The end of TV.

Today CTV (a big Canadian TV station) announced that they will lose $100 million this year, and write down their assets by $1.7 billlion, 3/4 of their previously-listed value. They also announced "Since we now lose significant amounts of money in conventional television, it is clear that our company would be in a better financial position if we closed our conventional television operations.", though they aren't planning (yet) to do that.

We are witnessing the beginning of the end of TV (but we are witnessing it on the Web).

We are #1!

"In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked the Canadian banking system as the healthiest in the world. America was ranked 40th, Britain 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalised and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the fifteenth largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn't grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the
past fifteen years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers."

Fareed Zakaria/ Newsweek

Tribal Wars

Tribal Wars is a boring real-time game that requires a hole lot of free time to be completely wasted but some do not share that opinion. Photo here.

IBM Roadrunner

The fastest computer on earth... at a peak of 1.7 petaflops the processing power of about 1000 PCs.

Great DNA visualization

Our interesting times

Noby Noby Boy Gameplay Video Compilation

Now that I can see it being played, the game still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

IYA Sites 2009 and Darwin

International Year of Astronomy sites: Parteners: NASA, Astro League and AAVSO. Finally the interesting evolution site: Evolution: Darwin

Grow version 3.0 is out

Click the image to play.

Geek celebration

The Internet is abuzz with the very exciting news that the Unix operating system will soon turn 1234567890 seconds old (to be exact, that is what the Unix operating system clock will say: it counts seconds from midnight of January 1, 1970, Greenwich Meantime, not counting leap seconds). Here in Mountain Standard time the happy event will take place this Friday February 13 at 16:31:30. Celebrate!

The pictured t-shirt recognizes the fact that the end of Unix Time will occur on January 19, 2038 03:14:07 GMT. One second later, any computers that still represent Unix Time using 32 bits (if there are any by then) will overflow (see Year 2038 problem).

Most computers these days are 64-bit computers, which won't overflow for about 290 billion years.

The Prime Number Shitting Bear

I don't really know what to make of this bear emitting prime numbers from his behind (though I note that I was fascinated enough to consider the matter until he got to 1301). The Internet can be a very odd place.

The World's Most Expensive and Useless Things

The World's Most Expensive and Useless Things, like this $25,000 GameBoy. The $30 million bikini is NSFW.

Cool drawing program

MyOats is a cool on-line drawing program.

M of the M

Mario of the month for February. Photo here.

Top 50 sites of 2008

Top 50 sites of 2008 overall has a good opinion of sites. Photo here.