Chris is happy (I guess) that FSU made the list. Two positions left, if the ‘shoe is not in #1 or #2 then this entire series is a farce.

I’ve been wondering a lot about the practical implications of the partitioning of processing power on the PC.

I’ve been dutifully buying machines with faster and faster Intel processors, I even bought a dual proc machine, and I have to say – the results have been underwhelming. All this processing power just seems to get sopped up by Windows, Office, all the taskbar cruft that programs and oems install, etc etc. As I have doubled and tripled the power available to me, my life hasn’t gotten a lot better.

On the other hand, I’ve also been adding processing power even faster to my video subsystem as I’ve kept up with the nvidia and ati product leapfrogs. And I have to say – my computing experience has gotten visibly, materially better over the last 24 months, games are looking better by the month.

And so I have started to wonder about the “right” model for partitioning processing power on the PC platform. I am not wondering in computer science sense. I am wondering at pragmatic, social level. I wonder if creating a pool of dedicated processing power, not generally accessible to general purpose programs, has created an environment in which games have been able to move ahead faster. And I am wondering if keeping this processing power away from the general use pool, away from all the general purpose cruft on my machine, has in fact been the reason that games have been able to take off. If all game processing power was intermingled with the general purpose cpu, would we have seen the same rate of improvement?

I wonder if we wouldn’t be served by more special purpose co-processors. A network/security processor where all the code for firewalling, virus checking, intrusion detection, compression, etc could happen. A reliability coprocessor where dedicated code could be backing up, examining systems for failure, predicting problems, etc.

Certainly not a traditional view of how to evolve the PC but I wonder.

Your tax dollars at work over and over and over again. We’ve been scanning all the national forest websites, looking for trail and camping info. For instance – Olympic National Forest - Olympic Peninsula Washington, and the Okanagon National Forest, and the Gifford Pinchot, and the Mt Baker-Snoqualmie.

Now as a taxpayer, I love all this info online, it is a great resource. But do we really need to have completely different website designs and architectures for every single national forest? This is just a sample of the forests near us, how much redundant effort is happening nationwide?

Saw a reference to Lockss in the recent Economist tech review. Its basic mission:

“let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” – Thomas Jefferson

All well and good for libraries, but I need this for all my personal stuff too. I wish I had a dead simple way for instance of replicating all my digital photos to 3-4 different places, so that I was never at risk of losing them.

Another random idea for the day. I kind of wish my PC kept up a blog of its own. I’d like to see day by day – what software was installed, what errors occurred, what config changes were made. all nicely categorized, which a nice search interface. A web interface so i could see it from anywhere of course and permit others as necessary to see it. A nice xml interface of course, it would be fun to do cross machine analysis. Kind of a replacement for existing error logs and audit logs – call it an “error blog” or “audit blog” (ok i am trademarking those terms right now!).

Dave has an idea for a Subscriptions harmonizer so that you can use multiple aggregators. I’d certainly be a customer. I kind of solve it today by using Newsgator which I leave running all the time at work; and then I use Outlook Web Access to browse my aggregated news folders from home. It works ok but it doesn’t let me use arbitrary aggregators at home, or keep sub lists in sync across multiple aggregators.

I told myself that I was never going to buy a Tom Clancy branded game, because I thought that the games probably sucked, the publisher having spent all their money on the name license.

But Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is a seriously good game.

But this is clearly a first generation product. I have a big VGA quality kenwood touch screen in the car, but I can’t browse an artist or disc list. I can just see the name of the current artist or current song – how lame is that! I can’t type in an artist name or song name and search to that – all I can do is play the next disc or the previous disc. Sucko. The only way to really use it is to just let the system do random play across your entire collection. Which is nice but it could be so much better.

Also the whole experience of plugging in aftermarket electronics is kind of a disaster. The good folks at Innovative Audio did the best they could. But the wiring harnesses in modern cars are a proprietary mess – subsystem signals are all entangled in undocumented ways on shared harnesses, so that I can’t replace my receiver head without destroying my Onstar connection or my trip computer behaviour. I hear Mercedes is even worse, they use optical cable for the wiring harness, so there is no ability to attach in at all. It sure seems like the car companies are missing an opportunity here.

This looks too goofy to not buy – Brief introduction to CrazyTalk

Edweblogs.org: NECC 2003 and weblogg-ed are both blogging events…should be interesting to see what is top of mind for folks.

This movie is in trouble. While watching The Hulk, two 20-something guys in the theater fell asleep and were snoring. When your core market for comic-based movies can’t stay awake thru the film…

Contrast with Bend It Like Beckham which was just great.

RCN offering home networking packages : Small Net Builder – I wonder how successful this will be. And what the margins on the business for RCN will be. My friends at pure networks have been thinking about software to automate all this work, I wonder if that is a viable business.

Oh yeah, read this recently too – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5). Some interesting developments for the series, but I thought the quest in this particular book was a little lame.

Another site recommended by prop builders for pneumatic gear – Surplus Center - Hydraulic Equip Electric Motors Engines Gear Reducers – apparently they have floor switch mats too. I’ve never posted this up here but a reminder – you really want to buy commercial grade pneumatic cylinders for your props. They aren’t that expensive. Some folks try to jury rig cylinders out of PVC or screen door closers, but these apparently have the bad habit of exploding and placing shards of plastic and metal into anyone around.

Hey irider is a cool browser alternative! i love the multipage open facility – really great for opening up huge swaths of my blogroll at once. And it seems pretty zippy.