Interesting Links for 01-08-2014

• What's it like at the world's biggest LAN party?
  (tags: games )
• Thousands of medieval manuscripts available online
  (tags: history )
• Arab Leaders, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel, Stay Silent
  (tags: egypt israel palestine middle_east politics islam )
• E-cigarettes are less harmful than cigarettes
  (tags: nicotine )
• I'm very happy to see decent arguments against Scottish Independence. Better Together are not providing them.
  (tags: independence Scotland )
• What Snowpiercer’s Video-on-Demand Success Means for Indie Films
  (tags: movies distribution vod )
• 100 novels everyone should read (I love the synopses!)
  (tags: books )
• Key to aging immune system is discovered
  (tags: immune_system age aging )
• Stellar - a decentralised method of transferring money between currencies
  (tags: money technology )
• Dark net drugs adverts double in less than a year
  There is, of course, a simple answer...
  (tags: drugs internet )
• Oculus Rift DK2 includes the entire screen assembly from a Galaxy Note 3
  (tags: virtualreality technology )
• The Mona Lisa's Twin Painting Discovered
  (tags: art painting LeonardoDaVinci history )
• Tory MPs call for rethink on government Israel policy
  (tags: conservatives israel )
• Utah man fired after boss complains blog post about homophones made school sound gay
  (tags: lgbt education USA OhForFucksSake viaSkreidle )
• Sales of movie film have dropped 96% in the last eight years. It's very nearly extinct
  (tags: film movies technology )
• Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF. (NSFW. Hilarious.)
  (tags: sex animated_gif funny )
• Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?
  (tags: parenting children surveillance )
• Cameron closes nuclear deal behind Parliament's back
  (tags: nuclearweapons USA politics UK )
• Could _you_ complete Piano Hero on Expert Mode.
  (tags: piano video )
• Three axes of relationships, and the people who don't want them (the asexual, the aromantic and the asocial)
  (tags: relationships asexual romance social )
• Samuel Beckett Motivation Cat Posters.
  (tags: cats motivation theatre funny )
• The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
  (tags: music )
• Might I recommend that you do _not_ take mushroom at Comic-Con?
  (tags: comics conventions psilocybin magic_mushrooms psychedelics funny )
• The world's best antidepressant
  (tags: antidepressants happiness comic )
• Russia enacts draconian law for bloggers and online media
  (tags: Russia media surveillance blogging LiveJournal )
• Fired From Los Alamos for Pushing Obama's Nuclear Agenda
  (tags: obama nuclearweapons censorship )

Technology of the Future - Today!

I remember being amazed when you could first buy a desktop PC for under a thousand pounds. This would have been in 1998, or so. There was discussion of it amongst the people at work, amazement that you could buy something which might be a bit rubbish but would still allow you to do some word processing, play some Quake 2*, surf the web on our awesome dial-up modems, etc.

I would have been blown away to discover that in the far-flung future star-date of 2014 you'd be able to get a desktop PC for £100.

Moore's Law, of course, does its work. Your computer power per pound pretty-much halves each year.** But then this machine, although pitiful by modern standards, would wipe the floor with anything from back then. 2GB of RAM, and 160GB of hard disk space sounds rather rubbish to me now, but back then I'd have killed for anything even close to that spec.

I don't quite want one of these. If it came in a box small enough to fit under the TV and was completely silent then it would probably make a great media PC, but I'm more impressed by their existence than anything else***.


*Unaccelerated, of course. You weren't going to get a 3dfx card for that!
**Give or take. We get more cores nowadays, which is harder to put to full work. And the frequency wars ended up some time ago, but the number of instructions per clock tick has gone up, I believe, if not quite as fast as we'd all like.
***They're mostly in demand in places like Africa, South America and Central Asia, according to this.