Links & Suggestions # 6: zombies, astronomical 486, digital dark ages, 3D fiascos & Windows

December 10, 2008 · Filed Under Babel fish, Links & Suggestions 

Babel fish - A mental interface between Sir Arthur's sensibility and the events from the outer world. And for all the rest, tooThis new round up of sparse suggestions has heterogeneity as its distinctive mark. I mean, here we’re trying to keep together a zombiecon with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Google fiascos with the possible future ones by Microsoft, the usual crap on P2P and even the ostracism by Western Digital for the SSD technology! I need a 36 hours-long day, definitely :-D

  • The backup unit of the Hubble telescope? An 80486. During the last September, the humanity’s eye headed toward the most distant universe has been blinded by a failure to the control unit for processing the data coming from the instruments before sending them on Earth. Waiting to repair the component (a fixing delayed to May 2009), one of the Great Observatories orbiting around the planet is currently controlled by the emergency unit, which features an archaic Intel 80486 processor. That’s fantastic, you almost never think that the space technologies working since decades feature computer components as much as ancient. It’s a… cathartic fact :-D Hubble’s 486 back-up springs into life via Slashdot.

  • Zombies at Wall Street. A zombiecon is an organized gathering of funny guys and gals made up like in a George Romero’s movie, and this year a zombiecon has been held in front of the dying and aphasic American and international finance temple. Sooner or later I’ll organize one by myself here in Italy, and obviously it will be afore one of the many TV buildings of the duopoly Mediaset/RAI that is to say a place where brains are useless hence they can be used to feed the undead :-P Photos from Zombiecon 2008 via Digg.

    Zombiecon 2008

  • The lost Exabytes of the digital dark age. One Exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes, the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes, a million Terabytes or even 1,000 millions Gigabytes. According to assistant professor Jerome P. McDonough there are currently 369 Exabytes within the digital world, and they will all fade into oblivion if we’ll not think about a way to adequately preserve them for future generations. I would remove the need to archive the traces of Silvio Berlusconi’s life and Britney Spears’ songs, but for the rest I couldn’t agree more :-D ‘Digital Dark Age’ may doom some data via Slashdot.

  • The usual bullshits on P2P. Obviously, considering the terms, we’re talking about the opinions from the majors and the copyright-involved organizations on file sharing. P2P represents a predominant amount of the Internet traffic, and that’s a fact. Less trivial is that someone pretend to give a real monetary value to the shared music contents, something like 69 billions of dollars in 2007 according to the “clever” guys from MultiMedia Intelligence, and than talk about the “impact of piracy on the music industry“. A great fanciful exercise, no doubt about that, but I know even better moronic jokes. However who would like to make equal physical piracy and the digital one is absolutely more moronic than me. Intelligent people know what’s the difference, these idiotic and ill-intentioned assholes clearly not. Unlicensed P2P Value: $69 Billion in 2007 & Group wants online and physical theft to be treated equally.

  • Windows, Windows and Windows again. In this period Windows is on the highlights, and particularly the next Windows 7 or “Seven” is. Boing Boing has for example mocked the policy Microsoft chose to monetize Vista with 10,000 different versions (all useless, of course) “showing” the 20 editions of Windows 7, while Redmond is serious on talking about the ability of the future Windows OS to scale up to 256 different CPU cores. Waiting to know how much of the amazing features already announced for Seven will end like WinFS, one can comfort himself knowing that Windows has become part of the cloud computing too with Azure. No, not Azureus, Azure :-P

  • Google makes a 3D flop. My idiosyncrasy for 3D “worlds” Second Life-alike is legend: I mean, what kind of trash are they? An animated chat? A place full of idiots and exhibitionists or simply people with their brains burnt? An outlet for pedophiles, bestophiles and frustrated people? The continuation of the same shit of the First Life with some more colors and oddities? Way better videogames, and I’m very happy to know that one of these 3D chats have been killed even before coming out of beta. Then it’s a surplus to know that it is Lively, the Google 3D chat. Lately Mountain View makes a lot of mistakes, maybe it’s the crisis in the air to bother Brin, Page & company, who knows :-P Lively no more via Slashdot.

    Second Bestiality

  • Western Digital is cautious about the SSDs. WD is one of the major hard disk manufacturers worldwide, and it was one of the few renowned brands of the industry remained to have to announce its policy in regard of the solid state drives market. Now the company has spoken out, deciding to watch the market evolution from afar and join it only when it will be the right time. Currently I use WD disks with great satisfaction, and I can’t help but agree on the fact that the SSDs are an immature and largely overestimated technology. Western Digital doesn’t rule out SSDs.

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