Ebola Cola

Hearing the news that Bill Gates had finally left Microsoft, I quickly turned to alcohol. On the brightside, I invented a summery drink which you can make yourself at home. It only takes two minutes and tastes of summer meadows.

First of all, choose yourself an appropriate beer. I chose Finkbräu, which is very cheap and has a rather strong taste. Perfect for our drink.

Next, choose an appropriate ice cream and add two or three scoops into a large glass.

Now, gently pour the beer into the glass, tilting the glass to avoid a foamy head. You will receive a lot of foam from the beer anyway as it is poured onto the ice cream.

Add a straw and enjoy (responsibly).

Good evening readers, even if there are only a small handful of you out there. I keep putting off this post, but it was unavoidable and had to be done at some point. In this post, I’m going to discuss things concerning the website, take suggestions and hopefully steer us onto the correct track should we be going wrong anywhere.

First of all, Ebola Cola was a personal blog but in just one night we seemed to have expanded and now have several editors and a larger fanbase number of readers. Which is excellent news, it means we’ve had a good start. Considering our first post began on May 27th and it is now 28th June, having almost thirty posts means that we have published a lot of content when you take into account the size of the website.

(more…)

Well, indirectly maybe.

Scientists have recently discovered that lack of vitamin D can significantly increase your chances of an early grave.  Here are a couple of Vitamin D facts for those who don’t know:

• Vitamin D is formed in the skin when it is exposed to ultraviolet rays present in Sunshine.
• Vitamin D is essential in Humans to promote the absorption of calcium and phosphate from the intestine and their uptake by bone. This makes Vitamin D a human body must-have accessory.

Unfortunately though, it was believed until a few weeks ago that vitamin D deficiency only played a part in diseases that screwed up bone structure, such as rickets and Osteoporosis. 

Now, it seems, lack of vitamin D can also contribute to cancer, strokes, sudden cardiac death and death of heart failure. Pretty much everything that involves pain and death.

Being the “Sunshine” vitamin, your unnatural existence of sitting in your dark room all day in front of the computer is not exactly beneficial to your health.

Best way to fix that though, is to simply walk in the sun for a while, eat fish and other such foods rich in vitamin D and pills. Lots and lots of pills.

There is a catch though. The real annoying thing is that spending too much time in the sun can develop skin cancer. On the other hand, spending too much time out of the sun can cause cancer anyway. Even having excess vitamin D in your diet can screw you up, causing silly little things like nausea (Yuk!), and more serious things like heart rhythm abnormalities (Boo!). Therefore it’s important, like many other things in life, to stick to a healthy medium.

So if you really are that obsessed with RPG’s, second life ,or you are just Japanese, get out more, or at least on a sunny day, take your laptop outside.

• Information on the new Vitamin D health implications (PDF)

If there is anything with this article that is wrong, I will be happy to hear from you.

After 33 years of intense activity, today’s the day William Henry “Bill” Gates III leaves his full-time job at Microsoft to dedicate himself to the charity foundation named after him and his wife, Melinda.

Whether you like him or not, nobody in the IT field could say that this is not a moment to be remembered. While little will change in the immediate future (Gates’s leaving was announced more than a year ago and had surely been carefully planned in advance), the software industry will probably be different without a man like him.

(more…)

Today, the Census of Marine Life launched a new website documenting the details of the millions of marine species known to man but they aim to index every single one of the marine species by 2010.

The indexers claim that many registers are incomplete or only focus on certain aspects of marine life and hope to benefit scientists and enthusiasts by recording photographs and in-depth descriptions of the entire ocean’s lifeforms.

We also appreciate that it may be hard to index lifeforms from such a mysterious and unknown environment but here’s hoping we have access to a beautiful register of marine species in a few years time.

We’ve hated Xp when it came out, seven years ago. We’ve started to love it when the SP2 came out, if not at first sight. And then Vista came out, and all of a sudden Windows Xp SP2 became “a great OS”, “very stable”, “never had a problem with it”. So much that, when Microsoft announced the natural extinction of the product would happen on June 30, petitions spawned around the net to save Xp.

Microsoft didn’t give in, but it has been forced by the facts themselves to announce they’ll continue to support the second-latest version of their home and office operating system through all April 2014 - bringing Xp’s lifespan to an impressive thirteen years! In fact, while new notebooks are almost exlusively sold with an OEM version of Vista, business customers, especially large companies, are still slow to jump on Vista’s bandwagon. That shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that many still have Windows 2000.

Microsoft has also confirmed their timeline for Windows 7, whose release has been announced for the very first weeks of 2010.

(more…)

I’ve never tried to hide my growing dislike of Firefox. There are several reasons for that, from the exaggerated hype surrounding the new release (while both Opera and Safari have let their latest version out almost without a word), to the substandard performance and quality it has out of the box.

Granted, there’s a flourishing community of third-party developers anxious to release many more plugins for Fx than we’d ever need. If it’s on the web, there’s porn of it, and there’s also a Fx plugin of sort for it. Opera has widgets, but they don’t offer the flexibility of the plugins, and then “dude, Firefox is open source”!

Anyway, the basic version of Fx delivers much less quality than a similar installation of the other two browsers. Months ago, when I’ve been shortly blogging in an Italian site, I posted screenshots of Firefox and Opera trying to navigate from the connection at my office: while Opera took a look around and detected the proxy settings in a heartbeat, all that Fx was able to do was declaring the network out of reach.

One would think that Firefox 3, the new Messiah, has no similar flows. Ok, adding a bunch of plugins may cause undesired effects, but a clean install would be perfect.

(more…)

Nintendo’s Super Mario trailed the videogame industry from “going to die soon” to “where’s my latest million dollars, you sexy thing?” by becoming one of the greatest commercial successes of the sector. Not only that, it was in fact so popular that it crossed the kids’ room’s door to attain the status of pop-cult, up to the point where colleges were having live action shows featuring the Nintendo franchise’s gameplay.

Super Mario is also one of the first games that users look for when they put their hands on a NES emulator. Those old cartridges have been ripped more than once to offer the real thing on a ROM dump. Platform games reminiscent of SM are a common exercise for those who learn game and graphic programming, and thus Mario clones exist in virtually any language.

But there was stil  a barrier to break.

(more…)

Remember when we pointed out a few slightly bizarre products that spawned in Japan? Well, I don’t think it’s fair that we just marginalise the Japanese as being the culprits for strange stuff.

So, today we bring you something that is currently being distributed in America. Kellogg’s™ Lego® Fruit Flavored Snacks!

That’s right, Lego blogs you can actually eat and surely the most retarded and dangerous snack ever created!

At Ebola Cola, we’re fans of open source. If we were not then our server would be running Windows, think of the difficulties we’d experience in that system!

So here’s some great news for developers, Reddit is becoming open source!

For those not in the know, Reddit is a Digg-like website where users can choose their content by voting news stories and articles ‘up’ or ‘down’. Although the differences are apparent between Digg and Reddit, open sourcing Reddit is a brilliant step forward for Reddit and should encourage many more people to use their system.

Does this mean however, that we will see a lot of rather lame Reddit clones in the future? Maybe not, hopefully we will see some fantastic content-specific websites using the Reddit system.