Information flow

[Poll #1461909]

(And yes, RSS there is meant to also include Atom, for those techno-pedants in the crowd)

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-24-2009

• Fox hat ad inspires comedy event
  They're building a comedy festival around one of my favourite ads! And I had no idea it was Rich Hall in the ad!
  (tags: advertising comedy scotland)
• First amateur HD Video from the edge of space
  Attach a HD video camera to a balloon. Send it right to the edge of the atmosphere. And back again, when the baloon pops!
  (tags: space video balloon)
• If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
  Able to spot 80% of the truth-tellers and 87% of the liars by looking at their drawings of a scene.
  (tags: psychology lying)
• British Fantasy Society admits lazy sexism over male-only horror book.
  And well done to them for not trying to bluster their way past it.
  (tags: scifi writing feminism sexism fantasy)

Computing - the next twenty years

This is a writeup of a presentation on where computing is going.  It's both entertaining and fascinating.

I have no clue about what high-performance computing will look like 20 years from now.

So, I asked a few of my colleagues. The answers can be summarized simply, since there were only three, really:

A blank stare. This was the most common reaction. Like “Look, I have a deadline tomorrow.”

Laughter. I understand that response completely.

And, finally, someone said: What an incredible opportunity! You get to make totally outrageous statements that you’ll never be held accountable for! How about offshore data centers, powered by wave motion, continuously serviced by autonomous robots with salamander-level consciousness, spidering around replacing chicklet-sized compute units, all made by the world’s largest computer vendor – Haier! [They make refrigerators.] And lots of graphs, all going up to the right!
===
Moore’s Law won’t end with a bang; it will end with a whimper. It will gradually fade out in a period stretching over at least two decades.
===
Computing will in general become cheaper – but not necessarily that much faster.
===
There will be TeraFLOPS on everybody’s lap, at least for some values of “lap”; lap may really be pocket or purse.
===
Computing will be done either on one’s laptop / cellphone / whatever; or out in a bloody huge mist/fog/cloud -like thing somewhere. There may be a hierarchy of such cloud resources, but I don’t think anybody will get charged up about what level they happen to be using at the moment.

Absolutely worth a look if you're interested in the future of computing.

My computer's too slow

[Poll #1461959]

You can't buy a computer nowadays that's too slow to run Word Processors/Spreadsheets/Web browsers on.

So what would you be able to do on your computer if it was faster that you can't now?

Twitter Question

Given two people is there a way to tell who links them?  I'd like to know if I share followers with another person, but there doesn't seem to be any way of doing that that I can see...

Enfrazzlement

No further movement on the damp problem.  I failed to get hold of my loss adjuster on Monday or Tuesday, on Wednesday got hold of him and he told me that the builders hadn't sent through their estimate (despite it having been a week) - so I phoned them, got a secretary, and was told it would be taken care of immediately.  Phoned back today, but no reply.  *sigh*

But tomorrow poisonduk helps me pick up tiles for the new bathroom I'm having put in, next Tuesday the bath/sink/toilet arrive, and two weeks from now I'll have a new bathroom installed.  If the damp can also be fixed by then I'll be a very happy Andy.

Meantime, Julie and I are working our way through Mad Men series 1, which is fantastic (if depressing a fair chunk of the time).  We just finished episode 6 over takeaway Italian, which was lovely.  And I'm about to put 130 VHS tapes into carrier bags to take to the charity shops, then do some sorting and tidying around the flat in an attempt to have it be slightly more livable until it's sorted.

And then, I think, another episode of Mad Men (or more of season 1 of TNG, which acts as the anti-Mad-Men), followed by an early night.

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

(courtesy of jwz)

Aha!

I spent three episodes of Mad Men trying to work out where I recognised Francine from, and it turns out that she's the main character in The Book Group!

Ooh, and she's in later House too, by the looks of things.