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Posted on

Airbus A380 to be unveiled on Jan 18

Witness the unveiling live: Airbus A380, the largest airliner in the history of civil aviation!

Hopefully, it’s not as underpowered as the A340-300.. a quick’n’dirty calculation:

A340-300: 4*15400(17000)/275000 = 0.224 (0.247)
A380-800: 4*35000/560000 = 0.25

(ratio = total maximum kg thrust per kg MTOW)

Oops :/

(Addendum: Please note that
i) The Antonov An-225 is still the largest airplane on earth: length 84.0 m, wingspan: 88.4 m, MTOW: 600’000 kg
ii) “Underpowering” an aircraft is usually done on purpose for the sake of cheaper operation and better pollution control.
)

[Update 20040118: Oh. Did live streaming work for you? For me, it didn’t. In compensation I was promoted to “A380 fleet captain” as I had 15 correct answers in a quiz of 14 questions.. I feel sooo flattered ;))

]

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Interesting topics at 21C3

This list is merely a pointer for myself. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the many VJ-related topics at 21C3 – hence I’m at home instead of attending 21C3: The Usual Suspects (BTW funny iPod advertisement spoof – Apple’s marketing division obviously hit the bull’s eye once again ;). At least I can cure my sore throat now ;)

21C3: Anti-Honeypot Technology
21C3: AVG ain’t vector graphics
21C3: Biometrie Überwinden
21C3: Black Ops of DNS
21C3: Bluetooth Hacking
21C3: Ciphire Mail
21C3: Cored Programming
21C3: Internet censorship in China
21C3: Introduction to 3DJ
21C3: Introduction to Cubensis
21C3: Introduction to ES-X
21C3: Introduction to Play
21C3: MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday
21C3: Mixing VJing and Post-Production
21C3: Natural Language Steganography
21C3: Next-Generation Peer-to-Peer Systems
21C3: Old Skewl Hacking: Infra Red
21C3: On finding the score to visuals
21C3: Passive covert channels in the Linux kernel
21C3: Pirate Radio
21C3: Pixels want to break free of the screen
21C3: Pixels want to dance
21C3: Pixels want to talk
21C3: Practical Mac OS X Insecurity
21C3: Pure Data and Gem for VJs
21C3: SAP R/3 Protocol Reverse Engineering
21C3: Secure Instant Messaging
21C3: Sicherheitsanalyse von IT-Grossprojekten der Öffentlichen Hand
21C3: Sicherheitsmanagement
21C3: State of Emergent Democracy
21C3: The Blinking Suspects
21C3: The Fiasco µKernel
21C3: The Kernel Accelerator Device
21C3: Tor
21C3: Unsicherheit von Personal Firewalls
21C3: USB – Unbekannter Serieller Bus
21C3: Verdeckte Netzwerkanalyse
21C3: Verified Fiasco
21C3: Voting Machine Technology
21C3: Wirklich selbst denken oder durchdrehen
21C3: xDash
21C3: XMPP/Jabber

(Credits to Firefox, Vim and regexps which greatly simplified the task of compiling this list :)

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Safe shutdown using an ATX power button

For Gentoo Linux, do the following (adjust where necessary):

0. Make sure you have an ATX board and a power button ;)

1. Make sure your kernel has support for ACPI (either built-in or as modules)

2. # emerge acpi acpid

3. # rc-update add acpid default

4. for kernel 2.6 (skip this step if ACPI support is compiled into the kernel):
# echo “ac” >>/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
# echo “button” >>/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

5. add parameters apm=off and acpi=on to your kernel boot line (e.g. in /boot/grub/menu.lst)

6. # reboot

(Source: Linux für alle. Thanks to maol for the pointer; other interesting articles: Server shutdown via Apache [Caution!], LaTeX Business cards)

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DriverGuide.com

DriverGuide.com

Let’s face it, finding the right device driver can be a tedious, time consuming, often impossible task! The Driver Guide was created to make finding driver updates a whole lot easier. With the help of thousands of our members, we have compiled a massive database archive of drivers and resources that is by far the largest and most comprehensive on the Web.

ACK! :)

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Philemon chess program

An interesting project by Dominik (Philemon) Käser:

Philemon (alternative URL), a chess program with a strength of about 2000 ELO.

Nice, concise assembly of information about chess algorithms (in German only). Source code is available for download (I can’t find any licensing information though).