Techoti

YouTube's Spookiest Halloween Videos [BOO!]

What Does Your Twitter Avatar Say About You?

By Lance Ulanoff

NASA Invites Twitter Followers to View Next Launch — In Person

I’ve Got An Awesome New Job

I used to be a little jealous of Mashable. The site came out of nowhere in 2005 and instantly tapped into the social zeitgeist. It was constantly breaking stories about hot social properties like Twitter and Facebook and had a highly engaged and active readership. It had a sense of fun and a need to do good. It was, in essence, virtually unlike any other site or blog I knew on the Web.
 
Now, as Mashable makes some of its most significant changes and expands and reorganizes to cover social, tech, news, politics entertainment and more—all through the prism of social and digital—I won’t have to ask anymore how Mashable’s doing it. I’ll be inside, helping to make it happen.
 
When founder and CEO Pete Cashmore launched his own blog in 2005, he named it Mashable to represent the way you could mash together all kinds of digital/web services to make something new. Today, Mashable is one of the Web’s most popular web sites, attracting 15 million visitors a month and Cashmore’s choice of a name seems positively clairvoyant.

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9/11: What I Remember Most

I remember many things that day, but these are the vignettes that remain.

A clear blue sky and crisp cool air. A perfect fall day, though it was still summer.

Hearing the news of the first plane crashing into the North Tower World Trade Center (over AOL Instant Messager).

Seeing the second plane strike the South Tower live on the news and knowing we were under attack.

The panicked, near hysterical call with my wife, trying to make sure that she and my children were safe.

Standing on the 13th floor deck of my old office with co-workers, watching the towers burn. Asking one another how the firefighters might put out the fires.

The towers falling.

Walking through the eerily quiet city late that afternoon, stopping in the middle of Fifth Ave to look downtown. All I could see, from roughly 14th st down, was a giant cloud of dust.

Passing by St. Francisi of Assisi church on 31st St and seeing a small cadre of Firefighters from the ladder company across the street walk slowly up the stairs and into the church, heads bowed.

A fire truck on the same block, covered in dust. I noticed that the front of the truck was partially crushed.

Coming home on the train, riding in utter silence.

In the days and weeks following the attacks, I remember a solidarity like I’ve never felt before or since. We were one nation, one people, with a single purpose, leaning on each other for support.

Can Windows 8 Survive Without the Registry?

Ever since Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky declared, “Windows 8 reimagines Windows,”, I’ve been pondering the unimaginable: Windows without the Registry. Let’s forget the alternative processor platforms and Windows tablets. Those are all well and good, but nothing will rock the Windows world more than a retiring of that massive, hiearchical sub-system list that tells Windows about every application, component, and bit of hardware that runs on it.

What’s the Registry? Here’s one of Microsoft’s definitions. It was written about the Registry that ran inside Windows 2000, but the Registry in Windows 7 operates in pretty much the same way:

“A central hierarchical database used in Microsoft Windows 98, Windows CE, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 used to store information that is necessary to configure the system for one or more users, applications and hardware devices.

The Registry contains information that Windows continually references during operation, such as profiles for each user, the applications installed on the computer and the types of documents that each can create, property sheet settings for folders and application icons, what hardware exists on the system, and the ports that are being used.

The Registry replaces most of the text-based .ini files that are used in Windows 3.x and MS-DOS configuration files, such as the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys.”

When Sinofsky first introduced Windows 7 in 2008 and spoke of the need for the Registry, he called it a fascinating topic and a hard problem. “It is metadata about everything on the subsystem, and it needs to go somewhere,” he explained. At the first Windows 8 unveiling last June at D9, there was little mention of the Registry, only a promise that the next version of Windows would work with all the stuff Windows 7 currently handles. To do so, usually means you have a massive database of information in the subsystem that Windows 8 can access at any time to run your, say, five-year-old inkjet printer or Windows Vista-friendly app.

So the Registry has to stay, right? Not necessarily.

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Found Video: The 2001 Spider-Man Trailer Featuring the Twin Towers

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 Terror Attacks approaching, I’ve been looking  through my old computer folders, trying to locate files and images from the period, bits of data that might help me remember what I was seeing, thinking, feeling in the days immediately before, during and after the attacks. In my quest, I stumbled across this video. 

Spider-Man was one of the most eagerly anticpated action movies of 2002. But in 2001, Sony released the first teaser trailer. It showed up online, I think, just a day or so before the 9/11 attacks. The story is set in New York and the producers used the iconic Twin Towers as part of a mini Spider-Man tale. It was never clear if this vignette was ever supposed to appear in the final product.

The video features a beautiful shot of the Twin Towers, though it’s unclear if the Towers portion of the image is real or CGI (since the helicopter and Spider-man jumping around the city are all, I think, computer-generated). For obvious reasons, Sony pulled the Trailer within a day or so of the attacks. I, for reasons I can no longer remember, grabbed the video and saved it.