Katie and Tom Rumour

The rumour is about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise that the baby Suri is looked after by hte Church of Scientology. It only comes around to the house so that Katie Holmes can see it on Sundays.

Now not that hands off mothering would be al that unusual amongst film stars, or even simply the wealthy, but once a week seems a little sparing with hte time, doesn't it?

Anyway, if you're looking for more Katie Holmes news and stories there's a blog you should check out. Just click through that link to find it.

Live Earth

So Live earth is coming up next month....I'm looking forward to one band in particular. Nunatak.

In order to get the seventh continent represented they've had to hire the only band actually in Antarctica, which is our boys at the BAS base who make up Nunatak.

There'll be an awful lot of amateurish performances I'm sure at this extravaganze but these guys'll be the only ones who are supposed to be amateur.

Buying a House and a Corpse

There's two things to be noted from this story:

A Spanish bank repossessed a house and put it up for auction complete with the mummified body of the former owner who had missed her mortgage payments, newspaper El Pais reported on Wednesday.

The corpse, preserved by salty air in the seaside town of Roses after an apparent death by natural causes, was discovered by Jorge Giro, who entered the house for the first time on Saturday after buying it at the auction, El Pais said.

The dead woman, described by neighbors as having been in poor health and often absent visiting relatives in Madrid, had stopped paying her mortgage six years ago.

The unnamed bank which eventually repossessed the home never bothered to look inside before selling it.

Sure, the obvious one, that no one checked.

Then the non obvious one. It take 6 years to repossess a house in Spain.

Ringtones Links

"Everybody loves ringtones. So i decided to have a search for the best ringtones sites. Maybe everyone knows Ringophone.com or Ultrasonic-ringtones.com but to tell the truth the best site for free ringtones to download is GoldRingtone.com. Download the best Ringtones for free! Doesn't it sound attractive? The site has a weekly update (as they inform me with their press release) so you can continuously find the best new free ringtones.

The site is simple. The users can download free mp3 ringtones from any carrier. Besides, there are sections for all carriers. You can get free Sprint Ringtones, or free Cingular Ringtones.

Sinbad Not Dead!

Another hoax in Wikipedia:

Wikipedia was again the victim of a prankster, who this time vandalized the profile of US entertainer Sinbad. He posted a entry according to which Sinbad had died of a heart attack on the morning of March 14.

"Somebody vandalized the page," Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said Friday, quoted by Reuters. "Whoever did this was obviously a prankster. I don't think they did this because they thought he [was dead]." The false entry was caught, and removed, by a volunteer administrator about 30 minutes later, Ordonez said.

Sinbad, whose daughter called him about it, was amused and brushed it off as a "commonplace" occurrence on the easily accessible Internet. "Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again," the Los Angeles-based entertainer told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Sinbad's page on the free online research tool now carries the message: "This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism."

Wikipedia, which was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, has grown into one of the biggest virtual communities in the world, with faithful and enthusiastic members, all driven by the noble purpose of making information accessible freely to any one at any time.

Still a better joke than Recess Monkey's though, isn't it?

China on the Moon?

Even NASA now thinks that the next people to walk on the Moon will be Chinese:

The next humans to walk on the moon may well be Chinese, NASA's administrator told Congress yesterday. He said that the combination of budget cuts and restraints in the NASA lunar program and a determined and well-funded effort by the Chinese made that once-unthinkable possibility a real one.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told the House Committee on Science and Technology that, based on the status of the Chinese space program and its projected growth, China could land a man on the moon within a decade. Under current projections, a U.S. lunar return would not take place until 2019 at the earliest.

"If they wanted to mount a lunar mission, they could do so," Griffin said. "And yes, they could get to the moon before we return."

The Chinese space program employs about 200,000 people, Griffin said, while NASA has a workforce of about 75,000.

Griffin's assessment came during a day of NASA budget hearings in which both Republicans and Democrats decried a lack of funding for NASA, which has been given many ambitious missions.

The mistake that was made was the absolutely absurd, insane, waste of money that was spent on the Space Station and the Shuttle. Shouldn't have happened, should have carried on with the rockets, more of them, and put a base on the Moon.

Frances E Allen

Finally, the top award in computing has gone to a woman, Frances E Allen:

Retired IBM Corp. computer scientist Frances E. Allen, whose work helped crack Cold War-era code and predict the weather, today will be named the first woman to receive her profession's highest honor.
The Assn. for Computing Machinery has granted the A.M. Turing Award for technical merit to no more than a few people each year since 1966. Winners include Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who helped create the underpinnings of the Internet; Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence guru; and Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the modern computer mouse.
When Allen receives the award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, at the association's annual banquet in San Diego on June 9, it won't take a computer scientist to wonder: What took so long?
Allen's achievement comes long after women toppled barriers in other professions. Marie Curie became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921. Sandra Day O'Connor joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, two years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
But computer science still is dominated by men. Fewer than one in five bachelor's degrees in computer science were given to women in 1994, according to the Computing Research Assn. Ten years later, that figure remains about the same, at 17%.

Hats off lads, about time don't you think?

Media Foundation

Concern as Microsoft announces that Vista will be handling sound and audio files differently than XP did:

Buried deep in the bumf for Microsoft's new Vista release is a line that says it handles sound very differently. This kind of jolly PR spin is enough to chill the blood of those who rely on Windows running their audio production software reliably.

Whenever a new version of Windows hits the street it tends to roil up the murky waters of the music and audio production world. Prospects of having to get new device drivers and new versions of otherwise perfectly reliable software is just a hassle most of us could do without. There has been some panic that it might be the case with Vista as well, but at first glance it doesn't appear to portend any major problems for music and audio software users.

...

The crack about the way Vista handles sound is not complete moonshine, though. This refers to a new way of handling audio called "Media Foundation", which is clearly aimed at Media Centre type systems. This looks like it adds a lot of fancy audio processing stuff into the operating system. As most dedicated music production software avoids the operating system's built-in audio facilities, the impact of going "Vista" should be minimal for anyone working seriously with music.

It's probably not as bad as people fear: Vista seems really to be a version of XP that actually works, in the same way that Win 98 was one of Win 95 that actually could be used to do something.

 

Technorati tags: Windows, vista, xp, win 98, win 95, media foundation

WalMart and Pirate Bay

Oh dear, something of a boo boo here. WalMart ads are turning up on hte world's largest illegal download site:

 

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is unintentionally funding the world's largest illegal file-sharing network, Sweden-based Pirate Bay.

According to Variety magazine, several Wal-Mart banners have appeared on the site, including an ad for the eighth season of The Simpsons on DVD, The Sopranos, Smallville, Desperate Housewives and the movie Office Space during the crucial Christmas selling season in November and December. Many of these titles are also available illegally as bit torrents.

It's not just the illegality: I'm sure that the boys from Bentonville won't be happy at wasting their advertising dollars on a site where people can get the things for free.

 

Technorati tags: WalMart, Pirate Bay, illegal, downloads, advertising