Why Obsolete Technology Can Save Your Life

So, there's been a lot of ballyhooing about the obsolete technologies our government uses in what are generally thought of as "State of the Art" facilities. As a closet luddite who genuinely misses his old Sears electric typewriter, I have a fondness for old tech, and can even appreciate its myriad advantages over newfangled gadgetry. If you're laughing, ask yourself how many times your PC has crashed while using a word processor e-mail client, think about why those errors occur, and now think about how a typewriter works. 

Okay, yeah, the door being held open by a crowbar is kind of a big screw-up, but using the antiquated computronics is actually rather a stroke of genius and lateral thinking. There's some joke in hacker/computer geek circles that the US Army has the most secure computer network in the country entirely by virtue of the fact they haven't upgraded it since 1992, so not only is most of it offline, but hardly anyone works in it primary programming language, and there's so little RAM to go around that running a virus would likely crash the system before it did any real damage. 

Also, bear in mind the US Army had its ass handed to it in Vietnam by farmers with sharpened bamboo sticks instead of sensible footwear. 

Anyway, going back to the silos...  

Because the floppies are so prone to erasure from interference, they have to be stored very carefully. Removing them or tampering with them would likely corrupt them, making them useless. Considering the way Mutually Assured Destruction is supposed to work, I feel very comfortable knowing our nuclear missiles are most likely to do absolutely nothing. Optical media may not be indestructible, but their relative longevity compared to those disks makes them a liability. In other words, "this message will self-destruct in five seconds." 

As for the computers themselves:

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Those computers aren't exactly versatile, but the one thing they're literally built to do, they do fine and dandy with a cherry on top. There's a reason why people marvel over their old Atari consoles still working while XBox360s get made the butt of jokes for their Red Rings of Death. 

Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima PC games, said in a recent interview that while aboard the ISS, a daily ritual was to reboot the PCs running Windows to reduce their chances of crashing. Similarly, the computers aboard the Space Shuttles had about as much processing power combined as a Blackberry from 2002, but the R&D and Quality Assurance behind their construction is without question because they are made to work. Your average desktop PC has to be a kind of Jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none, but these are purpose-built machines that don't waste time, space, or energy they don't need for their primary function. 

So, frankly, I think all this uproar about old tech in the private sector is unbearably naive and you should all be ashamed of yourselves. As penance, dig out your old GameBoys (or get one if you don't have it anymore) give it a warm, loving kiss, place it on a pillow, and tell it how grateful you are its processing power would have been overkill for the Apollo missions. 


You're welcome. 

A Fabricated Encounter (from Facebook)

The Facebook status message that started this:
PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THESE INSTRUCTIONS: I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE. That's right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status, so I can do the same. I bet HALF of you won't read the instructions.

to which I replied:
I was sabotaging a cruise ship with the intention of stranding the passengers to die a slow and painful death of starvation as a sacrifice to the ancient god Dagan. I was setting the detonator in the boiler room when you walked in on me, mistaking the room for the sauna. I thought you were going to try and stop me, but while I was explaining my evil plan (as all bombastic villains do) before silencing you, it turned out we actually worshiped the same evil deity and you'd even poisoned the entire food supply and were simply sticking around for a celebratory sauna. So, we fired up the jet skis and left that band of wayward travelers to their doom.

and in return:
The obelisk stood dusty in the dunes as I brush at them... frustrated at my situation. "Oh Lord DAGAN. Why must I unearth this damned monument?!" I yelled to nothing in particular. "Because he wishes it so," a voice from behind me called out startling me causing me to drop my brush. I looked back and spotted you setting down your backpack and breaking out a brush of your own. "The name's Matthew Joseph of the Great Dark Deepness, yourself?" I picked up my brush and returned to the delicate dusting of what looks like Dagan sitting atop a massive throne with men and women weeping at his feet and replied without looking at you, "Desiree of the Deep Weeping." The conversation went from Dagan to darker topics as the sun sank behind the larger dunes of the endless desert. The chittering of the hellflies dying on our buzz zapper makes us laugh as we continue our dark duty in the light of our new friendship.

This is seriously my new favorite thing right now. Thanks, Desi :)

Two Webcams for the Price of One

Apart from occasionally begging my dad to let me look through the viewfinder of the VHS camcorder he'd bring home from work, and the Christmas video we shot one year, my first real experience working with video was a webcam. My Dad got it through work for videoconferencing. It was only in monochrome, but it delivered a very solid 30 frames per second, or at least above 15. Of course, that was the frame rate when the video was saved directly to a hard-drive; the frames dropped well below 10 per second during an actual video chat session (DSL was maybe being whispered about, but high-speed was pretty much nonexistent). Now, here we are, over ten years later, and I've learned many things about webcams, the most important thing being that color is a failure mechanism. Seriously, it's sad when a monochrome webcam from the mid-to-late 90s looked better than most webcams I've seen today.

I bought one once circa 2002, but I took it back after one day, citing its failure to get me a full 30 frames per second despite the iMac being well above the minimum system requirements. Again, the old monochrome webcam could get consistently higher than 15 frames per second, but this newer and more modern camera couldn't muster more than 10. Granted, the newer one was a lot cheaper compared to the monochrome one, which I think cost about 130USD at the time.

More recently I was reading a Cyberguys catalog and came across this little IPEVO number and was intrigued by its ergonomics. Later, I found a packaged deal on Amazon where I could get two for the price of one, and thought I'd give it a shot. I mean, surely there must be a lot of progress made between 2002 and today in the way of webcams.

I was wrong... mostly.

When I record directly to the hard-drive, I was really disappointed to see it not even rise to the level of a now-decades-old webcam despite the advances in technology in those intervening years. My PC, which has literally 5 times the processing power and RAM of the iMac, is still apparently not powerful enough to get this camera running anywhere close to 30 frames per second. Instead, it averages about 8.

That said, I'm not going to take it back.

Why? Because I like its quirky design, I like the fact that I got two of them for the same price, and, best of all, I like the picture effects. The picture effects include a black-and-white mode (which immediately earned its staying power on my desk) and something called "TV effect" which adds horizontal lines to make it look like an old security camera. Put simply, I love it. I can't explain it, somehow 8fps doesn't look so contrived or ugly when the video is in monochrome than color.

So, the IPEVO PoV is the newest implement in my lens-based arsenal.