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26
Living Room / Bedtime Story
« on: December 06, 2007, 08:16 PM »
"Daddy, will you tell me a bedtime story?"

"Sure.  Once upon a time there were two variables."

"What were their names, Daddy?"

"We'll call them D and M.  And D and M were initialized together and were very happy.  And then one day, they, um... multiplied..."

"Is that a euphemism for anything, Daddy?"

"Not at all, dear.  Not at all.  Anyway, they multipled and the result was a bouncing baby variable named A."

"And they lived happily ever after!  Together!"

"Well, not quite.  You see, there was an another variable, who'd never bothered to get initialized.  His name was X."

"Ooooh.  Was he a bad variable?"

"Oh yes.  Because X wasn't initialized, he was a big fat zero.  And then, he tried to divide D and M!"

"Then what happened?"

"A horrible division by zero error!"

"Eek!"

"And then do you know what happened?"

"Tell me!"

"The bad old variable was taken out of the program, and then it compiled just fine.  The end."

"Um... Daddy?"

"Yes, sweetie?"

"You still program in BASIC, don't you?"

"Ah... well, it's Visual Basic."

"Poor Daddy."

27
Living Room / The State the Art of 3D Printers
« on: December 06, 2007, 04:20 PM »
The Z Corporation ZPrinter 450 represents a middle-of-the-road solution to your 3D printing needs.

http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/138/spage.aspx

Z450.jpg

What is 3D printing?  Imagine working with your favorite 3D modelling software, and when you hit the "Print" button, instead of getting a piece of paper with a picture of your creation, you get an actual 3D plastic model in full color. 

3Dee!.jpg

It's here, today, now.  For a cool $39,999 USD you can have the 3D printer of your dreams.  Oh sure, a cheaper monochrome model exists, as well as a top-end ultra-high resolution edition, but for everyday fantasies the Z450 can't be beat.  Like I'd know -- if I had $40K to drop on a printer the damn thing better come with beer taps and print real money.

But patience is your friend.  Remember when color laser printers cost as much as a car?  Now you can have one for the same price as a week's car rental.  I expect the same thing to happen with 3D printing.

But until that day comes, you'll have to do things oldschool.

28
Living Room / $4,450 World of Warcraft Edition Laptop
« on: December 05, 2007, 06:08 PM »
Via Wired's Gadget Lab, Dell Readies $4,450 WOW Laptop.

horde_and_alliance_notebook.jpg

No.  Just... no.

29
Living Room / Your Power Suit is (Almost) Ready
« on: December 05, 2007, 10:43 AM »
Finally, my dreams are but a few hundred million bucks and a coupla years away.

steamman.jpg

Here is streaming video of a fully articulated powered exoskeleton, now under development by Ratheon:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=109_1195663753

Sure, it's tethered.  Sure, it has an external power supply.  But my god: look at the ease with which the wearer does impossible tasks!  Lifting 200 pounds repeatedly with full, natural motion.  Running, walking, tip-toeing.  Dancing.

It looks cleverly designed, "getting out of the way" when the user wants to manipulate something bare-handed.  (One might imagine the dangerous hilarity of trying to, say, brush your teeth while wearing the thing.)

It navigates stairs, ramps, and the design suggests sitting or reclining is possible.

The makers even go so far as to say the skeleton can operate autonomously, while its human wanders off to do biological things.  Even if it's something as simple as coming when it's called ("here, boy!") that alone would be our first real application of humanoid robotics.  Truly, we are living in the future.

Once they get the power-pack integrated I can easily see applications for these everywhere.

And if anyone disagrees with that, we can settle this the old fashioned way: power-suit to power-suit.

30
Living Room / Destroying the World, One Server at a Time
« on: December 05, 2007, 10:00 AM »
BLDGBLOG links to these New Scientist and Money articles about the impact of our world IT infrastructure on the environment.  And let's just say, the environment is Not Happy.

servers.jpg

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/server-rooms-and-future-of-humanism.html

One server alone, we read, has the "same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

By "server" I'm sure they mean the enterprise-class brutes your ISP is running 24/7 at the other end of your cable.

But still, an SUV?

As Money explained last summer, these "server farms" and "data centers" can each use up to "a small city's worth of electricity" – and most of that electricity goes toward "cranking up the air conditioning to make sure the computers don't literally melt themselves into slag."

The electricity of a small city?  Holy hydroelectric, Batman!  That's crazy bad.  I had no idea my innocent surfing and DonationCoder addition was sucking down that kind of juice.  Maybe I'll cut back on the pr0n.

What's really interesting is the tangent BLDG zips off on next: where does it make sense to build these humming shrines to Amazon and Google?  The answers are surprising and innovative, and give me hope for the future.  At least people are thinking about this now, and not when the Mad Max mutants are fighting over the last can of petrol.

Oh, and extra bonus points for teaching me a new phrase: "mouse potato".

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