Comments are off. They were turned on by accident, anyway. This should stop the spam at least.
Comments are off. They were turned on by accident, anyway. This should stop the spam at least.
I see that New Yorker Magazine just did something very nifty: The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive. Although having it online as a subscription service would be great, too, this is an awesome thing to have it if you want to read past articles, search articles, or just relax by reading stuff from the past — recollections or articles friends have pointed you towards. Of course, I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, but not just for the New Yorker. No, what I would love to see is Analog (nee Astounding) and other SF magazines provide their old issues in a digital format. I do realize that there’s some level of difficulty in doing so, what with getting rights from the various authors, scanning in art, entering all the text, etc. However, I’m sure there are enough fans out there that they’d help do most of the heavy lifting and provide it back to the various owners of the rights gratis, ala Wikipedia. Imagine if you could access, whenever you wanted, entire issues of Analog/Astounding, IASFM, Worlds of If, Galaxy, F&SF, etc.! You could simply ask to read stories by the likes of Larry Niven
Some pieces of hardware are simply too cool. I picked up this piece at Tiger Direct. It allows you to easily swap drives for different OSes. I used to use a tray system for my old IDE drives but this is mucho simpler. The old system required $30 trays while this new system costs $25 total, no trays: you simply slide bare SATA drives into it. Genius. Pure genius!
I feel for the folks in the US Midwest. This storm has dropped between 0.5cm to 2.5 cm of ice causing general havoc. We went through The Ice Storm of 1998 which is considered the worst ice storm in recent history — dumping 5-7 times as much ice as the Midwest is experiencing. Some folks were without power for weeks and the cleanup took months, if not years. You can still see the damage from that storm 10 years later! So, for the sake of Midwesterners suffering through their storm, I hope it abates soon. A beautiful natural disaster to be sure. But still an unpleasant one to live through.
I’ve been wondering why no-one has put together a proper Lisp Machine VM. By that I mean a VM that runs in something like VMware Player. It would allow anyone who needs one to simply launch a Lisp Machine. I do realize the original Lisp Machines, like the Symbolics 3600 I coded on decades ago, have a special architecture and can’t easily be ported. But I was hoping that someone out there would have taken one of the many Common Lisp implementations and put all the pieces needed for an excellent Lisp environment and wrapped it in a VM that any of us could simply run by double-clicking on it. There are appliances for all kinds of things, but none for a Lisp Machine. Sigh.
Saw this video over at TechCrunch. Brilliant and funny. Enjoy. That’s the new version. Read why it’s changed here: Updated Video at Plagiarism Today. A nice, level headed piece on the whole issue. Tech Crunch also weighs in. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the video now that it’s back. It is funny, esp. after living through Bubble 1.0.