Odd Lots
- The 64GB Microsoft Surface Pro tablet has only 23GB of open storage. Yukkh.
- Given that I do most of my reading curled up in a monster cushy chair, I’ve begun to wonder if a tablet with a 12″ display (or perhaps even larger) with a charger dock on the adjacent end table would be useful. Such things exist, but not in great numbers and not cheap. Technical PDFs are often uncomfortable reading even on my 10″ Transformer Prime.
- Here’s yet another reason I’m not bullish on the Cloud: If all you have is the Cloud, everything has to include a rain dance. I ruled out Eye-Fi when it first came out for this reason, but the absurdity of requiring global connection to make a local connection needs to be aired every so often.
- Short summary of Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven: Ringworld with an engine, and nowhere to go. It’s the first Larry Niven book I can recall that I genuinely hated. Save your money.
- Here’s a result of vintage calculators (well, if not “result,” what’s the proper collective?) and a pointer to what would be a stunning steampunk model, if it hadn’t been designed in 1788.
- Early heads-up for what may be a really brilliant thing: Pulp-O-Mizer, which is a sort of image generator that spits out convincing Deco/Diesel magazine or book covers. Thanks to Jim Rittenhouse for putting me on to it. I’ll have more to say when I take it for a spin myself.
- I don’t know from personal experience if this is true; I don’t drink enough, nor late enough, to be a good test case. However, I’ve been told by several in my inner circle that too much booze too late at night makes for very bad sleep.
- There are a lot more Steampunk R2D2s out there than I would have guessed. I like the one with the monocle.
- It’s as easy as fishin’? I’ll stick with bluegills. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The big movie studios are evidently creating fake YouTube accounts with fake users uploading supposedly pirated movie trailers promoting new films. For the sake of plausible deniability, they’re sending YouTube takedown notices on the trailers. And you wonder why I see maybe three movies a year.
- This may not be a viable business model.
- In times long past, men used to wear high heels. (More recently, I remember seeing guys in platforms when I was in college.) Why? To stay on their horses. Or maybe to avoid being mistaken for Neanderthals. We may never know.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: culture · hardware · health · humor · sf · software · steampunk
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Years ago, I worked at a company where one of the women in the accounting department still used something that looked exactly like the first Monroe High Speed Adding Calculator in the Vintage Calculator link. When she retired, they gave her the calculator!
Back in the late 1960’s the standard “calculator” for an engineering student was the slide rule, but when I had to take some courses in statistics I bought one of the metal pocket “adding machines” which I used when I couldn’t get time in the calculator lab in the department. They had a number of Wang calculators with Nixie tube displays with key pads that plugged into a suitcase sized electronics package under the tables. When we learned that those things could keep the sum AND sum of the squares in two separate registers with each entry we thought we were in heaven.
Latter, in the early 1970’s, while in the Air Force working in a high tech windowless vault at Wright Patterson there were some of the large Monroe mechanical calculators still in use sitting near the vector graphics terminals driven by the PDP-10 in the back room.
In regard to the free space situation on Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet, part of the issue is that the tablet has followed the recent trend of having a recovery partition instead of separate recovery media. Basically, Windows 8 is installed on the tablet twice. That aside, it’s not really the fault of the tablet that Windows 8 is a seriously large piece of software. A clean install of Windows 8 needs ~16 GB of hard drive space for the 32-bit version and ~20 GB for the 64-bit version (the space needs of Windows 7 are similar). It’s not like Windows 8 is designed to do finite element simulation or some other exceptionally intricate activity. I mean, really, why are Windows 7 and Windows 8 made up of so much data? Flashy GUI elements might be a piece of it, but I can’t see how that accounts for most of the data increase over previous Windows versions. Executable libraries which have been expanded over previous versions might also be a factor. But, 10 GB – 15 GB of run-time libraries for a consumer PC seems excessive to me. For reference Windows XP 32-bit takes up ~2 GB of hard drive space, Windows 2000 32-bit needs about 700 MB of hard drive space and Windows NT 32-bit only needs slightly over 100 MB. How could 10-15 GB of executable code ever be properly optimized or secured fully? I feel like it would be a humanly impossible task.