Ten thousand visits to Haibane.info, in less than one year, as of 11pm this evening. I am truly humbled. It’s small by poliblog standards, but I value each and every one far more than I would ten times that number at my other blogs. I feel like I’ve gained a lot more than just traffic; I’ve gained friends, and there’s no metric that can quantify a thing of such value. Thank you. (more…)
Author: fledgling otaku
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external graphics cards
This has intriguing potential ramifications for computer design downstream:
A new PCI Express standard has been approved that will allow for the development of and operation of external PCIe graphics cards. Dubbed the PCI Express External Cabling specification and approved by the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), version 1.0 extends PCIe outside of the case.
The most obvious application for the new standard is external enclosures for graphics cards. Once you get past the price tag, the biggest barriers for many who would want to deploy a dual SLI or Crossfire system are heat, power, and space. Newer GeForce and Radeon graphics cards can emit a lot of heat while demanding a significant amount of power under high load. In addition, the need for large heat sinks and fans often means that you lose a second slot to a single PCIe graphics card.
Now imagine sticking a pair of graphics cards into an external enclosure with its own power supply and fan, hooking your monitor to that, and connecting it to your PC or even a laptop. Those are the kinds of possibilities opened up by the External Cable specification.
The advantages are well-summarized above, but take the idea further. We already have external bulk storage and external sound cards for laptops. Now imagine that via Bluetooth you also divorce the keyboard and mouse. External optical drives are also easier to deal with than internal bays. What’s left? Just a core that contains your essential apps and your critical data. You could conceivably just carry a small brick around, that is your computing core, and have it seamlessly adapt to your pre-defined computing environments. One might have an ultralight notebook chassis with a 14inch screen for travel; a beefed up desktop unit for the office and a silent SFF PC for the home. Your core is what contains your user profile and OS and authentication; biometrics keep it secure from anyone else’s use but yours. The bulk of your data remains accessible securely over the internet, by hooking up your master data store to a router with fixed IP and using strong encryption and VPN connections.
I’m sure this isn’t an original thought. Still, bears thinking about the advantages over the modern era. At the very least you’d only need to buy one copy of Windows 🙂
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Remastered Trek: Doomsday and Constellation
AICN has some stunning before and after shots from the remastered Trek:TOS series, from the episode The Doomsday Machine. The shots are just awesome, there’s no other word. I loved this profile shot of the damaged USS Constellation in particular:
and this flyby of the Enterprise with the Doomsday Machine in the distance:
Click the images to see the original broadcast versions so you can appreciate the sheer awesomeness. This isn’t “Greedo shoots first”, it’s an expression of love for the source material. There are plenty more to gawk at so take a look.
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Diamond Age miniseries
more torrent fodder! Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age
is coming to SciFi Channel as a mini-series:
Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.
When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV.
Could be magnificent, like Dune (so I’ve heard… must torrent!) or teh suck, like Earthsea (which was adapted to miniseries before Goro took his own ill-fated swipe). I’m not sure whether George Clooney as director is a good omen or bad.
To be honest, I vastly preferred Snow Crash
(the best cyberpunk novel I’ve ever read) and Cryptonomicon
than of Diamond Age. I’d be really excited if SnowCrash was being made into a live series, but let’s see whether SciFi gets DA right before I trust them to do it right. Actually, let the small screen have DA and let’s have SC in the theater where it really belongs.
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rationalizing the inevitable
I still haven’t found a Wii on the shelves, but the day I see one, I will buy it then and there. So it’s not like I need to justify the decision to buy one. However, rationalizations are another matter entirely 🙂 A few days ago, Shamus pointed to someone using the Wii for weight loss; now comes word that video games improve visual acuity by 20%:
Video games that contain high levels of action can actually improve your vision, claim researchers at the University of Rochester. Their findings, which will appear in the journal Psychological Science, show that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.
“Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information,†says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in.â€
The paper isn’t on PubMed yet, though I did find some other relevant, entertaining and informative abstracts.
Given that my wife and I both are severely vision-impaired, I am seriously interested in any beneficial effects (however negligible) I can arrange upon my daughter’s vision. Of course, keeping her running around and gesticulating wildly while remaining tethered to a specific part of the house is also a big appeal 🙂
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dooooomed
John Dvorak says that Microsoft is toast. Twice. Consider yourselves warned!
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Shufflin’ Crew!
We’re so bad, you know we’re good.
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JJ Abrams and Star Trek
In case you heard from somewhere that ubergeek director JJ Abrams is no longer affiliated with the new Star Trek motion picture about Kirk, Spock and Bones at the Academy, rest easy – AICN has JJ’s personal assurance that he’s still onboard.
The reason it matters is because JJ is a Star Trek geek at heart – he has a genuine love of Trek, and that enthusiasm is going to be visible just as Lord of the Rings lived and breathed because of the passion of the Peter.
It also bears mentioning that the classic Trek is getting a CGI make-over, too.