Links for 2009-06-30
MythTV support in Boxee : native support built-in — awesome! must try this out
(tags: mythtv boxee linux pvr mythfrontend)Introducing The Computer of 2010 : hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
(tags: history computing prediction funny 2010 forbes frogdesign fail pc future via:fanf)Bids for the SORBS blocklist over AU$1.2m : ‘Ms Sullivan said the highest “legitimate” offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.’
(tags: sorbs blocklists filtering anti-spam auctions bids)
Nix said,
July 1, 2009 @ 12:21 am
Hilariously offbeat is not the word. Some of those ideas are interesting but they were too optimistic (optical computing, holographic storage: not yet, but they did say “if we’re really lucky”; total voice computing: there for those who must for medical reasons, but too unpleasant for general use). Some are interesting but have unanticipated downsides and they obviously believed vendor hype (the ’smart house’, which might work better if it wasn’t for crackers, and surely should remain smart even when you take your laptop to work with you, and might work better in the States where houses seem to be built to fall down after thirty years. But even then a time horizon of >10yrs seems necessary). Some are obviously utterly dumb (the desk becoming a screen: I don’t know about you but I put things on my desk, which would cover the screen; the desk growing a keyboard: return of the ZX81 flat keyboard, what joy!)
(’If your computer is stolen or destroyed, you might actually start wondering who you are.’ Charlie Stross, Tourist, 2002. I wonder if Charlie read this Forbes article? Of course that happened much later than 2010 and was explicitly happening in the middle of a technological singularity. A rather unpleasant one.)
They really didn’t crunch the numbers, though. Their allegedly-fast cache was, um, physically separated from the CPU. At their postulated 100GHz the cache is going to have to be within 1mm of the CPU core to avoid stalls, assuming everything is operating at c, which it won’t be unless the CPU consists of a volume of hard vacuum. And, look, in the real world cache is integrated on the CPU die for exactly that reason. Hell, it was integrated on the CPU die in 2000: they couldn’t predict the present!
Justin said,
July 1, 2009 @ 9:50 am
I guess the lack of sensible practicality is what happens when you ask a design company, instead of a technology company ;)
Nix said,
July 1, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
I said:
No, he’s just read it. Lots of interesting comments.