In case Pi Day wasn’t enough, here’s ‘Tau Day’

Written by Eliza Hardacre on June 27, 2011 – 7:59 am

On the Internet, anything can be the basis for a holiday — even a number.

You may recall that the day honoring the number Pi — which is March 14 (3/14 … get it?) — has become a worldwide phenomenon. Pi Day now features pie-eating contests, digit recitations and educational games.

And now, just when you thought the math holiday season was over, it’s time for Tau Day!

There’s a movement afoot online to celebrate tau, approximately 6.28, instead of the familiar constant pi, which is 3.14.

Pi — just think back to grade school — is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle.

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Sony faces jittery shareholders after cyberattack

Written by Eliza Hardacre on June 26, 2011 – 3:53 am

TOKYO — Sony Corp. Chief Executive Howard Stringer credited “very loyal” PlayStation Network gamers for flocking back to the service in big numbers, as he sought Tuesday to reassure shareholders following a series of embarrassing hacker attacks.

Stringer apologized for the data breach in April, which compromised personal data from more than 100 million online gaming and entertainment accounts.

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Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Adds TRIM Support, But Only For Apple’s SSDs

Written by Eliza Hardacre on June 25, 2011 – 10:42 pm

Apple’s latest OS X update 10.6.8 has brought with it TRIM an great new feature for Mac’s fitted with solid state drives. TRIM support enables your SSD to write data on top of deleted data without the need for another cycle first speeding up your machine considerable and stopping it becoming progressively more sluggish.

Unfortunately though if you have added your own personal SSD to your Mac system the new update will not add the TRIM feature and support to your SSD. As App

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Living in a box: gamer to travel a very Long way stuck in a crate

Written by Eliza Hardacre on June 25, 2011 – 6:36 am

Some may call him crazy but US artist Jordan Long is on mission to highlight post traumatic stress disorder by living in a crate on the back of a flat-bed trailer for seven days straight while playing the video game Lord of the Rings Online on his way to an art exhibition.

Long will begin his 3500-kilometre journey on July 1, travelling from his home town of Bald Knob, Arkansas to Portland in Oregon where he’ll go on public display as he plays games inside the crate at the Fourteen30Contemporary art exhibition.

Speaking with Fairfax Media via telephone, the 28-year-old who recently graduated at the Cranberry Academy of Art said he suffered from PTSD and that this project was his way of highlighting how he coped with it.

Jordan in the box.

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Turntable.fm: The cool kids’ Pandora?

Written by Eliza Hardacre on June 22, 2011 – 8:02 pm

Everyone knows Pandora — that popular music-streaming site where robots pick songs for you based on equations.

Well there’s a new kid in town: Turntable.fm. And its philosophy is almost perfectly anti-Pandora.

Instead of computers, real people pick the songs, in real-time.

The site turns this process into a concert-like game.

Here’s how it works: When you show up, you see a list of all of the “rooms” where DJs are currently playing. You can see what type of music these small online venues typically play, and what song is currently on.

When you click on a room, your avatar — the people in Turntable.fm are cartoon mice, kids and aliens, which is weird, but go with it for a second — enters and finds itself standing in a crowd of other people who are in that room at that very moment.

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Tags: Kids Pandora, Pandora
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