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50 Killer Apps for your USB

These free apps don't require any installation. With portable applications, all you have to do is plug in your USB and run the program without the hassle of installing the program or leaving traces behind. If you like these portable apps, many of them also have an installer allowing you to install the program on your computer for more speed and accessibility.

How to Choose a Computer

Buying a new computer can be an overwhelming task for anyone. But finding the computer that is right for you doesn't have to be hard. You just have to think about what you want the computer to do. Does it have to be portable? Is it just going to be used for homework? Are you a big gamer? This all factors into what type of computer suits you best.

Pirates In Space!

Recently, pirated software as well as the sites that host them have been receiving a lot of criticism for their "lack of morals." The entertainment industry is attempting to stop any and all of the countless torrent sites littering the internet, but to no avail. The most famous (or infamous) and well known website distributing pirated software is The Pirate Bay.

The entertainment industry has been chasing The Pirate Bay for a long time with little to show for their efforts. Although they have won numerous lawsuits opposing what the site is doing, the industry isn't even close to removing the site from existence. The Pirate Bay almost seems impervious to any attempts to get even close.

Tables != Layout

Tables exist in HTML for one reason and one reason only: To display tabular data. That's it. Then border="0" came along and made it possible to make a table to organize data without being able to see the table itself. Which then led to tables being used to lay everything out on all beginner websites and even some professional websites. The time has come for this to stop. Professional websites are now designed in a way that makes the website more flexible and more functional, not to mention the massive increase in the readability of the code. Still on the edge? Let me change that for you.

Qualities of Good Code

Although knowing how to program is obviously the most important quality of being a comptuer scientist, code architecture follows closely behind. The quality of underlying code will have a great impact on the reliability, scalability, security, extensibility, and maintainability of your program. Basically, without good code architecture, you will run into many problems down the road.

Self Repairing Solar Panels

With the goal of transferring the world's energy demands to renewable sources quickly becoming more and more essential to the existence of the human race, scientists at MIT are focusing on creating revolutionary, super-efficient solar panels to harness the sun's power. But there is something extraordinary about these solar panels. They have the uncanny ability to repair themselves.

Lingodroids

Its one thing for a robot to be programmed to understand Japanese or English or any other language that already exists. But it quite a feat for two robots to develop their own language and be able to communicate with each other like these two have.

Created by Ruth Shultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, each of these Lingodroids have developed a specialized language for the sole purpose of navigating their way around obstacles and recognizing where they are.

Less - CSS Preprocessor

Everyone who calls themselves a web designer has quite a bit of experience with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely simple, including only rulesets and declarations. The only reason CSS exists is to encapsulate the elements to style and how to style them. For the newcomer, it does everything it is supposed to do, but to an experienced developer managing a dynamic website, CSS is a massive limitation on how easily values can be changed and related to one another.

Why Linux (Still) Sucks

Over the past few months, there has been a great increase in the amount of interest in open source options and that isn't limited to software. It also applies to operating systems, specifically to Linux. To Linux activists, Linux is a gift from the gods, saving humanity from the evils of Bill Gates and his cursed Windows operating system. But to everyone else, it is just another attempt by less than 1% of the market to dethrone Windows as the most effective end user operating system currently available on the market.

Ninite: The Universal Installer

Getting a virus and having to reformat your computer wouldn't be so bad if you didn't lose all of your favorite programs. But it happens to everyone. Viruses and malware troll theinternet just waiting for some unexpecting user to come by. Then they attack and there isn't much you can do about it. The virus will ravage your computer until all hope is lost and your only hope of regaining use of your computer is to reformat the computer. And every program you ever installed is gone too.

Qualities of Good Code

Phi: A Magical Number

By Daniel Taylor on June 19, 2011 04:06

Have you ever heard of phi? No, I am not talking about fee-fi-fo-fum from Jack and the Beanstalk. The phi (pronounced fi like "fly") I'm talking about the mathematical constant with properties just as magical as the beans in Jack and the Beanstalk. This constant is referred to by many names including the Golden Ratio, Golden Number, Golden Section, Golden Mean, and Devine Number, but is normally referred to as the Golden ratio because of how the number is derived mathematically.

Phi is an irrational number similar to pi. The golden ratio can be represented as a continued fraction or an infinitely recursive function.

Given a rectangle with sides of length phi and 1, phi can be defined as a number such that the partitioning of the given rectangle into a square with sides of length 1 and a new rectangle yields a new rectangle with the same ratio as the original rectangle. This may be better explained in a picture.

As it turns out, phi is exactly (1 + 5^1/2)/2 which is approximately equal to 1.61800339887499. Phi can also be represented trigonometrically as 2sin(54°).

You might be saying to yourself, "Well, that doesn't seem very magical to me. It's just a number." In reply to that, I must say that it isn't the number itself that is interesting. It is the fact that the number is everywhere, whether you realize it or not.

The Fibonacci sequence follows this magical ratio. The first 11 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence are as follows: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 24, 55, 89. By dividing one number by the previous number, you get a number close to the golden ratio. As you progress farther to the right, you get closer to the golden ratio. The sequence converges on the ratio.

8 / 5 = 1.6000

13 / 8 = 1.6250

34 / 21 = 1.6190

89 / 55 = 1.6180

The Parthenon in Greece follows this ratio, Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations of Polyhedra and the Mona Lisa follow the ratio. The ratio of the size of most books is close to 1.6. Everything from postcards, playing cards, posters, wide-screen televisions, and photographs have a close resemblance to the golden ratio. The magnetic resonance of some cobalt isotopes is 1.6. Animal shells often resemble the golden spiral, which is derived from the golden ratio. The ratio of the first bone in your finger to the second bone is 1.6. The egyptian pyramids have a very close semblance to the golden ratio. The opening of Beethoven's Fifth resembles the golden ratio. The size of galaxies follow the golden ratio to some degree. Even your heartbeat has ties to the golden ratio. Phi truly is a magical number.