...more recent posts
I've been gearing up for a new (personal) project. Practically this just means I've been thinking about a bunch of stuff, and it seems to be converging on something I could build. It's about bookmarks. I'm trying to follow the "scratch an itch" philosophy which states you should try to make things (tools?) that fill a personal need, as opposed to filling a potential need of some hypothetical market segment. And the bookmarking abilities of the big browsers are not really cutting it for me. Hopefully more info will follow as this develops.
Now that Napster is in a deal with BMG, I'm seeing headlines like this: "Napster goes legit." But who would pay money for the chance to download mp3s using another customers bandwidth, when the song might not even match the title, and even if it does the encoding probably sucks, plus the host machine might disconnect you at any moment? Peer to peer only works because its free. That's the whole point. That's why people make these sacrifices to use Napster. If you pay money then you will expect some quality of service guarantees. And you can't provide that in a peer to peer network.
Slashdot had this great link to a Christian Science Monitor article speculating that today (October 31) will be the last day with no human in space. The 7:53 GMT lift off of the Soyuz rocket carrying 2 cosmonauts and 1 astronaut to the International Space Station is planned to be the beginning of humankinds continual habitation of space.
"I'd say there's a decent chance that Oct. 30 may be the last day we don't have humans in space," says John Curry, the station's flight director at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston."Maybe this is a little overblown, sure, but it's fun to think about. Space colonization seems realistic to me, but of course we don't have too much experience yet, so it's probably too early to tell. My favorite argument against humans ever colonizing space is based on an idea called the "Copernican principle" (I can't remember who argued this, I'll try to find out.) It seems like bull at first, but if you really think about it there is some sense to it: There is very little chance that your particluar point of view is very special, and therefore it would be highly unlikely that you would be living in a time during the span of the human species that is in any way special. Yet if we do go on to colonize space and spread throughout the galaxy then it would be true that right now we are living at the very start of this incredible celestial journey. Your short life span would just happen to fall exactly at the birth of humans as a spacefaring civilivationl. But as we assumed to start, this sort of special perspective is highly unlikely, and therefore it follows that humans won't colonize space and live far far into the future. If we were going to colonize space, it would be overwhelmingly more likely that you woulld have been born in the vast chunk of time that makes up the middle 90% of spacefaring humankinds existence, in other words, you would have been born somewhere during the fantastically long ride we would have to go through to get anywhere in space. But since you (and me) were born right here on the home planet, it's highly likely that we are falling somewhere in the middle of our life span as a species, and therefore won't live that much longer than we have already been around, or again, in other words, not long enough to spread out through the galaxy.
Well, I said it sounded like bull. But the guy I'm paraphrasing argued this as a statistical argument. If you see the math, it's a little more convincing (deceiving?) Anyway, I don't buy it because I like being a bit more of an optimist. Perhaps this date actually will become significant in the far future as the day we first left home.
You can find out more about the ISS here. And here's the slashdot thread.
Aha! Maybe this helps explain Verizon's missed appointments.
"...the Department [of Justice] noted that Verizon's performance in providing DSL lines to its competitors appeared to be discriminatory with respect to installation times, quality of service, and repairs."A covad operator told me that Verizon was showing up for only 50% of their scheduled appointments. But I'm sure now that the government is involved everything will be worked out in a timely manner ;-)
Selected "Astronomy pictures of the day" (index): here, here, here, here, here, and here. Plus this big one of Mars.
Mark Pesce weighs in on the Sony Playstation II
"Doing the math, this 3-D revision of Moore's Law predicts that every five years computer graphics should improve in performance a thousandfold. My own experience over the last half-decade confirms this.... Alvy Ray Smith, one of the pioneers of computer graphics (now toiling away at Microsoft's research lab), told Howard Rheingold that 'reality is eighty million polygons a second.' To re-create scenes indistinguishable from reality, the computer needs to send that many of the tiny triangles to the screen. We're less than two years away from reaching that target, and there's no sign that things are slowing down."
The end of rapid technological change? Intriguing argument. (from HTP)
"It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."--Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000Huh? Dark dungeons? Does he mean that thing with the dragons and the funny dice? That's so pre-internet, but I guess he's got the right social group. Come to think of it, I seem to remember my mother warning me about Dungeons and Dragons as well. If only I had gotten into it, I'd probably be some sort of unix wizard by now, writing obfuscated one line perl programs to calculate the amount of hit point damage my stock options could do against a heavily armed phalanx of suited capitalists. Instead I wasted many years trying to fit in and kiss girls. Oh well.
Is Kid-A the pro-Napster argument the industry can't deny?
I grew up as a Red Sox fan. Not just a casual fan, I was one of the Fenway faithful. I loved the Bo Sox. Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Carleton Fisk, Luis Tiant, Rick Burelson (sp?), Butch Hobson, George Scott, Jerry Remey, Bill Lee (!), Carl Yastremski... These were the big league heros I grew up on. So I'm sure it would come as quite a shock to some of my playground pals that I now live in New York, and while I'm certainly not so fixated on baseball, I do route for the Yankees when it comes down to it. The Yankees! How could this be you ask? Those spoilers of so many Red Sox dreams. Those evil tyrants of the A.L. East. Those Bronx Bullies. My defense rests on the head (and what a head it is) of one man. A man who thoroughly signifies baseball - if not through his deeds at least through his posture - Don Zimmer. That's right, Joe Torre's right hand man, and former Red Sox head coach. The man who, at least for me, ties it all together. From the always losing Sox, to the never fail Yankees, it's really Don Zimmer I've been routing for all along. See? There's no conflict. So congratulations to the Don, and the rest of the Yanks. Now no more baseball talk for a year.