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Monday, November 21, 2005

Make Screen Captures From Windows Media Player

When you want to capture still images from Windows Media Player, Amit Agarwal suggests you do the following:

“To disable graphics hardware acceleration globally for all applications in Windows XP or Windows 2000, Select Control Panel - Display - Properties - Settings - Advanced - Troubleshooting and slide the Hardware Acceleration slider from Full to None.”

Usually when you try doing this without the extra setting as suggested, the resulting image will only display currently running movies. Amit has more tips on how to achieve this (not all worked for me, though).

Googleplex London (Gallery)

ZDNet has some photos of London’s Googleplex. [Via Slashdot.]

Googlevision

Localudal has some interesting prophecies concerning Google and the next 10 years... like this one:

“Cash is virtually abolished and used only in illegitimate trade of drugs, firearms, in presidential campains and in live prostitution. Numismatists grumble over cash substitute called AdCents: an ancient $2 bill is valued at 200 AdCents at GoogleBay: 1 AdCent is equal to 1 million of AdSense clicks. As the result, Google Cache replaces Fort Knox. Google’s motto ’Don’t Be Evil’ now reads: ’Don’t Be!’”

Google Base Porn

The day had to come (NSFW): Google is now hosting porn movies, as searches for porn or xxx reveal (merchants uploaded them to Google Base in abundance). And it’s more visual than the Google Directory section for fetishes, too. I wonder if the Google Base editors considers these bad items, and will delete them? I wouldn’t necessarily expect that to happen – if somone searches for “porn”, after all, it’s very likely someone is looking for porn too. [Thanks James in the forum.]

Reports Say Gmail Was Vulnerable

A lengthy and detailed report at Elhacker.net says hackers were able to kidnap and get access to any Gmail account. According to the report, the security hole (discovered on October 14) was fixed on October 18. [Via Toufeeq.]

Worst Computer Bugs

The following bug is considered to be in the top 10 of history’s worst software bugs by Wired’s Simson Garfinkel. Imagine you’d be a programmer responsible for one of those!

“June 4, 1996 – Ariane 5 Flight 501. Working code for the Ariane 4 rocket is reused in the Ariane 5, but the Ariane 5’s faster engines trigger a bug in an arithmetic routine inside the rocket’s flight computer. The error is in the code that converts a 64-bit floating-point number to a 16-bit signed integer. The faster engines cause the 64-bit numbers to be larger in the Ariane 5 than in the Ariane 4, triggering an overflow condition that results in the flight computer crashing.

First Flight 501’s backup computer crashes, followed 0.05 seconds later by a crash of the primary computer. As a result of these crashed computers, the rocket’s primary processor overpowers the rocket’s engines and causes the rocket to disintegrate 40 seconds after launch.”

[Image credit: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.]

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