Soooo slowwww

Many things in life are pointless. But you have to love people who take such activities to an artform.

Progress in Britian

In my view Great Britian has only, really, seen progress during two periods of her long history. The first was during the Roman occupation up to around 400 AD. The second was during the Victorian era of the 1800's. Outside this, nothing very much changed in our nation. Now what most people don't realise is that the Romans and the Victorians were in fact the same, Alien race, which has visited Earth and Great Britian on only two occassions. When they last left, they did so in giant, steam powered iron spacecraft complete with velvet lining, each adorned with an enormous fireplace. Believe me. And lets hope they come back soon as the railways are completely shafted.

My Digital Life....

With the rise of media centres and similar devices which aim to bring together all my digital photos, music and films into one convenient location I'm very keen to set something up at home. However, I am still concerned about how easily I could loose everything dear to me (could I live without my Duran Duran collection?... errmm well...). At the moment if my house got robbed and someone walked off with all my CDs and DVDs I would phone my insurance company, tell them what got nicked and they (hopefully) would reimburse me for all my missing shiney disks. But what happens if it was all on a hard disk somewhere and was downloaded from iTunes music store? How do I prove I ever paid for this? Sure I coule lie about how many CDs I owned and, to some extent, I doubt the insurance company would be too bothered. But what about 0.5TB of music? I mean at about 79pence per track and a track being about 4MB that is approximately...more than 100,000 UKP! Blimey! With disk sizes as they are it is near impossible to back them up unless it is to another disk and is everyone expected to setup some kind of home network with a server to autobackup?. There is a real lack of any support for domestic backup services (a real buisiness opportunity in the making I reckon). And another thing. If my house gets robbed now chances are my photos won't get taken as they have very little resale value. However, if they are unfortunate enough to be stored on something that does have resale value - like a media centre - then I can't really see your average burgular stopping to back them up for me before he buggers off with the box. Unless of course he is thoroughly decent chap in which case he wouldn't be in my house in the first place!

X-Prize and beyond

Wow so someone actually won the X-prize. I always kind of assumed that it was asymptotic. I never actually believed anyone would win the thing. I guess thats just one more reason why it wasn't me! Very cool. But another winner is appearing as well. Richard Branson. He has started to push his Virgin Galactic idea with some very neat marketing. For instance just watch the first flight video, as SS1 starts to reconfigure the engines for re-entry whose logo is plastered all over the focus of our attention? Ohh and whose flapping hair is that I see next to Rutan in the main photo on the Scaled Composites website? But what I can't get over is how, for once the roles are reversed. I mean the real innovation for this is largely an all American deal. However, for the moment at least, it looks like the exploitation could be British! I can't believe that for once we might actually exploit someone elses idea instead of the usual situation where a clever British innovation is exploited by a foreign industry. Go Richard.

This Weeks Big Question

In a straight, clean fight who would win, Airwolf or Blue Thunder?