Geek Christmas

This week I discovered that the life-cycle of Hallmark keepsake Christmas ornaments is a lot longer than I suspected. For example, this years Star Wars keepsakes are already available as of today, at least in the US. Welcome to (geek) Christmas in July!

Something that took entirely too long is the beta tag coming off Google apps. Gmail had been in beta for over five years, to the extent that I had stopped noticing the tag. It didn't mean anything, the apps certainly worked much more smoothly than anything that would normally be in beta, which after all refers to a rough but fairly stable version put out for limited testing by perhaps a few thousand users. This comes a month after Google basically admitting that they had been abusing the term for years.

Goldman Sachs got a nasty shock last week after a Russian hacker stole the source code for their top-secret trading platform. This is a problem because, as Ars Technica points out, the platform makes thousand of trades per second in an attempt to anticipate the effect of various market news and hopefully make a few cents per trade, which can add up to millions of dollar if the algorithm get it right. As this is all timed down to the millisecond, very powerful computers are used to do this and there is massive competition between brokerages to do it just a little faster. The concern that this information could be used to attack Goldman Sachs or perhaps an entire stock exchange. Or, you know, the very existence of all these very powerful networks all plugged into each other and basically controlling world markets could just become Skynet. One or the other.

On to something a little less threatening, how about a robotic cow? A couple of US military contractors are reportedly working on a battlefield robot that could run off of gasoline or propane but could also process plant biomass to power itself and therefore stay on-mission until someone blows it up or comes to turn it off. The actual name is the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) which still sounds goofy, but perhaps more military as it is, at least, and acronym. Nobody wants to give the order "deploy the robotic cow!"

Well, it sounds good in theory.

Here's a headline that needed to be thought about a little more closely: Brain-Controlled Wheelchair is "95 Percent Accurate". Which would be great for quadriplegics, but what happens that 5% of the time when the controls don't work properly? Run you into a wall? Off a bridge? Might have to hold off on making this widely available, until it's got server-like uptime. I'll take my chances at 99.9%. Incidentally, I've got a great idea for an extreme sport: inaccurate-mind-control wheelchair racing! Can you imagine NASCAR with steering that only works 95% of the time? You can bet George Carlin did (RIP).