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Wow. Gartner have made 10 predictions to (and I quote) "rock our world". They’re all reasonable OK, until you get to number 6, which says that Moore’s law will continue unabated until at least 2011, which means "Gartner projects that by 2008 the typical desktop computer will have 4 to 8 CPUs running at 40 GHz, 4 to 12 gigabytes of RAM, 1.5 terabytes of storage, and 100Gbit LAN technology". And number 1 says that "Cheap and plentiful bandwidth will catalyze a move toward more centralized networks services, using grid computing models and thin clients".

So… Let me get this right… We’ll be using 8-way 40GHz processor machines with 12GB of RAM as thin clients? Whoosh. Now that is bloatware.

That new planet Quaoar would really clean up a nasty rack…

Found out today what it means though. Quaoar is a genderless creator of the gods in the Tongva people (Native Americans originally from the Los Angeles area). Not only is it very difficult to say (apparently pronounced kwah-o-wahr or kwah-wahr depending on your source) but my rather anal-retentiveness makes me want to see some order in our planet names. The fact that Uranus is the only planet with a Greek name annoys me enough, without straying into yet another pantheon. (And no, I don’t keep my CDs in alphabetical order before you ask).

This guy has spent an awful long time building lego models of instruments of torture and other violent ends. Marvellous.

Oh yes. A real piece of old school arcade action. Vertical shot ‘em up like you used to play in the arcades. Lovely.

This is a neat solution to leaky wireless signals (as well as mobile phones in the cinema). Researchers at University of Morioka in Japan have invented magnetic wood, a material that blocks radio signals. Rather than using the rather crude approach of a signal jammer (which is illegal in the UK anyway) you line the walls of your building with this stuff and it stops various frequencies getting in or out. Stop the boss ringing you at the weekend while securing your WLAN. Nice.

This site is really odd. Nearly two years worth of press quotes about why Britain is shit. Thing is, there’s no explanation as to who is compiling it, or why. It’s the why that bothers me. Why would you do that? It’s not like someone who sets up a site about why football is a shit game or why Atomic Kitten are shit (actually there would appear to be very few sites out there that diss bands – for example a google fight between “Oasis are shit” and “Blur are shit” only gets 20 results each. Maybe I just don’t know the bands that people hate anymore. Anyway, I digress).

Is the author British? Australian? French? Very odd. Not that I’m massively patriotic, but I just couldn’t be arsed collecting all that information.

Meet an inmate. Fascinating. Apparently there aren’t any non-bi-sexual female inmates in the entire of the American penal system…

…or this site is a wind up

Wow. This new logo for BBC3 really must have taken some time… You would have thought that as 1, 2 and 4 all look the same it wouldn’t have been too hard to come up with one for 3, but no, they had to have it different. I imagine designers Lambie-Nairn (hmm… that’s a lovely web site) are very proud. So proud in fact that the latest news section of their site hasn’t been updated since 13th September. Ah well.

This guessing game always seems to get it right, in quite a scary way. It took me quite a while to work out how it does it…

Marvellous, I thought that this had been removed, but no… It’s back. Build your very own George Dubbya Bush speech…