Ok, so here's something I thought was cool. I heard today that some scientists, particularly Dr. Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and Professor Miles Padgett from Glasgow University tied some light into a knot.

Woa.

Seriously though, here's the idea behind it, simplified to an extreme.
There are these things called optical vortices. To reduce it to the ridiculous, its like making light kind of spiral out in a direction rather than in a straight line. I suppose you could use the analogy of a toy slinky, with the slinky rings being the light and all going in one direction. What you would see if you shone that light on something flat like a wall would be a ring of light rather than a single beam.

Ok, so these guys took this to the next level as I understand it by creating optical vortices, and then manipulating them into knots.

So for those of you who are a bit behind, to sum it up some dudes made light travel in a spiral, then tied that into knots. Yeah, that. What did you do today?

So what?
Well....
The thing about optical vortices is that they can actually induce torque from the spiraling effect, depending on how many twists the light does in one wavelength and the more spirals (higher number of twists) the faster the light is spinning around the axis so the more torque it has. They can also be used to trap, manipulate, and even transform small volumes of matter.

Lets not get it twisted, (Ha ha, see what I did there?) we aren't talking about much force. Its enough force to work on a micrometer scale. Think of micrometer scale bulldozers, or micro pumps with no moving parts, or sorting or mixing particles and stuff like that.

What else? Well, computers use electrons which have two states, zero and one. That's 1 and 0... You know, binary. That's how they work. Now you have the possibility of quantum computing that uses light to encode and store information, and optical vortices theoretically have an infinite number of states because there is no limit to the topological charge (how many twists the light does in one wavelength) so this could lead to faster data manipulation and higher bandwidth. There's even talk of using this technology on radio waves to reduce radio-frequency congestion. Im not even going to get into that right now. Long story short(er) there's a ton of cool stuff you can do with this.

Ok, I hear you now writing me emails... "Yeah Halla, but that was all doable before this whole knot tying thing. So whats the big deal?"

The big deal is the fact that tying these optical vortices in knots proves we have much more advanced optical control, and so we can now do even more with optical vortices than previously thought.

For example you can manipulate these optical vortices to project hundreds or thousands of simultaneous three dimensional configurations, each with unique characteristics and make some seriously sophisticated nano-craziness, and who only knows what else.

I thought it was cool. Hopefully you do too.
Here are some links on the topic to blow your mind and/or waste your day:


http://www.physics.nyu.edu/grierlab/hot.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... screwed-up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_vortex
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences ... t-in-knots

Later people!
(PS - H4z3, you were the tie-breaker on this post. I hope you liked it. Now build me some nanobots!)

Feel like some good old fashioned hackery?

Sick of searching through the Windows Vista (32 bit only! theres rumors of this hack crashing 64 bit versions!) or Windows 7 control panel?

Wish the control panel would just display a simple list of alphabetically sorted linked text labels to nearly all of the "administration" options the average user will ever need?

Realize you can't perform local Group Policy changes on Windows 7 Home Premium, but want to do things like restrict internet access during certain hours, Keep kids from installing stuff, etc?

Maybe something like this?



Well then, have we got a cute little trick for you!

Create a new folder and name it the following:
InformationLeak.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Simple? Hell yes!
Enjoy!

So I was reading some news today and found that the iphone app store has now hit 3 billion downloads.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10424 ... icksArea.0

That was fast.

So the app store opened on July 10, 2008.
It hit a billion downloads on April 24, 2009
It hit 2 billion downloads on Sept 28, 2009
Now today (Jan 5, 2010) its at 3 billion downloads.

What does that mean?
A lot. Hang on.

It means that this app store is wildly popular.
It also means that Apple has sold one billion apps since September 28 mark, thats only 98 days.

Perspective time! (aka excuse for math time)

1,000,000,000 app downloads in 98 days =

10,204,081 app downloads per day
425,170 app downloads per hour
7086 app downloads per minute
118 app downloads per second

Hot damn.

So whats this mean for Apple? Well...

Lets say that 95% of the apps downloaded are free.
I'll go out on a limb and call that a fair number. That means that only 5 percent of the apps downloaded are being paid for.

Now lets lowball and pretend that the average cost of each paid for downloaded app is only $1... and Apple gets 1/3rd (it does) of all apps sold (forgetting the $100/yr license fee for now)
Therefore:

5% of 10,204,081 = 510,204.05 (apps sold per day @ $1)

510,204.05 * .3 = 153,061.21 (Apples $ take per day)

$153,000 aint bad for a days work. So lets forecast a month then...

153,061 * 30 = 4,591,830 (monthly Apple profit from appstore alone)

ok, 4.5 million a month comes to about 54 million a year. (4.5 * 12)

Please note that these numbers are a bit skewed in that Im only taking into account the last 98 days, not the previous profits of the last 1 year, 2 months and 18 days since the app stores launch and the 2 billion download milestone (thats 445 days or 10,680 hours, or 640,800 minutes or 38,448,000 seconds if anyone cares.)

So congrats Apple, Im no Apple fan boy, but theres no arguing that those are some impressive numbers! Rock on!

-Feel free to check my math, I wrote this quick and on the fly. Comments Welcome as usual. You know the email. Thanks.

So then Im sorry it took so long but since it did I figured I may as well save a post and kill two birds with one stone.

A while back I asked for some custom system properties screen shots as a contest.
I got few, but I lol'd pretty hard at this one, its mainly just poking some fun (good-natured, I assure you) at one of our beloved admins, and I decided to post it just because.. well... because its funny, really.

Winner:
PhreakerD7 with the following:


Runners up:

http://informationleak.net/LINKS/ILcontest2.jpg
http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/922/ ... dition.jpg

Moving right along...

We also had a comic contest recently.
This was also rather hard to judge, there were some pretty funny entries, and I like an idiot forgot to put in an end date. Creativity is the key but it also has to be funny.
Therefore, the winner was one that took me off guard and as it wound up, the joke was on me.
So you win, you bastard, and well played.

Winner:
AnonTheGreat with the following:

(translation so you dont have to type the whole thing in like I did:
Why dont you see if you can make them waste their time translating this?)

Runners up:

http://informationleak.net/LINKS/ilcomicentry.png
http://informationleak.net/LINKS/rez-out-of-it-1.png

This was a lot of fun, and thanks for playing. For those of you that missed out, dont be shy next time!
I may get a vote system going for any new contests of this type of nature so that our viewing public can vote for their favorites, and considering the content and visitors of this site, who can produce the most legitimate looking vote fraud! I'm looking forward to it, hope you are too!
Happy Holidays slightly in advance!
-Halla

As you probably know, AT&T is getting slammed for their service sucking. This is because they got an exclusive contract with the amazingly popular iphone but due to all those users and all that data their network is being sucked dry, thus the service has been reported as "sucky". Fitting, no?

According to this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/companies/10iphone.html

"AT&T is considering ways to encourage customers to use less wireless data as its network struggles to keep up with demand, a company executive said Wednesday.
...the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use."

Wait... what?

How the hell do you educate consumers to not use what they are paying for? Seriously. I want to know.
Id love to see a flowchart of that, or an infomercial. I can imagine it now...

"...so as you can see in this last chart, as you actually use the network services we sell you our profit margins go down due to the fact that our network can only handle so much, therefore Im sure you can see the need to just pay for our services but dont actually use them so we can continue ripping off the populace..."

Ahem...
The problem isnt the users. Its the providers! If you are selling unlimited data plans and your network cannot keep up with demand you have only two possible options.

1. Upgrade/fix your network.
2. Stop selling unlimited plans.

Guess which one they will do, then guess why.
If you guessed #2 because it will cost less, then you and I are on the same boat.

Id love to just drop my cell phone services altogether as a personal protest, but I personally use Sprint. Sorry.