Fascinating article by Kristin Winet and found at i09.com concerning the above, Soviet Era arcade games!
http://io9.com/the-alternative-universe-of-soviet-arcade-games-1729012559
What’s the most intriguing is the way the games play, without a sense of individual “winning”. I have to say, seeing some of the pictures, I’m really curious to see some of these games, but to do so, I’d have to travel quite a way…
Are you at all familiar with the Ashley Madison website? You know, the website that caters to married individuals looking to…uh…spice up their sex life by allowing them to find willing affair partners?
Well, a little while back a hacker group claimed they had broken into the website and taken their database of some 37 million users. Was the breach real? Looks like it might have been as the hackers have released the data to the “dark web”:
What does this mean? Clearly anyone who used the website is now exposed, along with their personal and credit card information. Given the nature of the website, those who are exposed may be in for a world of hurt when their spouses/significant others get wind of their lurking (at the very least) on that particular website. And if some of the clients of that website wind up being higher ups in government or industry…?
Ouch.
As a society it seems we’re captivated and repulsed by sexuality. We can’t get enough of it but it’s filthy to even consider it. As parents we shield our daughters -how many times have you heard the old “my daughter won’t date until she’s in her 30’s” joke?- yet paradoxically encourage our sons to “play the field” (who exactly will they play the field with?).
We have no big problem with violent action on the television or movie screen but when presented with sexual matters, we’re quick to slap labels on it and, in some cases, hear from others how grotesque such displays of affection (!) are.
I don’t mean to get into a rant so I’ll get to my point: Ashley Madison is a perfect example of society’s sexual mores. Politicians and “well respected” people rant and rail about our sexualized society yet when the opportunity is presented to covertly engage in your sexual fantasies, people (to the tune of at least 37 million) take advantage of such a service and now they may well stand exposed.
Am I applauding this big reveal? Absolutely not. And neither do I want to come off as Mr. Know-It-All…
I suppose the only thing I wish is that we as a society would grow up and honestly face our desires and urges instead of railing against them while engaging in them when we think no one is looking.
You may want to read this article regarding privacy problems with this new version of Windows, and how to deal with them:
Broken Windows Theory: How To Protect Your Privacy in Windows 10
When the day comes that I’m able to upgrade to Windows 10, I’ll be following this advice. It’s chilling how so many computer/smartphone companies mine our privacy nowadays…and we let them!
Orwell’s 1984 was wrong in at least one way: We seem to be freely giving up our privacy to these tech giants.
Today, July 29th, is the first day that Windows 10 is officially available for download but, given the large (extremely large) number of people waiting to do just that, Microsoft is offering the downloads in waves. Thus, if you’re waiting to download the new version of Windows, you may still have to wait a little while.
Regardless, an interesting article for those who use the Windows platform and are curious about Windows 10 and what it has to offer versus the older versions:
So it would appear that the Commodore Computer brand isn’t entirely dead…
Long Dead PC Company Commodore Just Launched a Smartphone
I have fond memories of the old Commodore 64 computers, though by today’s standards these computers (indeed, all technological products from the 1980’s) are rightfully considered primitive.
Yet during those very early days of technological advances to the PC and gaming market, Commodore stood tall, right there with Atari (who, many forget, also had two home computer models!), Apple, and IBM.
I never owned a Commodore, but I had a friend in the dormitory who did and I recall enjoying using it…while still thinking my Atari 800 computer was better. Then there was the kid who had the Apple II…
Anyway, nostalgia is good and all, but the one thing to realize regarding Commodore’s phoenix-like resurrection is that the Commodore brand has bounced around quite a bit since its heyday in the 1980’s. I’m curious to see if this phone manages to get any traction in an industry that appears, at least at the moment, in a death-choke stranglehold between Samsung and Apple.
As with so many other things, we’ll see!
If there is one constant in this universe it’s this: If you or your company somehow manage to climb to the very peak of the mountain and succeed beyond your wildest dreams, be weary. Be weary because it is only a matter of time before you’re knocked from your perch.
Apple has led a truly charmed life these past few years. What started in the very late 1970’s and early 1980’s as a fascinating home computer company that then floundered and nearly died with the rise of the PC and Microsoft only to become renewed with the iPod, iPhone, etc. etc. has now, apparently, reached that lofty king of the hill point…and it looks like the knives are being sharpened.
Yesterday, Apple had one of their big tech announcement events and, this time around, it appears it elicited more snark than “oohhs” and “aaahs”.
Why?
Perhaps in part this is due to the fact that many are catching on to Apple’s propensity to “borrow” (ahem) technological concepts already created/used by others and then make a big show of touting them as their very own.
Others may note that Apple has been doing this for years, yet fans of the company inevitably defend Apple by say something along the lines of “Yeah, but Apple took concept X and refined it to make it great!”
This line of thinking certainly worked for quite a while, but it seems as if the Emperor is finally being exposed for what s/he is.
In the case of yesterday’s event, one which I was curious about (I’m always interested to see what tech companies such as Apple have coming), I found reaction articles were generally muted. Many fell along the lines of this one, written by Will Oremus for Slate.com:
All The Revolutionary Products Apple Just Announced, And Who They Copied Them From
The piece is well written and rather devastating in that it points out exactly what each “new” Apple product is…and what identical products are out there -some for years- that do the very same thing.
But the criticism may be the result of another thing, something I’ve felt for a bit now: We’re reaching something of a technological plateau where it comes to computers, phones, video gaming systems, and, yes, even software.
A couple of years ago people were writing about the “end of the desktop PC”. I scoffed at these stories. Sure, the sales of desktop PCs were indeed down, but I felt the reason for that was extremely obvious: The desktop PC had reached a technological plateau and there simply was NO NEED to trade in your old PC for a new one as the old one was perfectly good to use for many years.
As I noted in other blog entries, when PCs first came out, each new generation was a genuinely BIG step forward and made your older model look like crap. In effect, you needed to upgrade to the next version PC because the version you had was so obviously inferior to the new version that was just released.
But a number of years ago desktop PCs hit a level that made them good enough to last many years and, suddenly, new versions weren’t all that different from the “old” ones. You no longer had the need to trade in the old to get the new.
In my case, I kept and used my desktop PC for over six years (a lifetime in tech years!) without needing to purchase a new model. Nonetheless, I recently wound up buying a new desktop PC but only because the old computer started to show signs of glitching. Nothing super serious but it was enough to get me to buy a new PC because the last thing I needed to do was get ready to get to work on my PC and find it was dead.
My purchase, thus, was preventative in nature rather than because I needed the newest “thing”.
And what did I get? My new desktop PC is a higher end big name brand and while it is faster than my old PC and I’m pleased to have it, I freely admit it isn’t a quantum leap above my six year old model. Indeed, if the old machine hadn’t started showing problems, I would still be using it.
So returning to Apple, the company has this problem: They are one of the kings of the tech hill right now and they have to keep show people they deserve to stay there. It wasn’t all that long ago, remember, when Blackberry was the king of the hill with regard to smartphones while today they’re essentially extinct.
So Apple continues having these technological “presentations” to get and keep people’s interest in their products. But unfortunately for them, we’re getting to the point where there isn’t all that much out there to brag about.
The biggest technological advance to come, in my opinion, is significantly extending battery life. But that isn’t a “sexy” tech to present.
So Apple trots out all these “new” programs and acts as if they’re just that. Unfortunately for them, the buying public has become more savy, and thus an event that is supposed to get you excited for the next wave of Apple tech…leaves people noting just how unoriginal the material presented is.
Every generation has its share of fascinating people. Be they artists, politicians, inventors, or businessmen, they emerge and, sometimes, transform the world around them.
If you were to ask me who is the most fascinating such person around today, I’d have to go with Elon Musk. Using a fortune built on the internet (he was behind the creation of Paypal), Mr. Musk has devoted himself to three fascinating areas: Space travel, sustainable energy, and electric cars (The last two are somewhat interrelated). Its no wonder he was partly the basis for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man.
If you want to learn a little more about him, there is a fascinating article/review of Mr. Musk’s biography by Will Oremus on Slate magazine and it offers some choice bits about the man. I was particularly amused by the author noting some have compared Mr. Musk to Apple’s Steve Jobs and his (perhaps) sarcastic answer to that comparison. The fact is that Mr. Musk is involved in technology on a level much higher than just about anything (at least so far) that Apple has done…and believe it or not I don’t say this to denigrate Apple!
Like him or not, Mr. Musk is dabbling into technology that has the potential to change for the better (one hopes!) humanity while Apple’s focus is on building wonderful gadgets that people like to use to communicate and entertain each other.
If you’re interested in reading more about Mr. Musk, check out the link below:
Very fun little game presented on radiotimes.com which gives you a series of screenshots from various science fiction features, all involving computers/computer readouts and you’re asked to identify which movie/TV show they came from:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-05-12/can-you-name-the-sci-fi-from-just-the-computer-screen
In the end I scored 73%. Not too shabby, I suppose, though I screwed up a couple I knew because I clicked my answer a little too quickly.
Yeah yeah, I know…sounds like a lame excuse! 😉
If you were to print the entire internet’s contents, just how many pages do you suppose it would take?
I know, I know. I never really gave it all that much thought either.
Luckily for us, UK students George Harwood and Evangeline Walker did give it some thought and figured it out. The amount they came up with for printing the entire internet is roughly 136 billion standard 8 x 11 pages of material which, when stacked one over the other, would rise a mighty 8300 miles up!
You can read the full article from Business Insider, here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-paper-would-it-take-to-print-the-internet-2015-4
Perhaps one of the best known/watched TV shows today is HBO’s Game of Thrones. This past weekend, as they are wont to do, HBO offered a “free” weekend of viewing for those who don’t have the cable station as a way to give them the premiere of this season’s Game of Thrones (it aired Sunday). Of course, the free “taste” of the fifth season of this show is intended to get people to, hopefully, subscribe to HBO.
But even before that first episode aired came news that the first FIVE episodes of the fifth season had already leaked and were available to be downloaded at various pirate websites:
http://gizmodo.com/nearly-half-of-game-of-thrones-season-5-just-leaked-1697305966
As I said in the heading, this is unfortunately very much a sign of the times. If you have anything that is popular and desirable, be it music, movies, books, and, yes, TV shows, chances are good you’ll find pirate copies of them available online.
And that’s too bad.
While shows like Game of Thrones no doubt earn their investment dollars many times over, the fact is that not all works of art and their creators/investors are as fortunate. Piracy, even in small amounts, hurts the bottom line. While there may be those who illegally download something and later on legally pay for the same product, there will always be some percentage of these people who get material illegally and for free and do not bother to pursue it any other way.
One of the great concerns I have today is that artistic creations have become dangerously devalued. There are great and powerful industries out there that create wonderful machines that allow you to see and experience artistic works (smartphones, computers, tablets, etc.) and as consumers we’re willing to pay sometimes big money to have the latest of these items…yet the things the machines allow us to see/hear -from music to movies to books- are for the most part unprotected.
You have the latest iPhone or iPad or Samsung or HP computer, etc. etc. and with them you can go to assorted websites and illegally download a movie/music/book/etc. you want to see. Sometimes, this movie/song/book hasn’t yet been formally released!
The end result, I fear, is that the ease with which people can get these items creates a sense the act of creating them didn’t involve much actual work. I’ve noted before the weird (to me) idea that authors “shit out” their books in their free time while and during the rest of the hours in the day pursue a life of fun and leisure. This concept has been exacerbated by TV shows such as Murder She Wrote and, more recently, Castle.
I fear this idea is permeating other creative fields. Coming up with a song/album? Come on, how hard can that be? Drawing a 22 page comic book? Shouldn’t take more than a day, right? Writing a story? Can’t take much more to create it than it does to read it.
Even worse, there are those who know creating such works takes time and effort and they just don’t care.
If I work somewhere -from a Wall Street office to a McDonalds- eight hours a day for two weeks, at the end of this time I expect to get a check for my work. With artistic creations, you may do the very same time and work just as hard and for just as long…and your hard work can then be taken from you, posted online, and whatever monies you might have made are now subject to that loss.
I’m not saying anything anyone out there shouldn’t know already.
Piracy is, at least as of now, a sad reality of life. Perhaps in time there will be a way to more securely protect your artistic works so that they don’t end up pirated online.
Or perhaps there will never be a way of doing this.
Regardless, the irony is that the people who will ultimately be hurt by this are the consumers. The Beatles took years to practice their trade and be properly paid for their work until they were able to create some truly memorable songs and albums.
Somewhere out there might be a band that, with time, might have become just as good as them, but they make no money from their music because it simply doesn’t sell as much as it is pirated. Unlike John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the members of this band eventually have to break apart…they simply cannot sustain themselves.
And we, the public, will never get to hear what this band might have made.
Or see what this director could have created.
Or this writer.
Or this artist.