Today marks the 50th anniverary of IBM’s introduction of the first hard disk.
Of course things have moved on since then. Not only are they physically smaller, cheaper and more reliable, but, according to Steven Levy, their capacity has increased considerably:
The total amount of information stored [was] not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Would Apple’s iPod adverts have been quite so successful if it had only been “nearly two songs in your pocket”?
Bruce Schneider again talks some sense about the recent unsuccessful terror attacks.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic.
If the security services did most of their work in the back-ground, without people knowing about it, then the public wouldn’t be in a state of terror. And — from the point of view of the police — working behind the scenes never did James Bond’s reputation any harm…
I found this interesting article that “demolishe[s] the myth that faith strengthens society.”
While we’re frequently told that religion provides a moral basis for a civillised society, the study found “that secular societies have lower rates of violence and teenage pregnancy than societies where many people profess belief in God.”
How can that be?
“Consciously or subconsciously, those who are “born again” or “chosen” have diminished respect for others who do not share their sect or their faith. Convinced that only the Bible offers “truth”, they lose their intellectual curiosity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in but themselves.”
Of course it’s only anecdotal, but some of the “logical” reasoning I’ve heard supports that!
If you’ve been to ZX81 before you can’t fail to notice that we’ve had the second major redesign in our history. This time we’ve moved over to using WordPress, the unfortunate consequence of which is that some of the old links might have stopped working. I’ve tried hard to maintain things, but there may be some problems. Let me know if you find them!
[ Edit: Some people are using my pictures on their web pages, in most cases this is both uncredited and without permission. This is an infringement of my copyright. As you might imagine, I have made no attempt to maintain links for these people. For a short time this may also inconvenience people coming from Google Images. ]
The other thing you’ll notice is a lot of new posts. That’s because I’ve decided to consolidate my two most active websites, that is the largely technical zx81 and the more personal stephendarlington.com. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly maintaining two sites is just significantly more work than one. I guess I should have seen this coming but keeping them separate seemed like a good idea at the time. The second reason is that the division between the two is somewhat arbitrary and not entirely useful.
People with registered accounts at stephendarlington.com should find their accounts present here but it may be necessary to reset the password.
Let me know what you think of this new site and whether you think merging the two together is a good idea.
Okay, so I’ve not watched it for a few years now, but it’s still sad to learn that the BBC have just recorded the last ever “Top of the Pops.”
I couldn’t let the inaugural train journey betweeen Beijing and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, go by without comment. It represents a huge shift for the Tibetans and, while it could bring some positive changes, it’s more likely to bring large numbers of Chinese and a quickening of the pace of the decline of their unique culture.
Wired has a nice article — “Train to the Roof of the World” — that takes a balanced view of the technology and politics. The BBC’s — “First Beijing train reaches Lhasa” — is much shorter if you’re pushed for time!
Also see the pictures from my 2002 trip to the region.