Thursday, May 18, 2017
Swimming in gold
Batman has the Batcave, Superman has his Fortress of Solitude, and Scrooge McDuck has his money bin. For 70 years, the maternal uncle of Disney’s Donald Duck has been portrayed as a thrifty—some might say miserly presence in cartoons and comics, a waterfowl who has such deep affection for his fortune that he enjoys diving into his piles of gold and luxuriating in them.
It’s a rather gross display of money worship, but is it practical? Can anyone, including an anthropomorphic Pekin duck, actually swim in their own money, or would diving headfirst into a pile of metal result only in catastrophic injury?
Via GoogleMyFacePlusSpaceBook, Fact Check: A Physicist Weighs In On Whether Scrooge McDuck Could Actually Swim in a Pool of Gold Coins | Mental Floss
Sadly, no. Even Carl Barks knew this and on several occasions had Scrooge mention it was a trick.
![[“Unca Scrooge, how come you dived all the way from that bluff, and you didn't get hurt?”—Huey, Dewey and Louie]](/2017/05/18/panel1.jpg "“Unca Scrooge, how come you dived all the way from that bluff, and you didn't get hurt?”—Huey, Dewey and Louie")
![[“Well, I'll admit—it's a trick!”—Uncle Scrooge]](/2017/05/18/panel2.jpg "“Well, I'll admit— it's a trick!”—Uncle Scrooge")
But it's still fun to fantasize about swimming in three cubic acres of gold coins though.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
For those times when downloading over the Internet is too slow
Andrew Tanenbaum has been quoted as saying, “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” And yes, if you have a large amount of data to transfer, sometimes it is better to physically move it than transfer it over the Intarwebs.
And if you have a metric buttload of data?
AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte- scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. Transferring data with Snowmobile is secure, fast and cost effective.
Via Lobster s, AWS Snowmobile – Massive Exabyte-Scale Data Transfer Service
And for the record, a petabyte (PB) is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes which I think is the expected size of the next version of Windows.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
I'm sorry, but I'm not fond of kids
- From
- "XXXXXX XXXXX"<XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
- To
- undisclosed-recipients:;
- Subject
- Re: Hello Dear
- Date
- Wed, 24 May 2017 22:03:12 +0300
Hello Dear,
How are you doing today? am XXXXXX and i must tell you how delighted i am to send you this mail. Am a single parent from Chicago,and i hope you don't get angry at my little note, I have been a widower for the last couple of years, After the death of my wife some years ago, i decided to move on in search of a partner.And I hope we can get to know more about each other! A friend of mine found his soul-mate through this medium. I like us to get acquainted via the exchange of mails as it takes time for people to compose an email and say a little about themselves. I have a son and a Bulmastiff as family and will like to know more about. Attached with this mail are my pictures for your perusal. I look forward to reading your mail. Here is my email ( XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ) God bless and have a nice day.
Regards XXXXXX
This is perhaps the oddest spam I've received. Yes, it came with two pictures of “XXXXXX” and they could be the same person, although it's hard to tell. And yes, one of the them does include a picture of “XXXXXX” and his son.
Usually, email of this type is a woman trying to start a relationship, but this is the first time I've received one from a man (not that there's anything wrong with that). It seems so sincere (especially with the two pictures), but I have to wonder, if “XXXXXX” actually sent this, why he would spam random people? Or is this a prank by someone “XXXXXX” knows?
Or an actual spammer trying to validate an email address?
Odd.
Very odd.
