Month: July 2007

Toaster

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a 4-bit microcontroller!).”

computer scientist vs engineer. spoiler: the computer scientist gets beheaded.

Open Spectrum

We believe that the winning bidders should be required to adhere to enforceable rules that require the adoption of 4 types of “open” platforms:
Open applications: consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
Open devices: consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
Open services: third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
Open networks: third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at a technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee’s wireless network.

Long range Taser

Continuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 30 meters. Previous Tasers, such as the C2 civilian model I was hit with a few months ago, are only useful within 10 meters.

crowd control 2.0

Text Rasterization

But it was only a “body show”; the main message of this article is. No more horizontal pixel grid! Really! From now on the horizontal grid is 1/256 of a pixel! You can shift the text horizontally by any fractional value, while the visual appearance does not change a whit! This “little detail” means a lot. How about this:

  • You can kern symbols with sub-pixel precision, not worrying about introducing extra blurriness.
  • You can freely scale the text as you want, with 100% guarantee of preserving a stable text layout that always fits other graphic elements.
  • You can always be sure that the calculated text width exactly corresponds with what you will see on screen and paper.
  • You can apply fancy vector effects such as “faux bold” and “faux italic” being sure the text will not look any blurrier.

there is really no need to still have crappy fonts on all platforms in 2007, as this article superbly demonstrates.

Total history

Where total history comes to the layperson.

We’ve had agriculture for ~12 ka, towns for 10 ka, and writing for ~5 ka. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioral habits – because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

2012-05-06: The transcribed Life. It may already be possible to have your smartphone record every sound it can pick up, and transcribe it continuously. What are the implications when you can search your words and those you interact with?
2013-11-23: Before and after. Meanwhile, someone taped 35 years of TV

Total history is something we haven’t experienced yet. I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first 40 or 50 years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before. Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever.

2017-04-11: Truth

2023-02-24: Others are thinking about the implications, now with a LLM lens

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?