soapbox

Thoughts on memory…

It’s kinda funny to see how baseline expectations of data/file size change over time. I very clearly remember upgrading from a Mac with a 512kb hard drive to one with 20 MEGABYTES – good god, how would we ever manage to fill it up? Twenty Megabytes was beyond comprehension.

While Gmail has done some nice things with their interface and archiving options, my favorite thing about gmail when it first started up was that I could use it as a repository of large attachments (forcing Yahoo to raise their inbox size to more reasonable levels soon after).

When collaborating on large papers or papers with large images or datafiles, I’ve become a fan of drop.io, since it’s simpler and easier than setting up an ftp server. I can see how it would also be a useful form or submission/collection from many sources (i.e. movies or songs from hopeful amateur artists) and you won’t have to fear an email account crash/overload. They’ve recently added a voice feature, where you call a preset phone number and leave a voice message that is saved in an audio file on the site (to be accessed by an authorized user – i.e. one who pays $$).

The Luddite in me gets a little squeamish when it comes to storing my life “in the cloud“, which I acknowledge to be a little silly given how privacy on the internet is a fantasy, but I’m curious about other’s thoughts – especially those with iPhones. Is biometric confirmation the only way to ensure security? Do we need to just rid ourselves of the illusion of any privacy or security and just assume that all ‘personal’ information is public and behave accordingly?

I suppose there are times in history when you can step up and move forward or you can stick to the old ideas and lose completely. I don’t have good examples, but maybe stagecoach manufacturers when cars started getting big?

It sounds like the auto bailout just died because of a similar problem. The UAW failed to understand that having a job is better than not having a job. Apparently current costs for a US employee in a GM plant is 50% more than a US employee in a Toyota plant. Of course, that’s only part of what’s killing the US auto industry… years of mismanagement and bad products definitely haven’t helped… but agreeing to bring labor costs in line with other plants in 2011 doesn’t help much when the crisis is now.

I have a feeling that Ford will come out of this mess OK. They have good compact cars that people like to drive, they just don’t sell them in the US yet. Throw in good trucks and I think they’ll be set. GM and Chrysler though… between the two of them, what do you have? Dodge trucks, the Corvette, and the Chevy Malibu? I don’t know that that’s enough to merit keeping the companies around, especially if they have no hopes of getting costs under control.

The real hope is that Toyota/Honda/Subaru/et al. don’t have efficient enough plants that they can pick up the slack of one of the major US automakers going under without having to hire on new workers.

So I know that last week I posted on how I prefer buying CDs to mp3s b/c of music quality issues, and I do stand by that, but this morning I present to you a great way to waste 5 minutes on really, really low-quality, midi-style music… and yet, it’s pretty impressive.

In honor of Brian:

But these (Beach Boys, Joan Jett/The Arrows), are also worth a look. In particular, Bohemian Rhapsody must have been a lot of work if the guy didn’t write script to do it.

I’ll preface this by saying that the HP touch-screen ads look pretty sweet, and I actually had a brief moment of “I WANT!” … No need for a mouse, you just reach up and grab stuff on the screen, move it where you want, etc… what’s better than that? Well, nothing, at least for the first minute or two – after a little while though your arms are going to get tired and you’ll be frustrated by the slowness of the 1-to-1 movement ratio (as compared to the acceleration algorithm of a mouse/touchpad/trackball).

If you don’t believe me, use FluidTunes for 10 minutes and see how that goes. I’d put this in the category of “really cool but not like I’d use it every day” – you use your Mac’s iSight camera to detect hand gestures you make in front of it and flip/swipe through your iTunes library. Once you’ve selected a song or album (in Cover Flow mode), you then swipe at a ‘button’ to play a selected album. The program shows what you look like on your camera behind your album covers, so you can center your hand over buttons to press them – while looking pretty goofy to the outside observer.

I have tried to restrain myself from ranting too much about the economy, but in light of the second round of congressional bootlicking by the Big Three (for the love of God don’t give them any $$ without serious restructuring), I had to say something.

(1) $700 billion is too small. When Japan had their crash 10 years ago, their bank bailout was a little more than $500 billion, while their dollar GDP was ~25% of ours today.

(2) Dubya managed to rack up a HUGE deficit while destroying the national infrastructure:

(3) That said, Obama REALLY needs to have the vision to spend our way out of this, and the GOP needs to get out of the way. Amity Shlaes is full of it – what we need is another New Deal; if we are half-assed in fixing this, it won’t get fixed.

okay, I’m done now. sorry guys. read Krugman for more, or this summary since I’m too tired to write our my own take right now.

There’s an amazing blog for you to look at:

A post about Hockey and Sean Avery could cover any number of subjects, from Paris Hilton to window-washing, and there could be a debate about who is/was the dirtiest player in the NHL (it’s not Scott Stevens, but his elbows got higher than legal a lot), but instead I’ll just post this nugget from Sean Avery:

“I’m really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada. I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don’t know what that’s about, but enjoy the game tonight.”

Then again, keep in mind that his exes include Elisha Cuthbert and Rachel Hunter, so maybe he has a right to be bitter?