Azo Tintinnabulum

Azo - relating to or containing the azo radical

Tintinnabulum - a bell, especially a small tinkling on

Azo radical - The bivalent group -N=N- united to two hydrocarbon groups

Aha, I've moved on from biology words to biochemistry! I guess that's a moderate improvement, though it makes sense that many obscure words happen to be science-related: I would imagine that, unless you are a scientist who specializes in observing reactive radical oxygen species, you probably wouldn't use the adjective azo very much. Anyway, today I decided to talk about techy stuff I read about in the last day or two (I forget if I read it all after last midnight or not), so... happy reading?

Netscape Navigator

On February first, Netscape is officially retiring. I guess there's not much to say about it that's not in the article here, but I had almost forgotten about Netscape once Firefox came around, so seeing this article reminded me of my pre-tabbing web-surfing experiences. Speaking of which, according to the article, 80% of people that surf the web today use IE, yet only two thirds of people who visit saddening goat do, as the others use firefox, which is good! If more want to convert to the light/dark (whichever is better) side, they should click here.

Nintendo WiFi

Apparently some researchers at Indiana university did a study where they found that hacking into a Nintendo (specifically Wii's) WiFi network is surprisingly easy, because it still uses WEP encoding instead of WPA or even WEP + MAC. Considering many people send their credit card numbers through Nintendo WiFi networks each day to buy virtual console games on their Wiis, I think that this is a bit stupid. More importantly, however, I find it very dumb that researchers in Indiana would bother making a study like this. There was an article the other day in the Globe about stupid research that has been done recently, and it lead me to think that if people didn't bother doing useless things, we could already be cloning each other, or something equally as advanced and cool. I forget what day the article was written, and I can't really remember most of the studies it talked about (I only remember important things) but one that I do remember, which must have been the most memorable, was that a group of researchers at California state University did a study to find that people, while under the age of 15, are much less likely to crash cars than when they are over the age of 15. I would never have guessed that...

News in the OS war

Some guy at ZDNet looked at the number of security flaws in vista, XP, and Max OS X for the past year, and decided that they look something like this:

Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007
	XP	Vista	XP + Vista	Mac OS X
Total extremely critical	3	1	4	0
Total highly critical	19	12	23	234
Total moderately critical	2	1	3	2
Total less critical	3	1	4	7
Total flaws	34	20	44	243
Average flaws per month	2.83	1.67	3.67	20.25

(yes, 34 + 20 != 44, but the XP + Vista number doesn't count the flaws that both XP and Vista had twice)

I somewhat doubt that Mac OS X actually had that many more flaws than Windows did (I think the guy who did the study was fairly biased) but he also pointed out in his analysis that:

"Also noteworthy is that while Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren’t present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it’s something I am glad I don’t use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista."

Now I have one more reason to add to my list of reasons that I dislike Vista! By the way, the article can be found here.

Batman

The sequel to the new Batman Begins, called The Dark Knight, is coming to theaters the 18th of July (this is actually old news, but I didn't realize it until today)! I thought the first one was even better than the first Spiderman movie, even though I prefer Spiderman to Batman, so it must have been pretty good. Here's a trailer for it, which looks pretty cool too:




Geek Test

For fun, I took the geek test, and, very surprisingly, scored "Major Geek" on it (36.12229%). I think that the quiz may not be entirely accurate, since, for instance, reading the Lord of the Rings once probably added about 1% to my score on its own, and I don't think I'm too geeky just for having read it. There were also a few things there that I didn't know were characteristic of geeks, like "I like to watch public access TV." Oh well.

I didn't come up with any logic puzzles today, partly because I doubt anyone has solved the last three, but mostly because I was busy playing a 7-hour game of RISK. If you have solved all three of the previous puzzles, say so in a comment or something, and maybe I'll come up with another one. If you're really bored, try this. A plus tard