Monday, June 06, 2005

ö Mac drops IBM for Insanely Great Intel I remember when we Mac addicts used to denigrate CISC as inferior to RISC. That may well still be justified architecturally, but the scale of the CISC market has driven it to Insanely Great heights of Bang for the Buck, plus there never seems to be a shortage of Intel CPUs. permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

ö self-replicating rapid prototyper can copy anything [CNN] Well, not "anything" yet, but still enough to make big trouble...  A revolutionary machine that can copy itself and manufacture everyday objects quickly and cheaply could transform industry in the developing world, according to its creator. The "self-replicating rapid prototyper," or "RepRap" is the brainchild of Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK. [...] "It makes industry a little more like agriculture," said Bowyer, who specializes in biomimetics, the study and application of natural processes in technologies such as engineering, design and computing. "Farmers have been dealing with self-replicating products for years." [...] To encourage that development, Bowyer plans to make the design of the RepRap available online and free to use, in the same way as open source software such as the Linux operating system or Mozilla's Firefox browser. Anyone with a replicating machine could then start manufacturing copies. Once someone owned the technology they could download other designs, or create their own.  Whoa, Nellie, things like this could almost make me a Luddite, but little good would that do. As I said just last month -- No big deal? Then I suggest you read Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and its sequels in the Galactic Center series. permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

ö Henery Hawk - "It's not tobacco... it's rutabaga and horseradish leaves" Excerpt from an Elmer Fudd interview with Henery Hawk:  ... "You mean that baby hawk who was always trying to get Foghorn Leghorn? I didn't know he was still around." "He wasn't weally a baby, just had a gwandular condition that kept him small," Fudd said. "After Warner Bwuthers eased him out in the early 60s, he wetired to his chicken wanch in Owens Valley." [...] He snorted, blowing a cloud of acrid smoke that made me sneeze. He took a puff on his cigar, pulled it out of his beak and looked from it to me. "It's not tobacco, y'know," he said. "It's harmless -- a special vegetarian blend of rutabaga and horseradish leaves-- Old family blend."  Elmer was trying to get to the bottom of the models for that rarest of W.W.II-era comic books, "Bunnies at War,", but Henery also fills him in on a whole woost of cartoon characters' development and W.W.II roles. There's a bunch of other Henery Hawk info, pictures and sound recordings, at records.goldenagecartoons.com. permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?