wombat_socho

Anime Studio Pro 8



How long has software like this been loose on the market?

I have grown weary of fighting with LJ and its seemingly unending stream of DDoS attacks, especially since the new management doesn't seem to be inclined to compensate for the lost/erratic access. Thanks to onsenmark, I'm now set up at Dreamwidth.

I know some of you have already migrated; would you be kind enough to leave your addresses in the comments so I can friend you on Dreamwidth as well? Or not, an it please ye.

I've set my DW posts to cross-post here for the convenience of those folks reading this via RSS, Google Reader, or some other automagical tomfoolery.

Electrical brain stimulation v. Alzheimer's. First a cure for depression, and now this...it makes you wonder what else might be accomplished by a gentle prodding of other neurons, as opposed to electroshock. (Via haikujaguar's LJ )

For what it's worth, being in charge of the weekday news roundup at The Other McCain is forcing me to keep abreast of the news (foreign, domestic and technical) to a deeper and wider extent than I had been these last few years when I was just reading Instapundit and a handful of other -mainly political- blogs. Between Google News, WeSmirch and Memeorandum, I wind up learning a lot about a number of topics I normally wouldn't have known much about*, and one of those topics is the disappearing line between tablet PCs and e-book readers. Barnes & Noble finally did what I'd been hoping they'd do when the news first came out that the Color Nook had been hacked to unleash its potential as an Android tablet: they're selling the color Nook pre-hacked, so that now you can buy a tablet PC running the Android PC for just $249. Yes, it only has a 7" screen, but on the other hand, you're not on the hook with AT&T or Verizon for a couple years' worth of their data plan. I think this is going to put pressure on a couple of folks. Amazon needs to bring out a color Kindle tablet, and HP needs to get off their asses and get the TouchPad on the market. Amazon's problem is that the Kindle is being undercut by the Nook tablet, which is comparable in price, can run the Kindle Android app, and can do other things besides merely serve as a portable library. HP's problem is that while WebOS is arguably superior to both iOS and Honeycomb, it is late, late, late; worse yet, it doesn't have the enormous store of applications that iOS and Android tablets do. Yes, it painlessly transfers data from the Pre3 and Veer phones to the TouchPad (and probably will soon do the same for the Pixi and older Pre phones); yes, there are probably some other nice things that it'll inherit from the last WebOS phones from Palm...but it's taking forever to get the damn thing to market. I'll probably buy one anyway, but I can't help wondering if the whole business of converting the entire HP netbook/laptop/tablet line to run on WebOS isn't too little too late.

I'm also skeptical about the notion that tablets are going to wipe out netbooks. Most of the tablets so far rely on the cloud computing concept, and as we have seen lately, that concept still isn't quite ready for prime time from a corporate point of view. There's still going to be a market for smaller laptops that can function without the cloud, to say nothing of larger laptops with more flexibility and storage, just as there is still a market for specialized data collection "bricks" such as the FedEx and UPS guys use.

NB: I don't pretend to be a computer expert, just a user that's been around for a while and has been forced to immerse himself in tech news five times a week.

*And, in the case of the news WeSmirch delivers, I would just as soon not have known in the first place.

digex had this book sitting on his office bookshelf when I went up to see him last week, and as I am perpetually curious about the history of things (and the Internet in particular, since I've been peripherally involved in it since the days when it was still ARPANET) I borrowed it.

It was well worth the time. John Naughton writes from an English perspective, so he has some insights into the early history of computers that one probably wouldn't see from an American writer, and his writing style reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson, which is another plus. Unlike Stephenson, he doesn't feel the need to take extended side trips into higher mathematics, but he nonetheless covers all the odd geniuses responsible for the ideas behind the internet (Vannevar Bush's Memex makes an appearance, and rightly so) as well as the engineers, grad students, and (yes) visonary bureaucrats who brought the Internet from a Defense Department dream of unstoppable tactical communications to a wide-open bazaar that brings us everything from scholarly essays to cat macros to cheap goods to rare treasures to pr0n. In other hands, this could have been a dull and thudding tale, but Naughton does an awesome job of spinning an enthralling story reaching from his father's frustrated ham radio dreams to the billion-volt limitless future where all the world's information and treasures are literally at our fingertips. Highly recommended; A Brief History of the Future is not available in a Kindle edition, but used copies of the hardback and paperback are available for literally pennies.

The Internet Changes Nothing:

Of course the things we do on the Internet are different from those we did (and do) in front of the TV. But it’s important to remember that they are only different; they are not new. Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your horizons, you could send email to strangers in, say, China, but you don’t. You read the news. You could read newspapers from distant lands so as to broaden your horizons, but you usually don’t. You watch videos. There are a lot of high-minded educational videos available, but you probably prefer the ones featuring, say, snoring cats. You buy things. Every store in the world has a website, so you could buy all manner of exotic goods. As a rule, however, you buy the things you have always bought from the people who have always sold them. You play games. There are many kinds of games on the Internet, but those we seem to like best all fall into two categories: the ones where we can kill things and the ones where we can cast spells. You look things up. The Web is like a bottomless well of information. You can find the answer to almost any question if you’re willing to look. But you generally don’t like to look, so you get your answers from Wikipedia. Last, you do things you know you shouldn’t. The Internet is great for indulging bad habits. It offers endless opportunities to steal electronic goods, look at dirty pictures, and lose your money playing poker. Moreover, it’s anonymous. On the Web, you can get what you want and be pretty sure you won’t get caught getting it. That’s terrifically useful.

Pretty interesting essay on how the Internet hasn't really changed anything. RTWT.
(GVDL)

After downloading Charles' Stross Wireless by mistake, the second and third books I picked up for the Kindle were John Ringo & Tom Kratman's The Tuloriad and S.M. Stirling's The High King of Montival

( Cut to spare the f-list )

cipherpunk's horrible experience with Verizon is another reason I'm never having anything to do with Verizon if I can possibly help it - to the point where if the only phone option for a house/condo I'm looking at in a few years is Verizon, then I'm not going to move there. Screw that company, seriously. Sprint 4 lyfe.

No, seriously. Dung gets used for fuel and fertilizer in a lot of places that we like to call the Third World, but there are more effective ways to use it than just drying it out and throwing it in the fire. It's pretty amazing how much processing all that dung into gas can change the lives of people for the better. RTWT.

Current View:

That's my recommendation. We don't need a conference. We need an X program. DC/X showed the way. Next step is to build a larger one. I'd go for the full 600,000 GLOW SSX, but we can settle for something smaller (that can never make orbit, or even scare it much, but can teach us a lot about engines and control). DC/X used hydrogen. One of the things we learned from DC/X is you really don't want hydrogen rockets; they are an operational nightmare. Max Hunter always thought we'd end up using propane. (There are those who like methane, but rocket fuel grade methane is hard to obtain and has operations difficulties. Propane is easy to come by and we know a lot about handling it.) The conclusion is obvious, at least to me: build the best propane LOX ship using at least 8 engines that we can build with present technology. Make it somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 pounds GLOW. Build it, take it to Edwards, and fly it. Build three tail numbers. Fly the first one closer and closer to the envelope and learn all we can. If it prangs -- sometimes X ships do -- you've got the second tail number to fly until the tests are over. With luck the third one is a hangar queen that eventually goes to the Smithsonian.

We don't need a conference, we need to fly some rocket ships.

He ought to know. RTWT.