Just a note that today is the 35th anniversary of the first men landing on the moon. I've pretty much always considered this as humanity's crowning achievement in technology, in part that we put some explorers up there, but also that we brought every one back home safely. That's some serious engineering.
To the moonwalkers Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, and Schmitt; the pilots who orbited Luna, Collins, Gordon, Roosa, Worden, Mattingly, and Evans; the guys on #13 who couldn't touch down, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise; the men on the earlier Apollo missions who "merely" orbited the moon; and the massive support team for the entire Apollo project, including George Low -- thanks, everyone.
NASA has a lot of exhibitry about the first landing as well.
The New York Times is running an article that comes as no surprise to those of us in the software industry.
In a campaign season of polarization, when Republicans and Democrats seem far apart on issues like Iraq, the economy and leadership style, it is perhaps not surprising that the parties find themselves on different sides in the politics of software as well.The Web sites of Senator John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee run mainly on the technology of the computing counterculture: open-source software that is distributed free, and improved and debugged by far-flung networks of programmers.
In the other corner, the Web sites of President Bush and the Republican National Committee run on software supplied by the corporate embodiment of big business - Microsoft.
Congratulations to Burt Rutan's group for successfully putting an aircraft above 100 km (essentially, the edge of space) and safely landing like an airplane (as opposed to NASA's lawn dart) a few minutes later. The culmination of five years of design, experiment and $20M of Paul G. Allen's money, it is a great achievement of a group of immensely talented people.
According to a Newsfactor Network story on the rise of the Bluetooth technology:
Among the more exotic applications, Toyota offers Bluetooth as an option for the 2004 Prius. Bluetooth connects the driver's cell phone to the car, allowing the driver or passenger to make calls using the car's speakers and microphone, or upload addresses to the Prius' GPS.
A few days ago, Microsoft leaked what their new system specifications will likely be for the next major Windows release, codenamed Longhorn, expected to reach beta in late 2005. You can read the full article, but here's the money graf:
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
This is an admirable rocketbox for today's Q2'04 home computing needs, to be sure -- we'd all like a Tbyte of storage -- but dang, Bill, this is the minimum? The graphics processor is 3X of today's market best is only half an order of magnitude improvement, but it's not trivial. Moore's Law says that it will be achievable, and it's probably already on the benchtop and just waiting for the right time to be released into the market (the semiconductor biz has learned a little bit from how much extendibility it gave away back in the hotshot 1990s); and the improvement in uP speed is likewise non-trivial but highly achievable. As hardware specs go, this set is challenging but readily possible.
But let's ask, what the hell does Longhorn do that needs this much platform?
sigh. I probably don't wanna know. I genuinely love the monumental leaps that technology makes, and the right-thinking apps which make our lives richer in tiny ways. Such creativity manifest is simultaneously entertaining, useful, and affirming that real, live people brought forth something new(er). That we tend, eventually, to ruin a good thing and leave behind heaps of waste is testament to the tunnelvision of the non-creative types who creep in and force-fit a world of wonderment into a perpetuable form.
So ask yourself, when the time comes, do you really need a Longhorn? You can answer yes, but don't fear answering no. Technology should fulfill needs, not mere wants.
With that in mind, those readers who are of sufficient certain age (and this scribe is staring down, in mere days, rolling his tens digit from III to IV) may have fond memories of simpler times, when an Apple ][ or other boxes of its generation would demand all-night, pizza-and-cola fueled hacking sessions, whether solving a game, coding a program, cracking some protection scheme, or just trying to get 300 baud audible connectivity to the campus mainframe (luxury!). Many of those nights (and days) were accompanied by some of the funkiest new-wave electro-pop of the 80s, so when you click here, think back, and see if you hear the long-distance echos of Madness, XTC, or perhaps even Chumbawamba. Enjoy.