not exceed 1.6 kg. Air has a density of 0.0012 kg/m3 at 20° Celsius at sea level;
by comparison, the density of water is about 1 kg/dcm3. In the
design of Air_ray, the difference in density between these two
media necessitates an extremely light construction. This enables
Air_ray to almost hover in the air by means of the buoyant force
of the helium ballonet, floating through a sea of air just as the
Manta_ray does in water.
The propulsion is effected by a flapping-wing mechanism. The
wing module, which can be moved up and down by a servo drive
unit, has a structure like that of the tail fins of many fish. This
structure consists of two alternating pressure and tension flanks
flexibly connected by ribs.
Cool I'm not sure why they made it...except it's cool.
So I found this little trick over here --> http://www3.webng.com/redtophank/cit.html But here it is for you: Crazy Cool Internet Trick!
by Justin Benton Try this crazy cool internet trick in your browser!  Go to Google images. Search whatever you want. Then copy/paste this code in your internet address bar: javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5 ); void(0) Hit enter. Crazy, huh? Hit refresh over and over to make it go faster. It also works on the main Google images page, as well as many other web sites if you just look around! To see the YouTube video of this being done, simply Click here. Enjoy! it's safe...I've checked it out. What it does is 1. sets up an algorithm for moving pictures using cosign and sign for circular'ish positioning. 2. Then it goes and finds all the images on the page. 3. Then it changes their positioning to be absolute instead of just in the flow of the page. 4. Then it makes them fly around the page. neato. pointless but fun.
You know it. So I previously pointed to this: [The Best Rube Goldberg Machine] as the best Rube Goldberg machine. That may be...for amateurs, but this commercial by Guiness is awesome. Too bad it is not a TRUE Rube Goldberg machine. There were many sequences spliced together. The advert took a week to film, with some of the sequences having to be reshot up to 15 times. New Guiness Advert: Giant domino village Still it's a fun commercial.
-bump- -bump again-
vote here
We here at the palatial headquarters of techRivet.com would like to thank the academy and all the little people. the 2007 weblog awards: Finalists Announced This is an honor that proves the old maxim of "Vote early and vote often"...I mean "the cream will rise to the top."
Some people really need to get a life. So there are a tonne of Rube Goldberg machine videos out on the web, some quite good some mediocre. The most famous one is the Honda commercial where every part of the car becomes part of the contraption. This one is exemplary. It may not be the best...but it is dang close.
Check this out. Very cool flash simulator of the Solar System. 
heh...heh heh... ... ... ... heh
You tell me...This is WAY cooler than suicide doors, butterfly doors, canvas doors and any other car door I've seen. But don't you take one look at it and think: Man there's a lot of things that could break with that.
Then I start thinking about safety.
Then about the side window, I bet you'd break a few of those.
But it is dang cool.
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