Breakfast Links: SpaceShip Two, Little Laptops & Lite-Brite
Ever since I thought Lance Bass was going to get into space before me (which, thankfully, never happened) I’ve been mildly obsessed with the space tourism industry and monitoring it’s falling costs, I’m not the only one! Thank god for Richard Branson, y’know? So he just unveiled SpaceShipTwo and it’s attendant White Knight 2 - with two distinct spacing and number spelling motifs that I find distracting… Interestingly White Knight 2 seems to be built on an open architecture although it isn’t clear to me just how open it is…
Whitehorn clarified the open architecture point a bit: He said that if interested parties come to Virgin and Scaled Composites they can use key points such as WhiteKnightTwo’s wing to build new aircraft. “We will work with people that come to work with us to do new things with the WhiteKnightTwo. If people come to us we’ll work with them.â€
But really, I don’t care… hurry up and get the price down so I can get me into the final frontier!
On the more immediate front, it’s no secret that based on what I’ve seen the MacBook Air is the bob-omb. Sadly, all the big reviewers, while they like it don’t love it (UPDATE: here’s a better comparison, with Pogue included). I still cling to my antiquated notions that this could be the machine that lots of folk have waited for. Not everyone, but a good number of ‘em. On the other hand, this new fujitsu P8010’s pretty neat, too. Decent, screen, smaller footprint, big ram and only 2.69 pounds. It has strangely a lot of ports, including a 56k modem?? I love my fujitsu P1120 and this looks like quite a nice bump (although w/out the touch screen). Course, it’s a PC so y’know.
And then there was Lite-Brite. A little javascript page that lets you while away your time placing light up color onto a grid of dots. I just wish it also had all those graduate level lite-brite tools like the shapes and that wierd pizza-cutter-wheel-thing. You know what I’m talking about. Still, this is pretty good stuff.
BONUS: Not that I bear any great love for William Gibson, but I do bear great love for myself - so I feel good that he also hated that stupid intro to Cloverfield that said ‘area formerly known as “central park”.’ God that was so “stupid”.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
If we go up is spaceship 2 together, you can’t throw up on me like you did in spaceship one. MY GOD JIM! GRAB A BARF BAG!
January 24th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Doesn’t matter, man.. If I barf in space it will float around hitting everyone anyway. Kinda like puking in the gravitron, remember that thing??
January 24th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I bet Spaceship Two is 100 times safer than the Gravetron!