Archive for the ‘Daily Rant’ Category
Home Computing Circa 1954
This article was pinned up in one of our cubicles. It is a photo from Popular Mechanics in the year 1954 that tried to foresee what a home computer would look like. Caption reads:Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustarte how a home computer could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also, the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented tochnology to actually work, but, 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to resolve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language the computer will be easy to use.
What was the steering wheel for??
Addendum January 27, 2011
I should have known this picture was too good to be true. It turns out that this photo is fake that somebody produced in 2004. It was photo-shopped from a picture of the control room of a submarine maneuvering room. The old geezer was added in, along with the keyboard. The original photo had a state-of-the-art display in its place. The steering wheel makes perfect sense in a sub. Here’s the actual photo before the pranking.
I found out the truth from snopes.com.
Let’s Have a TV Strike Today
I’m leading the way. It’s a pretty sad commentary on western society when the biggest news story of the week is the death of a celebrity. UI’m talking about the Michael Jackson coverage, of course. Tom Engelhardt had more to say about this and said it more eloquently in his latest Tom Dispatch.
One thing that is really sad in all this is that several other, more worthy (IMHO) celebrities died in the same time period and those deaths were totally swamped by the Jackson tsunami. Therefore, here is a brief list of some that I noticed:
Probably the death of Billy Mays will have the greatest actual effect on our realities, because he was always in our faces pitching some miracle product. And yes, Hercules hooks do work just as well as Billy promised. We saw Billy every day and I’m certainly going to miss him more than Jacko.
Jackson may have been a great musician and certainly had a large effect on the entertainment industry in his day. That day was a long time ago, though. His main occupations for the last ten years have been spending money and going to court. I think its really amusing that the same news services that flayed him during his court cases are now lionizing him as though he were the second coming.
Personally, I’m just glad I have lots of episodes of Dog Whisperer and a bunch movies saved on my PVR to satisfy my entertainment jones. Strike, I say. Strike now.