type “about:mozilla” into your browser bar in any version of Firefox. On Easter day alone, this will reveal the following message:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
My T42 Thinkpad came with an 80GB Hitachi Travelstar hard drive. I’ve been living at 95% maxed out capacity for well over half its lifetime, surviving by migrating a lot of files to an external disk (mostly personal video and raw data from my MRI research). The Thinkpad is also starting to show its age in terms of cruft; my new Asus EEE is much easier to use in some ways because I’ve installed only a core set of software that I use often (limited by it’s tiny 4 GB SSD). A clean XP install – nlited to save me the hassle of installing service packs and software – is clearly necessary. So, an upgrade was clearly (over)due, despite my tightwad constraints. Winning a $30 Amazon voucher from Read/Write Web spurred me to action; I’ve just placed an order for a Western Digital 250 GB Scorpio drive.
Since my Thinkpad is older, it only has an Ultra-ATA interface instead of the newer SATA ones. Hence, my choices were limited and I had to choose between 250 GB for $130 or 160 GB for $90. WD is the only manufacturer which makes a laptop drive at 250 GB capacity with the Ultra-ATA interface, but I am satisfied that the drive is worth the cost (partially offset by the Amazon voucher to boot). The performance of the SATA version is reputed to be excellent, and I doubt the UATA lags it much (as it happens, SATA requires slightly more power consumption, so what I lose in marginal performance, I will regain in marginal battery life).
I am planning to stay with Windows XP for the time being, most likely Service Pack 3 (which is not an official release yet, but you can download it as a release candidate from Microsoft). I’m not sure how well my Thinkpad will run Vista, since it’s only got a Dothan chip instead of a Yonah (aka Core Duo). Steven’s travails are also a cautionary tale.
My plan is to also order a cheap external 2.5″ case to house the old drive, so I can more easily transfer the data off (and of course reserve it in case I ever need to boot back into my old setup). Now I need to think about something a bit more rigorous for backup; at present I have the external disk I mentioned, but it would be better to invest in a NAS like a Linkstation Pro. Sigh. A print server would also be nice… argh! It never ends.
it seems that reality has caught up to science fiction – a robot has killed a man:
Francis Tovey was distraught over having to move out of his home into foster care and built the robot from plans found on the Internet.
A jigsaw power tool actuated a .22 caliber pistol with four cartridges. Tovey was hit with four rounds after activating the machine in his driveway, according to witnesses who ran to the house after the shooting.
It’s a sad story, but part of me has to respect the ingenuity and determination of Mr. Tovey.
There’s a great in-depth article in the Iridium satellite network at TG Daily that is worth a read. When I worked in Boston back in 1997, an Iridium executive had come round to pitch the service, and made a compelling case for the technology and wow factor. Two years later it was bankrupt. the business model just wasn’t right for a consumer service:
Analysts speculated back then that Iridium would need about 1 million customers to reach a break even. The estimated cost just to maintain the satellite network was about $540 million per year. Despite the hype, Iridium saw just a lukewarm feedback from customers: Just 3000 customers subscribed to the service in 1998. By the end of March, the customer base was just 10,300 and by the end of June just about 15,000. Still, especially market research firms fueled the hype around the company: Dataquest, for example, estimated in early 1999 that global satellite phone services would be able to attract about 10 million subscribers by 2003. Consider calling rates between $7 and $10 per minute and handset prices of more than $3000 and you can easily imagine that this was at least a $1 billion per month industry, if Dataquest was right. As we know today, they were wrong.
What was ignored at the time was the fact that Motorola had borrowed lots of money to build Iridium’s satellite network (the final price tag was reportedly more than $5 billion). The staggering cost to build and maintain the network as well as the failure to attract enough customers pushed Iridium’s quarterly losses above the half-a-billion-dollar mark by Q1 1999 and eventually forced the company to file for Chapter 11: Less than a year after the official launch of the service, Iridium defaulted on a $1.5 billion loan in August 1999.
I was under the impression that the network had been dismantled and the satellites abandoned. Instead, it had been bought out for pennies on the dollar and the business model completely revamped to focus on industry and military customers rather than the mobile consumer market. There still is no network quite like it, even though it’s based on technology that’s already decades old.
A giant, a visionary, a prophet has passed.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away today at the age of 90. It’s impossible for me to express how formative this great man’s writings have been upon my personality, my interests, even my career. Along with Isaac Asimov, who passed away when I was a freshman in college, Sir Arthur was my gateway into science fiction and a lifetime of intellectual curiosity and simple appreciation for the fruits of the mind.
On my recent trip to Colombo, the idea of meeting him crossed my mind, but was rejected immediately as an impossibility. But at least I came close.
This bit from The Onion is just too good to pass up.
Wii Video Games Blamed For Rise In Effeminate Violence
Wii’s critics claim that the sissified games use disturbing pastel imagery, graphic representations of adorable characters, and disorienting kaleidoscopes of color to prey on children’s basest flaming instincts. The game Dewy’s Adventure, in which children control a cute droplet of water who must return fruit to a magical tree, is often cited as one of the worst offenders.
[…]
“The Wii’s fluffy flowers and bright peach-colored sunlight glorify chasing precious talking rabbits with plungers,” Greer said. “What kind of message is that sending to our children? That it’s ‘cool’ to act like some kind of electrical elf or banana fairy?”
Of course, Super Smash Brothers Brawl just came out, so presumably the problem will only get worse.
This interview with Ron Moore has lots of little morsels to chew on, but by far the best is the news that wily lawyer Romo Lampkin returns twice in season 4. He’ll always be The Badger to me, though.
The bad news is that there is no word on when the second half of the season will be aired; SciFi milking the series out until 2009 seems increasingly likely. Still, at least we get the first ten episodes of season 4 starting in just two weeks.
Interestingly, the interview with Moore also includes his thoughts on the new Sar Trek film. Overall, he is very positive, about the reboot with fresh blood. Worth reading in full.
I’m loath to interject politics or religion here – I already have venues for both elsewhere – but I can’t help my reaction to this:
Is that the face of God? in one sense, yes. That’s the 5-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and it shows the residual photos from the Big Bang, now cooled down to 2.725 +/- 0.0002 degrees Kelvin. Yeah, the color variations on that scale are only 2/10 thousandths of a degree. But what’s more striking about this is the implication of how much we don’t see:
The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.
The WMAP data also conclusively demonstrates that the Universe is flat, which has further implications about the inevitable and fundamental limitations of our observational capabilities:
Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.
Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.â€
Krauss has a piece in Scientific American where he expands on this:
We are led inexorably to a very strange conclusion. The window during which intelligent observers can deduce the true nature of our expanding universe might be very short indeed. Some civilizations might hold on to deep historical archives, and this very article might appear in one—if it can survive billions of years of wars, supernovae, black holes and countless other perils. Whether they will believe it is another question. Civilizations that lack such archives might be doomed to remain forever ignorant of the big bang.
Why is the present universe so special? Many researchers have tried to argue that the existence of life provides a selection effect that might explain the coincidences associated with the present time [see “The Anthropic Principle,†by George Gale; Scientific American, December 1981]. We take different lessons from our work.
First, this would quite likely not be the first time that information about the universe would be lost because of an accelerating expansion. If a period of inflation occurred in the very early universe, then the rapid expansion during this era drove away almost all details of the preexisting matter and energy out of what is now our observable universe. Indeed, one of the original motivations for inflationary models was to rid the universe of pesky cosmological objects such as magnetic monopoles that may once have existed in profusion.
More important, although we are certainly fortunate to live at a time when the observational pillars of the big bang are all detectable, we can easily envisage that other fundamental aspects of the universe are unobservable today. What have we already lost? Rather than being self-satisfied, we should feel humble. Perhaps someday we will find that our current careful and apparently complete understanding of the universe is seriously wanting.
So, that WMAP data above? An ephemeral wisp of data that will fade away. We are fortunate in that sense to be able to see the face of God, because it’s not going to be there forever.
Sometimes I wonder if we really aren’t living in Douglas Adams’ universe after all. Where else, in a Universe where the Ultimate Answer is 42, and the Last Message to Creation is “we apologize for the inconvenience”, would it be true that someday, the Big Bang is destined to someday be a mythological event whose existence will be unprovable by the best available evidence? Will the WMAP data become the icon for Unintelligent Design?