Tag: tech

If I didn’t already have my own server space for such usage, Dropload would be quite useful. Don’t ruin it for everyone else.

If you have to fly 14 hours, it seems Jimmy Grewal has found a great way to do it. I simultaneously would love to experience such a flight, and would dread doing so.

The big tech news of the week has to be the first step toward space privatization, with the successful launch of SpaceShipOne on Monday. Pilot Mike Melvill took the craft into a suborbital flight 62 miles above the Earth’s surface, and returned safely, landing at Mojave Airport, which Dan claims is the first certified and now operational civilian space port.
Melvill had the plane in freefall weightlessness for three minutes, releasing, in now-famous video footage, a bag of M&Ms to float around in the cockpit. He landed SpaceShipOne on the same runway it had taken off from, under the launch vehicle White Knight, an hour and a half earlier.
The venture is that of renowned designer Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, and was financed by former Microsoftie Paul Allen for a cool $20+ million. The flight marked the highest altitude ever reached by a non-government aerospace venture, and proves what commercial enterprise can do when left alone.
Scaled Composites will now turn its attention to readying SpaceShipOne for another flight, as it pursues the Ansari X Prize, which will award $10 million to the first group to launch a resuable spacecraft with three passengers in to space, return them safely home, then do it again with two weeks. With the same reusable spacecraft.
Scaled Composites’ endeavor underscores some of what is wrong with NASA and the U.S. government’s continued interest in space. The space agency is greatly interested in the SpaceShipOne mission, and is in talks with Rutan and company. There is room for healthy competition and co-opetition in the space race. Our nation has greatly benefited from space missions in the past, and this week’s event could foreshadow greater government cooperation with private enterprise as we look beyond our own atmosphere.

Bruce Sterling spoke at Microsoft last week, and someone was nice enough to transcribe it for him, since by his own admission, Mr. Sterling had no idea what he said.

I’m not sure if it is really cool, or too geeky and too pricey.

The world’s fastest man has left this earth for the last time. William J. “Pete” Knight became the world’s fastest man on October 3, 1967, while flying the X-15 hypersonic rocket plane. He died of cancer on May 7. His record-breaking Mach 6.7 (nearly seven times the speed of sound) flight remains the highest speed ever attained by a manned aircraft.

Microsoft Watch is reporting that the next verison of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, is going to require a PC that doesn’t yet exist. That’s okay, since Longhorn isn’t due until 2006, plenty of time for Mac OS X to steal market share as the Redmond monopoly struggles to catch up.
Longhorn will purportedly require “a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.”
I’m sure Intel and AMD have 4 GHz CPUs waiting in the wings, but I wonder if we’ll see 6 GHz in 2006. Hard drive sizes are increasing expotentially, to be sure, and I can see a terabyte being available in the next two years, but I’m not sure if it will be available in such quantities as these specifications would assume. Gigabit Ethernet is a reality here and now, especially for Mac owners, as is the 802.11g wireless spec, so those aren’t any big surprises.
In a nutshell, I imagine you will see Microsoft having to blunt Longhorn for lower-end systems than what is currently called for. I simply don’t believe that those systems will be available, in mass quantity, by the time the OS ships.
(via MacMinute)