2012-04-17
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2012-03-27
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2012-03-23
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Charlie Stross on robotic pirate hosts: Pirate Airships: An Alternative (via)
Drones are sexy, but the ground is easier.
(via paperbits)
2011-12-09
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2010-10-08
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2009-07-19
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The Technium: Was Moore’s Law Inevitable?
Of course, it kind of weakens his argument, but I still find it odd that Kevin Kelly doesn’t admit anywhere in this post that the speed curve for rockets he posted turned out to be wrong.
OK, fine, it predicted the first satellite launches and Apollo, but then it broken down catastrophically. The fastest a human has ever travelled was in 1970.
Kelly does address the reason later on:
In this microcosmic realm energy is not very important. We don’t see exponential improvement in efforts to scale up, to keep getting bigger, skyscrapers and space stations.
Multi-stage chemical rockets are the only way we have to hoist payload. Unless and until we shift to nuclear rockets or tease out of particle physics some magic method of propulsion, they’re the only way we have to get to the Moon, and Saturn V and Energia are as big as we’ve made. As Charlie Stross says:
Stick a LEM on the moon and bring the contents back? Easy. Increase the mass that the LEM brings back? Very expensive — the price goes up as the sixth power of the weight you’re returning from the lunar surface (because you have to loft the heavier LEM into Earth orbit to begin with).
This doesn’t really invalidate Kelly’s argument. I just found it a bit of an odd omission.
2008-12-14
"And then I woke up and it was all a dream"
Charlie Stross on the life and death of the PDA. Usually I’d post this on delicious, but there’s a lot I want to quote.
Newton was John Sculley’s pet project, allegedly started after a high-level Apple meeting in which he realized everyone present was using a Cambridge Z88, and said “why don’t we make one of those?”
The sorry truth is, PDAs are a commercial rat-hole. The only folks who really made money at them were Psion (hors de combat) and Palm (whose abject failure to modernize their OS since 2001 amounts to the longest drawn-out suicide in portable computing history
It turns out that people don’t want that stuff in a notepad-shaped machine. What they want is a mobile phone that does the address book/agenda stuff — and is an entertainment gadget besides, with a camera and music player built in.
Folks who use computers and want a mobile device want a real computer that has shrunk in the wash, not some bizarre tablet thingy that forces them to write with a pen. Sculley’s 1989 executives might not have known how to use a keyboard, but it’s 2009 now, and only luddites and geriatrics have failed to come to terms with QWERTY over the intervening two decades.
I’m now looking at my desktop. There are two devices on it: the powerful, grown-up iPaq with a decade of software development behind it, and the new upstart iPhone. And I know where the future lies.
