Several hundred million non-technical primates went "ooooh" last night when Microsoft unveiled their ostentatiously sci-fi surface computer. Or, as the kind folks at Bloggingstocks point out, a coffee table with a PC built into its base.

Yeah, it's nice eye candy. As previously mentioned, it's very sci-fi looking. Like jingling their keys in front of a toddler Microsoft has entranced everyone with, basically, a table that breaks easier.

Move past the eye candy. Move past the silly, insanely inefficient displays used in movies like Minority Report. Move past the cheesy sci-fi.

Tables are for putting things on. Of all our furniture (save maybe the couches of fat-asses), tables take the most brutal beating. You can't use a simple, cheap touchscreen--Microsoft's product uses a series of cameras to make it work through the glass.

And why? Once you get past the eye candy--which will be boring in less than three years--there's no real function of this.

You want a product that will actually get used? It's called a tablet PC with bluetooth and a camera. Yup. It can do everything Microsoft's fancy-pants table can do. Cheaper, too.

And it would have one amazing feature Microsoft's table will never have: Portability.

Take it to your friend's house. Or a meeting room. Or the bathroom if you really want to. Casinos and restaurants can glue them to the table if they really want to.

But put it inside a table? Please. More expensive. More fragile. No upgrade path. And you need one for every god damned room.

Which is Microsoft's entire point, I suppose :P

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Yes, this is damned fucking cool. Thank you!

Oh yeah, if anyone has a multi-page scanner I'd be more than happy to scan my growing collection of manga, even at the cost of their poor little spines :( I'm not about to do it one page at a time, though :P

http://science.slashdot.org/article..../05/21/2227240

Network coding is basically an attempt to route traffic better. It gets a bit mathy, but the basic idea is that instead of sending the traffic bit-by-bit over a single link (which may be congested), send combined data (hints) over the direct link and other hints over other links. I can't really explain this better than the article does, so if you're interested please read it ;)

My problem with this approach is that it only really seems to care about bandwidth rates, not latency. And while it would certainly be nice for bittorrent downloads, streaming video, and even web browsing, I'm not inclined to believe this would be a good thing for gaming. With network coding your latency would increase by the latency of the slowest link. This is bad enough in a typical 6-8 hop route--send data down alternate routes to recombine at the destination would cause each hop to behave as slow as its slowest link. At best such a network would have the same latency as a traditional routing network. In reality it would likely perform a good deal worse.

I think that high bandwidth networks and low latency networks, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are at least detrimental to each other. It's the same as always: High Bandwidth; Low Latency; Cheap -- choose two.

The idea that there should be a single almighty Internet is seeming more archaic by the day. Gaming should have its own net (yes, I know some companies are already starting this). Streaming video should likewise possibly have its own net (can you imagine a fully multicast network with router caching and timing protocols? How many people try to click a youtube video at once? What if everyone was delayed by between 1-5 seconds to sync up their data, then multicast it out all at once? What if popular videos were cached at edge rouers?)

There's no reason multiple nets couldn't all share the same physical lines. That's the beauty of the network layers. You could even use the same routing equipment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek/

This is pretty damned cool. I hope their research pans out.

On a related note, the thought of being connected to a heart-lung bypass machine terrifies the shit out of me.

So buy a shirt or somethin' already.


http://digg.com/linux_unix/Spread_This_Number_Again

http://www.09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.ws/

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/3...d-this-number/