When you look at the way we do space travel right now, we can compare it to airplanes -- the way we're currently doing it is like a B2 bomber, the way we need to do it is like a 747. Now both programs were lengthy and expensive an dealt with serious engineering challenges. The B2 comes out of it being so much more expensive because it's a delicate and tempermental piece of gold-plated tech, we only built a limited number of them, and all of that dev cost is spread out over those limited number of units. The 747 is built by the hundreds, the support infrastructure is just as expensive when you work in all the airports around the world, but the cost is amortized over millions of trips per year which is why moving 20 tons of passengers and cargo on a 747 is cheaper than on a B2.
Ok, there's some places where the analogy breaks down, maybe I should have stuck with cars or compared 747's and Concordes, but the limited production run and limited number of flights is what's really killing the shuttle, not to mention the design compromises inherent in trying to satisfy too many customers with one vehicle. But I think most of that analogy still stands.
Old NES consoles were equipped with an EKG cartridge that ran the software. Inputs were from sensors on the patient's body plugged into the controller ports. The display was any old TV they could get their hands on. Power on the console, power on the TV, el cheapo EKG that worked just fine.
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!). With OpenCL and DirectGPU (or whatever MS is calling it this week), this should be good for anyone trying to build a cheap superGPU cluster.
It's exactly like the razor wars.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-blade game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Gillette is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary blades, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Gillette is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five blades, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Now I am going to be worried every time I get one of those adverts for penis enlargement....who told them?
Data mining. You must have ordered some of those little finger condoms people use in food service to cover up cut fingers and they just assumed it was for something other than food service. I'm still enraged that from my purchase history of metal they were able to decide Madonna's latest would be a good recommended buy for me.
The most efficient form of governance is a dictatorship. This is not to say that it is a universally ideal form of government -- for every example we have of an autocrat who was able to get what he wanted and happened to be correct, we can find many other examples of autocrats who got what they wanted and were dead wrong.
It is easier for a man of singular vision, foresight, and ambition to stand out as a dictator than as one of a committee but men of singular ignorance and venality tend to do less harm in committee form because they're like crabs in a bucket and it's hard for one to rise to preeminence and control.
By all accounts, Jobs is a bastard to work for. What makes it all the more galling is that is judgment calls are usually right so when your design needs more work, he'll tell you you're a fucking piece of shit, get the hell out of his sight, don't you fucking come back until you have something that doesn't make him want to vomit you cocksucker, you'll want to punch him in the throat. Yes, he could have been nicer about it, but by the time you finally come back with a design he likes, it'll also be the one the customers will go nuts for.
It's very rare to find that kind of person. When Jobs was booted out the first time, they brought in an airline executive as CEO. He didn't know anything about the industry and said all of Jobs' ideas weren't sticking to the knitting, were going out into left field and would waste money. Pragmatic business people agreed. Hell, I thought going into the music business when they were already struggling making computers was a bad idea. Looks like I was wrong.
What's driving Apple right now is a productive cult of personality. There's simply not a viable line of succession. Alexander the Great dies, the empire falls apart. Stalin dies, the empire lurches on but nobody in the party leadership will ever again risk letting someone gain that much power again. It's possible for a leader to rise up within the ranks of an existing organization and take it over with such force that you would think he was the founder. Jack Welch did that with GE. Because the market value went from $14 billion to $410 billion under his watch, he's lauded as a genius. Personally, I think he was more like an asshole who got lucky, got some breaks, and knew how to shaft the right people at the right time. He'd been picked as the golden boy to succeed to the leadership role by the previous CEO who later came to regret that decision because Jack poisoned the corporate culture much like a Carly Fiorina. Wall Street didn't seem to care because he made the trains run on time and that's all that mattered.
What's interesting is Microsoft seems to be struggling from both the lack of vision and the bureaucratic bloat that paralyzes large organizations and prevents meaningful action. This kind of strategic paralysis is usually the opening needed for a competitor to swoop in and steal the market. Apple would normally be in that position except for the huge questions concerning Jobs' prospects for this world. If both companies become wadded up with stupidity, will it finally become Linux's year for the desktop by default?
Yes, especially as it was those religious beliefs that allowed this device to be created in the first place, or did you miss the part about the Babylonian priests? Good God, can't you people get off your Anti-Religion Flaming Horse for one thread a day?
Tell me more about the horse. That sounds awesome.
WHAT??? What do you mean no one takes Pastafarianism seriously?? Die, infidel!
If you disbelief in the deities you're an atheist, if you disbelieve in Pastafarianism does that make you antepasta? And if so, what would be a good wine to match with you?
Then we could excommunicate people for breaking coding conventions and burn them at the stake for buffer overflows. Of course, this would also mean we'd need altars to Gates and Torvalds in the server room, would have to burn the right incenses and make appropriate obeisances to ward off crashes. Of course, when the crashes happen anyway, we could then have the debate over whether the religion was false or if we simply weren't observing it strictly enough and decide to throw a virgin off the roof and see if things improve. (cue jokes about the likeliest department to find virgins in.) You know, it would be kind of cool to have a giant computing pyramid atop which is the altar we tear out the beating hearts of living sacrifices.
I was always impressed by the similarities between sharks, dolphins, and icthyosaurs. Similarly, there's a phenomenal similarity between the flying reptiles such as the pterodactyls and bats with finger bones modified with flaps of skin to make wings. There's also the similarities between various species of gliding tree mammals, the flying squirrels and lemurs and the like. One can also talk of amazing developments with marsupials which had armored herbivores similar to a rhino and carnivores like a leopard-form. (and let's not forget that a Triceratops is built awfully similar to a rhino down to the armored hide, horns, and heavy, stocky legs.) All of these from obviously unrelated lines of descent converging on similar forms to satisfy ecological niches. If I recall correctly, there's also a type of fish that developed a false-placenta for live-birthed young -- it's not a true placenta because it isn't a placental animal but it serves the same purpose. I believe this fish was in the extended shark family.
The other thing that really amazes me is how the theory of evolution makes certain predictions that you'll simply not see contradicted. For example, there's the general rule that animals will adapt existing limbs for various purposes so you might see a rodent develop forelimbs into wings but you will not see a rodent sprout brand new wings from its back while retaining the previous four limbs. Even the weirdest body parts you can find can be seen to be modifications, not wholly new structures sprung forth from nothing. You won't see a bird suddenly come with three eyes or an elephant with a cyclopean eye or a cat with eight legs like a spider (barring genetic defects that will be unable to reproduce).
What's also amazing is how the lines between species get blurry. The old definition is that two populations are split as a species when they cannot interbred and create viable offspring. But we've seen from zoos that populations that don't mix in the wild can produce viable offspring such as ligers, tygons, then there's the blonde grizzlies that are a hybrid of grizzly and polar bear that did occur in the wild... All of these animals come from common ancestors if you go back far enough and it makes you wonder just how freely genes could be traded back and forth with the right technology and a proper understanding of genetics.
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
To which I say "Thank Xod for the interwebs." I'm watching them the day after they air and quite enjoying myself, thank you.
They say that paper is still a pretty good long-term storage medium. There's been talk about using high-quality printers and high-quality paperstock to print out tiny, complex patterns that look like UPS shipping data (those weird patterns replacing barcodes) that's actually a representation of encoded data. The encoded version is supposed to be able to fit hundreds of pages worth of data on one page.
OF course, paper is still capable of deterioration. CD's and DVD's sound like a really good idea with a laser burning the data as areas of light and dark on a special substrate but even that substrate can decay.
When we get right down to it, pretty much all of our storage media come down to moving something past a read/write head, be it magnetic tape, magnetic disk, or optical disk. Flash RAM is really the only one doing it differently. What we need is a media that won't degrade. That makes me think it won't be bendy so any tape-like solution is out. I'm guessing the answer we want is going to come down to a material with very high stability that is unlikely to decay regardless of heat, moisture, etc.
My guess is the true long-term solution will be some sort of glass that can be fed into a drive that burns patterns in with a laser. There's no substrate, the pattern is on the glass itself, and burned deeply enough to account for a little erosion. Now the next question is whether the glass will be cylinders, disks, square tablets, etc.
Now since I'm able to think of this, I'm sure other people have as well, smart people. Since we aren't already hearing about this solution on the market, there's probably bigger pitfalls than I'm anticipating that's holding it up. I'm guessing it'd probably be really, really frickin' expensive.
PC's are too "open" for the comfort of many industries. By moving focus to more restrictive consoles, companies regain their control. Once they have control, the ability to push ads you can't block, monitor what you're doing for marketing, and limit what you are allowed to do or not do with media, consoles will eventually come full-circle so that users will eventually be using them for the same things PC users have been, only in safe, friendly, controlled environment.
Suckers.
We're witnessing that same dynamic with cell phones. The whole "walled garden" phenomenon is going to have to be dealt with by government trust-busting because there's no way the consumers would ever have enough power to force it on their own.
This is going to be like the whole debate with thin client and fat client, centralized vs. decentralized computing, etc. It's always going to go back and forth.
Back in the PSX and PS2 era, it became stupid to try to keep up with PC gaming. A really good video card would cost as much as a proper console and the console would remain playable far longer whereas the computer would become outdated far more quickly. Game on consoles, work on computers, no-brainer.
With this generation, the consoles are getting too damn expensive. By the time you factor in accessories, you easily spend as much on them as PC's now. It's actually getting back to the point where if you already need a PC, it's just cheaper to spend extra to turn it into a gaming machine rather than gettin a work PC and a gaming rig.
Xbox 360 - was around $299 Extra controller - $50 Charging kit for a controller - $30 wireless adapter - $75 if you decide the 20gb drive is too small, you want the 120 - $200 memory card to serve as a backup to the hard drive - $50 headphones so you don't wake up the read of the house at night - $75
$779. And if you decided to upgrade the TV from the ol' CRT to a proper HDTV to look nice with the console, $1000 and up.
They say you'll save money bundling mobile, broadband, and phone lines on one bill. Not only has the total sum of the bills gone up, the bills become impossible to debug because support for those three areas are all separate specialists who don't have the authority to make changes on the side that isn't theirs.
I'm not usually a violent man but dealing with these companies causes visions of guillotines and wood-chippers to dance through my head.
As to writing about stuff that never happened, THIS never happened - until now. The "hyperdrive" (what Roddenberry renamed "warp drive") was never invented - yet. Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, flat screen talking computers, self-opening doors, and space shuttles (I remember a world without space travel at all).
Wow. Your UID should have a minus sign in front of it.
I'll just use a hot glue gun to seal up all of my usb ports and use ps/2 connectors for mouse and keyboard.
fuzz: HOLY SHIT! THIS GUY MUST BE SOME SORT OF UBER_HACKER!!!
me: Too fucking right. Now you piggies hurry on back to the donut shop or I'll make your cruiser drive you down to the gay district on autopilot with YMCA blaring from the radio. (holds hands up over head, makes "whoooooooooing" scary sound, wiggles fingers menacingly)
In the early 90's Infocom released the Crescent Hawk's Revenge. It was an RTS, no resource harvesting or manufacturing but it played out in real-time as you moved your units around and shot at stuff. Extremely primitive by today's standards but fun back in the day. That game royally kicked my ass.
Slashdot Mirror
None of this rinky-dink shuttle-derived crap, I mean serious tonnage into orbit booster technology.
http://www.optipoint.com/far/farbdb.htm
When you look at the way we do space travel right now, we can compare it to airplanes -- the way we're currently doing it is like a B2 bomber, the way we need to do it is like a 747. Now both programs were lengthy and expensive an dealt with serious engineering challenges. The B2 comes out of it being so much more expensive because it's a delicate and tempermental piece of gold-plated tech, we only built a limited number of them, and all of that dev cost is spread out over those limited number of units. The 747 is built by the hundreds, the support infrastructure is just as expensive when you work in all the airports around the world, but the cost is amortized over millions of trips per year which is why moving 20 tons of passengers and cargo on a 747 is cheaper than on a B2.
Ok, there's some places where the analogy breaks down, maybe I should have stuck with cars or compared 747's and Concordes, but the limited production run and limited number of flights is what's really killing the shuttle, not to mention the design compromises inherent in trying to satisfy too many customers with one vehicle. But I think most of that analogy still stands.
Old NES consoles were equipped with an EKG cartridge that ran the software. Inputs were from sensors on the patient's body plugged into the controller ports. The display was any old TV they could get their hands on. Power on the console, power on the TV, el cheapo EKG that worked just fine.
Nobody wants Vista and Windows 7 is just Vista rebranded. It may well be the year of Apple and Linux.
3 year usage life for a desktop? Hardly. You should be able to hit eight easy.
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!). With OpenCL and DirectGPU (or whatever MS is calling it this week), this should be good for anyone trying to build a cheap superGPU cluster.
It's exactly like the razor wars.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-blade game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Gillette is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary blades, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Gillette is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five blades, sweet Jesus in heaven.
S
Personalized Spam Rising Sharply
Now I am going to be worried every time I get one of those adverts for penis enlargement ....who told them?
Data mining. You must have ordered some of those little finger condoms people use in food service to cover up cut fingers and they just assumed it was for something other than food service. I'm still enraged that from my purchase history of metal they were able to decide Madonna's latest would be a good recommended buy for me.
The most efficient form of governance is a dictatorship. This is not to say that it is a universally ideal form of government -- for every example we have of an autocrat who was able to get what he wanted and happened to be correct, we can find many other examples of autocrats who got what they wanted and were dead wrong.
It is easier for a man of singular vision, foresight, and ambition to stand out as a dictator than as one of a committee but men of singular ignorance and venality tend to do less harm in committee form because they're like crabs in a bucket and it's hard for one to rise to preeminence and control.
By all accounts, Jobs is a bastard to work for. What makes it all the more galling is that is judgment calls are usually right so when your design needs more work, he'll tell you you're a fucking piece of shit, get the hell out of his sight, don't you fucking come back until you have something that doesn't make him want to vomit you cocksucker, you'll want to punch him in the throat. Yes, he could have been nicer about it, but by the time you finally come back with a design he likes, it'll also be the one the customers will go nuts for.
It's very rare to find that kind of person. When Jobs was booted out the first time, they brought in an airline executive as CEO. He didn't know anything about the industry and said all of Jobs' ideas weren't sticking to the knitting, were going out into left field and would waste money. Pragmatic business people agreed. Hell, I thought going into the music business when they were already struggling making computers was a bad idea. Looks like I was wrong.
What's driving Apple right now is a productive cult of personality. There's simply not a viable line of succession. Alexander the Great dies, the empire falls apart. Stalin dies, the empire lurches on but nobody in the party leadership will ever again risk letting someone gain that much power again. It's possible for a leader to rise up within the ranks of an existing organization and take it over with such force that you would think he was the founder. Jack Welch did that with GE. Because the market value went from $14 billion to $410 billion under his watch, he's lauded as a genius. Personally, I think he was more like an asshole who got lucky, got some breaks, and knew how to shaft the right people at the right time. He'd been picked as the golden boy to succeed to the leadership role by the previous CEO who later came to regret that decision because Jack poisoned the corporate culture much like a Carly Fiorina. Wall Street didn't seem to care because he made the trains run on time and that's all that mattered.
What's interesting is Microsoft seems to be struggling from both the lack of vision and the bureaucratic bloat that paralyzes large organizations and prevents meaningful action. This kind of strategic paralysis is usually the opening needed for a competitor to swoop in and steal the market. Apple would normally be in that position except for the huge questions concerning Jobs' prospects for this world. If both companies become wadded up with stupidity, will it finally become Linux's year for the desktop by default?
Yes, especially as it was those religious beliefs that allowed this device to be created in the first place, or did you miss the part about the Babylonian priests? Good God, can't you people get off your Anti-Religion Flaming Horse for one thread a day?
Tell me more about the horse. That sounds awesome.
You know you were thinking it.
Drill, baby, dr--AAAAUGH! It burns!
WHAT??? What do you mean no one takes Pastafarianism seriously?? Die, infidel!
If you disbelief in the deities you're an atheist, if you disbelieve in Pastafarianism does that make you antepasta? And if so, what would be a good wine to match with you?
Then we could excommunicate people for breaking coding conventions and burn them at the stake for buffer overflows. Of course, this would also mean we'd need altars to Gates and Torvalds in the server room, would have to burn the right incenses and make appropriate obeisances to ward off crashes. Of course, when the crashes happen anyway, we could then have the debate over whether the religion was false or if we simply weren't observing it strictly enough and decide to throw a virgin off the roof and see if things improve. (cue jokes about the likeliest department to find virgins in.) You know, it would be kind of cool to have a giant computing pyramid atop which is the altar we tear out the beating hearts of living sacrifices.
I was always impressed by the similarities between sharks, dolphins, and icthyosaurs. Similarly, there's a phenomenal similarity between the flying reptiles such as the pterodactyls and bats with finger bones modified with flaps of skin to make wings. There's also the similarities between various species of gliding tree mammals, the flying squirrels and lemurs and the like. One can also talk of amazing developments with marsupials which had armored herbivores similar to a rhino and carnivores like a leopard-form. (and let's not forget that a Triceratops is built awfully similar to a rhino down to the armored hide, horns, and heavy, stocky legs.) All of these from obviously unrelated lines of descent converging on similar forms to satisfy ecological niches. If I recall correctly, there's also a type of fish that developed a false-placenta for live-birthed young -- it's not a true placenta because it isn't a placental animal but it serves the same purpose. I believe this fish was in the extended shark family.
The other thing that really amazes me is how the theory of evolution makes certain predictions that you'll simply not see contradicted. For example, there's the general rule that animals will adapt existing limbs for various purposes so you might see a rodent develop forelimbs into wings but you will not see a rodent sprout brand new wings from its back while retaining the previous four limbs. Even the weirdest body parts you can find can be seen to be modifications, not wholly new structures sprung forth from nothing. You won't see a bird suddenly come with three eyes or an elephant with a cyclopean eye or a cat with eight legs like a spider (barring genetic defects that will be unable to reproduce).
What's also amazing is how the lines between species get blurry. The old definition is that two populations are split as a species when they cannot interbred and create viable offspring. But we've seen from zoos that populations that don't mix in the wild can produce viable offspring such as ligers, tygons, then there's the blonde grizzlies that are a hybrid of grizzly and polar bear that did occur in the wild... All of these animals come from common ancestors if you go back far enough and it makes you wonder just how freely genes could be traded back and forth with the right technology and a proper understanding of genetics.
They die because it's cold and the air's thin.
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
To which I say "Thank Xod for the interwebs." I'm watching them the day after they air and quite enjoying myself, thank you.
That was me, if you wanna wreck my karma. (Ticked the anon box accidentally.)
I only want to do that because you ran over my dogma.
They say that paper is still a pretty good long-term storage medium. There's been talk about using high-quality printers and high-quality paperstock to print out tiny, complex patterns that look like UPS shipping data (those weird patterns replacing barcodes) that's actually a representation of encoded data. The encoded version is supposed to be able to fit hundreds of pages worth of data on one page.
OF course, paper is still capable of deterioration. CD's and DVD's sound like a really good idea with a laser burning the data as areas of light and dark on a special substrate but even that substrate can decay.
When we get right down to it, pretty much all of our storage media come down to moving something past a read/write head, be it magnetic tape, magnetic disk, or optical disk. Flash RAM is really the only one doing it differently. What we need is a media that won't degrade. That makes me think it won't be bendy so any tape-like solution is out. I'm guessing the answer we want is going to come down to a material with very high stability that is unlikely to decay regardless of heat, moisture, etc.
My guess is the true long-term solution will be some sort of glass that can be fed into a drive that burns patterns in with a laser. There's no substrate, the pattern is on the glass itself, and burned deeply enough to account for a little erosion. Now the next question is whether the glass will be cylinders, disks, square tablets, etc.
Now since I'm able to think of this, I'm sure other people have as well, smart people. Since we aren't already hearing about this solution on the market, there's probably bigger pitfalls than I'm anticipating that's holding it up. I'm guessing it'd probably be really, really frickin' expensive.
Oldest brain? Fossilized? I wouldn't even know where to begin.
PC's are too "open" for the comfort of many industries. By moving focus to more restrictive consoles, companies regain their control. Once they have control, the ability to push ads you can't block, monitor what you're doing for marketing, and limit what you are allowed to do or not do with media, consoles will eventually come full-circle so that users will eventually be using them for the same things PC users have been, only in safe, friendly, controlled environment.
Suckers.
We're witnessing that same dynamic with cell phones. The whole "walled garden" phenomenon is going to have to be dealt with by government trust-busting because there's no way the consumers would ever have enough power to force it on their own.
This is going to be like the whole debate with thin client and fat client, centralized vs. decentralized computing, etc. It's always going to go back and forth.
Back in the PSX and PS2 era, it became stupid to try to keep up with PC gaming. A really good video card would cost as much as a proper console and the console would remain playable far longer whereas the computer would become outdated far more quickly. Game on consoles, work on computers, no-brainer.
With this generation, the consoles are getting too damn expensive. By the time you factor in accessories, you easily spend as much on them as PC's now. It's actually getting back to the point where if you already need a PC, it's just cheaper to spend extra to turn it into a gaming machine rather than gettin a work PC and a gaming rig.
Xbox 360 - was around $299
Extra controller - $50
Charging kit for a controller - $30
wireless adapter - $75
if you decide the 20gb drive is too small, you want the 120 - $200
memory card to serve as a backup to the hard drive - $50
headphones so you don't wake up the read of the house at night - $75
$779. And if you decided to upgrade the TV from the ol' CRT to a proper HDTV to look nice with the console, $1000 and up.
What next, a breathalyser for paedophiles?
Ew! I don't even want to know how that would work-- just ew!
They say you'll save money bundling mobile, broadband, and phone lines on one bill. Not only has the total sum of the bills gone up, the bills become impossible to debug because support for those three areas are all separate specialists who don't have the authority to make changes on the side that isn't theirs.
I'm not usually a violent man but dealing with these companies causes visions of guillotines and wood-chippers to dance through my head.
As to writing about stuff that never happened, THIS never happened - until now. The "hyperdrive" (what Roddenberry renamed "warp drive") was never invented - yet. Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, flat screen talking computers, self-opening doors, and space shuttles (I remember a world without space travel at all).
Wow. Your UID should have a minus sign in front of it.
I'll just use a hot glue gun to seal up all of my usb ports and use ps/2 connectors for mouse and keyboard.
fuzz: HOLY SHIT! THIS GUY MUST BE SOME SORT OF UBER_HACKER!!!
me: Too fucking right. Now you piggies hurry on back to the donut shop or I'll make your cruiser drive you down to the gay district on autopilot with YMCA blaring from the radio. (holds hands up over head, makes "whoooooooooing" scary sound, wiggles fingers menacingly)
fuzz: BETTER TAKE HIM SERIOUSLY! HE COULD DO IT!!
me: Heh. Wankers.
In the early 90's Infocom released the Crescent Hawk's Revenge. It was an RTS, no resource harvesting or manufacturing but it played out in real-time as you moved your units around and shot at stuff. Extremely primitive by today's standards but fun back in the day. That game royally kicked my ass.