It's funny that the bike I'm looking at (hopefully riding today) is geared the same as my Kawi: 17/42. There are some places in the local area where I can shred on my local condition, ease back onto the Kawi, and it if it's in the form of a single-speed "flat-tracker" with dip bars, who am I to object? How many times have you ridden down GW parkway and thought, gosh, I'd like to be down there on the boards or down there on the cement or in the dirt/mud, where only pedestrians and bicycles are allowed to go? I gotta admit I have wanted to get into the mud so many times I'm amazed I never have.
There are also many beautiful road-courses in places like Great Falls, rides out 29 to the Shenandoah, rides out and up into West Virginia and I'm sure others I've never even noticed. For regular riding trails there are the sanctioned trails, maintained by the state. Then there are mountain bike trails which I know nothing about, but you may look at these few if you're interested (courtesy Big Wheel Bikes — specifically Bennett at the Old Town Alexandria Shop, who is awesome).
13 May, 2010
You're lucky. This was going to be sent out on Buzz.
People want remote work (I WANT REMOTE WORK) and yet the tools are so POOR. if you're not working, here's a hint. INNOVATE. write a tool that lets you work better with that awesome chick you met at at the starbucks on the corner.
Why is this 2010 and we're NOT ALL WORKING WITH SUPER FANCY ASIMOVIAN/GIBSONIAN "slates" and "decks" that do our bidding with formidable capacity, seamlessly (this is presumably ip6 or ip32 or something even wickeder), manufacturing diamond structures of varying shapes and opacity because it's the only sensible thing to do with carbon. Why?
Instead we're chasing batshitinsane people in Africa who do not understand the very possibility that we can create a small star on the surface of the planet where they once stood. That their atoms would be rent from each-other in inelegant fashion, just thrown into box-o-atoms. Seems like that's a good hobby: to collect the atoms of your nuclear annihilated foe in a small jar, sort of like a funerary vase, only placed at a fair distance, give him, say, eight or ten kilometers and plink his ass from somewhere nice and safe and where the rads won't hurt him or anyone else.
I know people are going to say "What of your Air, alex. and the Netbook swarm? The OLPC? Are these not the same decks and slates mentioned in The Robots of Dawn and Neuromancer?"
Are you people friggin kidding me? First of all, these devices were usually just throwaway devices because your data was ephemeral, an almost visceral thing out there, and with a deck, we could "talk to it" much in the way we see (I really hate to make sure a recent reference but Jason Greystone talk to Zoe Greystone's approximation of herself–though we never hear from Zoe herself why she created her own avatar) she did herself, and Greystone later comes to. Remember the talk in (yes, I skipped an author here) in Snow Crash about nobody caring about how magnificently rendered your six foot talking penis was. It was just really uninteresting. Perhaps if it split in part down the middle to reveal a sort of chaise-longe with four seats instead of just two very masculine seats, presumably intended to seduce... either one girl and a time.. on a scrotum... or even three, none of which is especially inventive or effective.
No, he describes the type of avatars (and, I believe, is credited with coining its use) as being of even finer granularity and rendering (I guess where available) so these decks and slates are supposed to be connected to some giant web (not 80) of computational power that one might be able to use to visualize an entirely synthetic environment from, or to be able to augment the environment they are in – to whatever purpose. Nobody's too unclear what those first intrepid reasons for jumping into that synthetic sensation pool are going to be. The question is, how much hardware will it require?
And so, I say again.
Why is this 2010 and we're NOT ALL WORKING WITH SUPER FANCY ASIMOVIAN/GIBSONIAN "slates" and "decks" that do our bidding with formidable capacity, seamlessly (this is presumably ip6 or ip32 or something even wickeder), manufacturing diamond structures of varying shapes and opacity because it's the only sensible thing to do with carbon. Why?
Instead we're chasing batshitinsane people in Africa who do not understand the very possibility that we can create a small star on the surface of the planet where they once stood. That their atoms would be rent from each-other in inelegant fashion, just thrown into box-o-atoms. Seems like that's a good hobby: to collect the atoms of your nuclear annihilated foe in a small jar, sort of like a funerary vase, only placed at a fair distance, give him, say, eight or ten kilometers and plink his ass from somewhere nice and safe and where the rads won't hurt him or anyone else.
I know people are going to say "What of your Air, alex. and the Netbook swarm? The OLPC? Are these not the same decks and slates mentioned in The Robots of Dawn and Neuromancer?"
Are you people friggin kidding me? First of all, these devices were usually just throwaway devices because your data was ephemeral, an almost visceral thing out there, and with a deck, we could "talk to it" much in the way we see (I really hate to make sure a recent reference but Jason Greystone talk to Zoe Greystone's approximation of herself–though we never hear from Zoe herself why she created her own avatar) she did herself, and Greystone later comes to. Remember the talk in (yes, I skipped an author here) in Snow Crash about nobody caring about how magnificently rendered your six foot talking penis was. It was just really uninteresting. Perhaps if it split in part down the middle to reveal a sort of chaise-longe with four seats instead of just two very masculine seats, presumably intended to seduce... either one girl and a time.. on a scrotum... or even three, none of which is especially inventive or effective.
No, he describes the type of avatars (and, I believe, is credited with coining its use) as being of even finer granularity and rendering (I guess where available) so these decks and slates are supposed to be connected to some giant web (not 80) of computational power that one might be able to use to visualize an entirely synthetic environment from, or to be able to augment the environment they are in – to whatever purpose. Nobody's too unclear what those first intrepid reasons for jumping into that synthetic sensation pool are going to be. The question is, how much hardware will it require?
And so, I say again.
- The Netbooks, iPad, iPhone, Macbook Air, and OLPC are not, are nowhere close, not even an order of magnitude close to a "deck" or a "slate" as described by our near-future priests of technology.
- The background infrastructure almost exists for the sorts of things required by a real, coalescent "cyberspace". It's got to go orbital so that it can get from place to place faster. It's got to adopt superprotocols that encapsulate other protocols. Remember everybody talking about running "6 over 4" in places where 4 is the only thing available between two 6 islands? How about "SIPR over NIPR"? Those big, slow gaps have to go away, and square-the-planet has to happen because even on the surface of Coruscant, bandwidth is shitty because you gotta wait for a guy in tight leather pants trying to seduce a princess like all the other schmucks on the network. The more orbital bandwidth you can grab, the better off you are.
A spam I now pass on to you:
I saw all this today on the ExaGrid website after re-reading an email conversation I'd had with Bill Hobbib. This spam is of the good kind, rather than the usual,
Hobbib, on the other hand, doesn't always offer me a job but expresses interest in my background and my probable interest in the product for my own use. (and, yep, I'm interested)
MY NAME IS NANOOP AND I REPRESENT ON.THE.gridWORX. I HAVE SEEN YOUR BACKGROUND AND I THINK THAT YOU WOULD BE A PERFECT FIT FOR A POSITION HERE IN THE SHARP AND POISONY SIDE OF NEW JERSEY.
Hobbib, on the other hand, doesn't always offer me a job but expresses interest in my background and my probable interest in the product for my own use. (and, yep, I'm interested)
ExaGrid provides the only disk backup appliance with data deduplication that offers best-of-breed for these 10 essential capabilities:
- Storage efficiency from 10:1 to 50:1 via byte-level data deduplication
- Quick installation with a turnkey plug-and-play appliance
- No change to your existing backup application via NAS interface
- Shortest backup window, using post-process deduplication
- Fastest restore and tape copy by storing a full recent backup copy
- No performance degradation as data grows via GRID scalability
- Unparalleled scalability from 1TB to 100TBs with no forklift upgrades
- Fast disaster recovery via WAN-efficient replication and rapid restore
- Deduplication and replication status via job-level reporting
- Lowest price and IT operational costs through unique architecture