Did you know I've bombarded these fora quite a bit the past few months? Well so far I don't believe anybody has asked me to stop... Although several people have suggested that I should get a blog... Maybe they were just being subtle.. Anyway I had some inspiration to start this thread.

Most of the people reading this will have inquisitive minds. And often discover a new technology. And use that technology/language/software packet/.. to far beyond the RDI (reference daily intake). By doing this you will most likely bump into some:
- strange facts
- cool tips
- suprises
- nasty bugs
- crooked situations
- just funny WTH
- a brilliant insight into a problem we never heard of
- even something that totally shocked you when you read it over at some other website

When this happens, you look around you, with some luck you find another human, you explain them just how great your new insight is... only to discover they tuned out when they had realized you were talking about computers. Well don't fear. Post all your programming tricks, software quirks, .. right here. Where people will understand them, and better yet learn from it. Everybody must know at least one of those things. So don't be shy and just post here.

O and it wouldn't be a rhican thread if I didn't set some absurd rule first:
1: Unless you are replying to an earlier post, you need to start your post with the words "Did you know"

That's all you can even chatter for all I care Just also post something interesting every once in a while

I'll try and give a few examples:
:============
Did you know that the easteregg in googleearth 4 is a flight simulator?
:============
Did you know that the "wirelesstools" software, which anybody who ever messed with wireless on linux is probably familiar with (probably through the tool "iwconfig" which is the wireless extention to "ifconfig" a program most windows user will probably know as "similar to ipconfig" ) Has this comment in it's latest source code?


in "iwconfig.c" right above the function which is arguably the hearth of iwconfig and which is about 788 lines of source code. The entire c file is only 1471 lines. Almost everybody on linux uses it. It works well. iwconfig is a pretty simple program which basically just acts as a user interface to the different ioctl()s But still... quite funny no?
:============
Did you know that you can't use floating points in linux kernel C code? or J2ME for that matter. The former because it would be to costly to init the FPU on every user/kernelspace switch. The latter because it just doesn't always have an FPU.
:============

Did you know that rhican posted the linux-kernel-float thingy twice

Did you know that every digit(0-9) or character(A-z) starts with a binary 01 ?

Did you know that the new zealand police has uploaded a "law-wiki"?
Did you know that google mail had a CSRF leck? You could change filter settings with manipulated websites the user had to open when he starts his webmail session
Did you know that Chicago wants an intelligent video control? In cooperation with IBM they installed thousands of cameras ("Operation Virtual Shield"). The "Smart Surveillance Solution" should search for interesting objects

Did you know that you can get 1 GB Webspace with unlimited traffic, without advertisments, ftp-access, MySQL and PHP for free? (kilu.info - its german, I'm sorry)
Again an interesting thread by rhican

Did you know that a german guy (Ruediger Gamm) is able to calculate very difficult calculations just by head in a few seconds (57^8, 91^50, 62/167, 5000 digits of Pi, .... they had to write a new program for him that can calculate with as big numbers as he does)
Clip (German)

Did you know that there exists an interesting website called didyouknow?

"In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information."
Anthony J. D'Angelo

Did you know that if you are a real geek you can track your favorite operating system/techcompany through it's stock. It's just a click away and well it's funny from time to time.

microsoft: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MSFT + on SEHK
apple: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL + others
google: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG
redhat:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHT
novell:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NOVL
yahoo:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO
nokia: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NOK + some other markets
sony: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SNE

It can give you an idea of how these companies relate in sheer magnitude (aka the answer to the question who's your daddy),
you can track a bit how major events influence these,

When you pull up the wikipedia page for a company they usually list where the stock are located.

You could sum up those for a given company and answer questions like, is Nokia bigger than apple?
did sony suffer losses after the rootkit deal (which they had to pay millions for settling)

And if tech isn't your thing you can always root for these http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MSOoddballs[/quote]

i'm no accountant so I can't fully explain all the details of the numbers you will be seeing, but usually green equals good.

and when you are considering buying new tech gear, you might want to check this out, and see if you can't get it shipped from over there. At a lower cost. Beware that some products have regional constraints. Like (hd)dvd's Wireless cards will not be able to use some channels, ... but if you are aware of the limitations, (and the ways that are already available to circumvent them ....)
euro/USD exchange rate
Let's just say that the dollar used to be worth more than a euro, and now every euro gets you more than 1.4$ ... Now i'm sure some economist is going to tell me where I go wrong. But wouldn't it result in turning 1000 into 1400 minus extra costs ...(i'm sure that if we all did that we probably screw up some macro economic thingy but hey) Perhaps I should take a course in this crap. there appears to be money in this field (pun intended). I do find it interesting, but maybe that's because I've always been told:

It's all about the dum dum duh dee dum dum

It seems to be almost a rhetorical question, but I'll answer anyway in case anyone gives a damn.

If 2 years ago $1USD = 1 Euro, then it would mean when you went to the USA (or ordered online) 1000 Euros would give you $1000 spending power on goods sold in the US.
If that 1 Euro is now worth 1.4 US, it means your very same 1000 Euros can now buy $1,400 worth of goods from the US.

Example: I used to order some stuff from the US several years ago when the Aussie dollar was around 88 US cents. When it dropped to the 60's I all of a sudden had to pay 20% more for the exact same thing so I stopped doing it (it was no longer worthwhile). But now it is back up to $1AU = ~89 US cents it's worth another look.

The implications on a national scale are that as your local currency increases, and purchasing power increasing (ie imports become cheaper) is that exports become more expensive for a lot of prime markets so they will look elsewhere for the same/similar good where exchange rates are more attractive.

The funny thing is that even though the media harp on about how currency x has strengthened against the US dollar, it's really the other way around - the US dollar is dropping globally like a bag of potatoes. Over the past few years the Euro, $AU, $NZ, $CAN and the British pound have remained somewhat similar in relation to each other - my $1AU can buy around the same in England or Canada or New Zealand as it could 3 years ago relative to exchange rates - but it can buy much more stuff from the yanks The US dollar would be even worse off without China buying into it at an enormous rate.

Anyway, as for a "did you know": SCO has finally filed for Bankruptcy. About time

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX

Did you know that soon Canonical's shipit project will start shipping Gutsy Gibon cd's when it is released.

What does this entail?
You go to the website, you fill in your details, and some time later(ok it can take up to 10 weeks) you get your Ubuntu cd's.

I have a nice branded 6.04 ubuntu cd roms(livecd+installcd). So it does actually work. The best thing is that they don't ship just one iirc. But a couple, so if you are converted you can hand them out to some relatives/friends whoever.

Gutsy Gibon isn't an LTS if i got it right, and actually i think that the release that will follow Gutsy will actually be more groundbreaking. Anyway, it's the perfect deal to get the latest and greatest (ubuntu) linux operating system to try your tbs Linux challenges on.

this is the website but some of you might like kde better

you can ofcourse also download it, and there are also regional maps of some areas where people pinpoint their location, and state that you can get a copy of ubuntu there for free. For my country Belgium that is here. As you can see in the big urban areas there are plenty of places to turn to. Some of these people will even demo and or help install it. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.


To quote the oddball who got the ball rolling once
Linus Torvalds: "Software is like sex: it's better when it's free."




Did you know there is a website dedicated to quotes like this?
Linus
Gates
Ballmer
Jobs
Theo

Did you know that alexa has a strange anomaly in it's graphs?


anybody have an explanation?

wasn't that when someone tried to BF one of the challenges ?

i also recall something like that happening a while back. and sasly the poor bugger didn't even get the answer in the end. lol