Jul 16
“And I regret some of the recent behavior Russia that has exhibited, and I’ll be glad to talk about that later on including reduction in oil supplies to Czechoslovakia after they agreed with us on a missile defense system, etcetera.” — John McCain, 2008-07-15.
Still, he’s learning to use The Interwebs. Right now if he needs to see a web site or e-mail he has his staff show it to him, because he can’t operate a web browser. Oh well, at least he knows what a telephone is, judging from the photo.
So, we could go from a President who knows how to use a computer but doesn’t read, to one who knows how to read but can’t use a computer.
Mar 26
Someone noticed that google.jp had a picture of some kind of computer. Turns out it’s the Parametron. Not a Futurama character, but instead an early (1950s) computer from Japan that I’d never heard of.
There doesn’t seem to be much on the web about it, but from what I gather, it used a really freaky design with no valves or transistors. Instead, the fundamental unit involved two magnetic coils and a capacitor, with the binary 0 and 1 values being represented by the phase of the AC current. From this unit, the usual AND and OR gates were constructed, and then those were strung together to make a computer.
I wonder if the ideas might be applicable to optical computing?
Oct 31
I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the Leopard previews earlier in the year, because OS X just blew my mind.
I was editing an e-mail message, and decided to idly click on Time Machine to see what it was doing. Instead of the Finder going into Time Machine mode, my e-mail went into time machine mode. I clicked the back arrow a couple of times, and there was what my e-mail inbox looked like 2 days ago, complete with since deleted messages.
It’s the same with the Address Book. You can step back through how your address book looked at different moments in the past.
My general impression of Leopard is that it’s good. Proper multi-threading in Finder and Mail makes a big difference. But this Time Machine thing is the most amazing backup tool ever. I got a big hard disk at Costco at the weekend, and backing up is now totally painless, there isn’t even an application to run. You just have to make sure a suitable disk is plugged in for long enough to copy the changes over, once a day or so.
Backing up isn’t sexy and it isn’t fun, which is why most people don’t bother to do it. Now there’s no excuse to skip backing up. Or at least, not if you’re a Mac user.