Archive for September, 2005

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Thursday, September 29th, 2005

For a brief, blindingly wonderful moment, I thought that someone had made a game out of Dark Star. Alas, it turns out to be just some typical Teutonic space sim with a violently cliched science-fiction backstory. If you haven’t seen it, Dark Star is one of the crowning achievements of ...

The Future, I hardly knew ye

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

So…round about 1996, drunk on hype from John Romero (this was in the days when he was swearing up and down that the only weapon in Quake was going to be a hammer…would it technically be a first-person shooter, I wonder? Or a first-person bonker?), I began feverishly researching ...

Android weathermen

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

Human-obsoleting technology continues to penetrate into even the most esoteric careers. Fox News doesn’t even need to wait around for the digital weatherman to be perfected—they can improve their operations and achieve efficiencies using existing and well understood technology. They could just put a melon on a pole, staple a blazer ...

What the Hell, People

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

Why is it that the United States is completely incapable of getting on board with any worldwide standard, no matter how much sense it makes? For example… Celsius: Used everywhere. Freezing water is zero degrees. Boiling water is 100 degrees. Fahrenheit: Used in the U.S. Freezing water is ...

Alienation

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Now here is a damn fine piece of writing. Read that essay, and then pardon me while I dabble in a bit of stereotypically-bloggy self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-indulgent blathering… I’ve been thinking a lot about alienation, but I hadn’t labelled it as such. Putting a name on the problem makes it ...

Whither Google Fiber?

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Well, this is sure interesting. Tons of computing capacity. An independent fiber backbone. Software for both voice and text communication. Search tools for web sites, comparative pricing, blogs. Satellite photo coverage of the entire planet. Software for playing video. Wireless access. Not only are they ...

Whither Google Wi-Fi?

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

This story has been bouncing around for a couple of days now. I haven’t seen this story inspire a whole lot of crazy, baseless predictions yet, so I thought I’d try to fill the empty void with some unfounded nonsense of my own. Wi-Fi just doesn’t make sense for Google if ...

Banh mi

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

What is it about really good banh mi? I could eat Pho Cyclo’s pork banh mi every single day.

Nokia N91 delay

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

Lot of talk today about the N91 delay, and speculation as to why. It sounds like Nokia wasn’t expecting to be able to get Janus integrated until much later. When they announced the phone, they made statements to the effect that Janus support would be not be available ...

Stupid vs. Evil, Part Duh

Monday, September 19th, 2005

The most troubling thing about the Stupid vs. Evil metric is that, if you rate a bunch of companies according to this metric, and then you correlate that to public opinion of the company, you will find that the public generally considers Stupid to be worse than Evil. In ...