Viewing the world through geek-coloured lenses.
2600: The Hacker Digest - Volume 1 #
Classic hacker magazine, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has released its entire first year of issues as a single, DRM-free e-book. I say “issues”, but, back in 1984, it was a monthly, three-page newsletter, rather than a magazine.
The book, entitled 2600: The Hacker Digest - Volume 1, has been lovingly re-typed verbatim (including typos), rather than scanned, so that the e-reading experience is the best that it can be. The release contains all the original sections, including the synopses of the “latest” technological developments and predictions, now guaranteed to make you snigger.
Best of all, it’s available for the bargain basement price of US$4.
The life-size Starship Enterprise that almost was #
It’s recently come to light that, way back in 1992, Las Vegas came this close to building a US$150,000,000 full-size replica of the Starship Enterprise.
In 1992, downtown Las Vegas was suffering; ‘The Strip’ was attracting 80% of the market, turning downtown Las Vegas into a ghost town of sorts. So the powers that be decided to run a competition for a new attraction.
The competition came down to two finalists: “The Fremont Experience” and a full-scale Starship Enterprise, created and designed by Gary Goddard and his team of designers at Landmark.
After 5 months of preparation, including: preliminary sketches; engineering approval; ideas for shows, rides, and restaurants; revenue and rights deals; cost estimates; committee (and mayoral) approval etc, the project came down to one meeting with Paramount studio CEO, Stanley Jaffe.
As you may have guessed, he said no. Mr Jaffe didn’t want to risk tainting the Paramount brand if such a massive project failed, saying that “I don’t want to be the guy that approved this and then it’s a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.”
So, there you go. You almost lived in a world where you could go visit a life-size version of one of the most iconic vehicles in modern pop-culture.
IBM to build Exascale computer before 2024 #
When completed in 2024, the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will stretch across 3,000km and will be 50 times more powerful than existing telescopes, giving humankind an unprecedented peek into the furthest (and, therefore, oldest) reaches of space.
But capturing such incredible detail brings with it a hefty computing challenge – the array will generate an exabyte (1,000,000,000 gigabytes) of data every day. That’s twice the daily traffic for the entire World Wide Web. How on earth do you process that amount of data?
ASTRON and IBM have now partnered up to create the ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology in the Netherlands, with the goal to create the ultra-fast, but low-power computing required to process the data. Specifically, scientists at ASTRON and IBM will investigate advanced accelerators and 3D stacked chips for more energy-efficient computing. They will also research novel optical interconnect technologies and nanophotonics to optimise large data transfers, as well as high-performance storage systems based on next-generation tape systems and novel phase-change memory technologies. Personally, I can’t wait for this tech to make it into my SSD.