If you have ever wanted to make your own web comic video using the original Star Trek characters, GoAnimate will now allow you to do that.
Here is my own little five minute creation.
GoAnimate.com: Kirk Love
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
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This year could be a banner year for science fiction and fantasy with great movies coming out throughout the year.
The following are the movies that I have found that are sci-fi or fantasy related that have a set release date.
Outlander - January 23rd, 2009
Push - February 6th, 2009
Fanboys - February 6th, 2009
Watchmen - March 6th, 2009
Race to Witch Mountain - March 13th, 2009
Knowing - March 20th, 2009
Monsters vs. Aliens - March 27th, 2009
Dragonball Evolution - April 9th, 2009
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - May 1st, 2009
Star Trek XI - May 9th, 2009
Terminator Salvation - May 22nd, 2009
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen - June 26th, 2009
2012 - July 10th, 2009
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - July 17th, 2009
District 9 - August 14th, 2009
Pandorum - September 4th, 2009
Game - September 4th, 2009
9 - September 9th, 2009
Surrogates - September 25th, 2009
Astro Boy - October 23rd, 2009
The Box - November 6th, 2009
Planet 51 - November 20, 2009
Avatar - December 18th, 2009
If I have missed any, please let me know. Also, if you have some favourites from that list, please let me know which ones they are. I am super excited to see what happens to the genres in 2009 and beyond.
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I remember when I was just starting high school, I would play around on various sites trying to come up with the computer I would own ten years later. It is now eight years later, and I was way off base on certain things, and pretty close on others.
Here is an example of what I thought consumer level computers would be like in 2010:
With recent news that Samsung has created a 4GB chip to allow desktops and laptops up to 32GB or RAM (Engadget), and Western Digital drawing attention for their 2TB hard drive (Engadget) it is easy to see how close I was on some predictions.
The biggest mistakes I made were in assuming that clock speeds would continue to increase over the next decade, and that increasing the speed of DVD drives would be important.
I think, what is most amazing to me, is that other than the CPU and the DVD Burner, I could have created this computer a few months ago for under $2,500, especially considering that when I made this list, we had just bought a Compaq computer for nearly that price, and it’s features were nothing glamourous.
How will consumer level computer technology change over the next two years? What about the next decade?
My predictions are that we will see more processor cores being fit on a single CPU, with it maxing out at around sixteen. We will also see a continued trend on packing in more RAM until a new technology comes along to bring CPU’s and RAM closer together, maybe eventually tying them into one packaged product.
Another interesting trend I am seeing is the increasing dependance on the Internet. With applications first going online to the web, and now coming back to the desktop thanks to Google Gears and Adobe AIR, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard drive sizes stopped being a key selling point to most consumers. Gamers, video editors and whatnot will still opt for larger hard drives, but the price will flatten out, and stop dropping at the rapid rate we experience today as people do most of their computing on the cloud. Storage and applications as a service will grow as an industry. People will pay twenty-five dollars a month to access a whole suite of applications as well as storage, paying only for their computer and operating system as a “one time fee”, while nearly everything else will be free, per-use fee, monthly fee or yearly fee to access.
Thumb drives will make most optical drives obsolete in the next decade. Even movies will either be downloaded right from the Internet onto your computer, television or set-top box or you’ll bring your USB drive to a video kiosk, purchase a movie rental, a DRM-laden file will be transferred to it, and then disappear once your rental time is up.
Because most applications will run through things like Google Gears or Adobe AIR, they will quickly become platform independent, allowing operating systems to compete in other ways.
Mobile devices are really where things are heading. Desktop computer’s are nice, but this whole Netbook craze has proven that its days could be numbered. I still think a more modular computer design where I could bring my screen with me while on the go, and then dock it at home for a more powerful computing experience would be ideal.
What are your thoughts on the future of computers? Have you been surprised at how fast they’ve changed over the last decade?
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This is a pretty simple future idea, and one that I think we will hopefully see in the next few years: computer settings that follow you from machine to machine.
Currently, when you log onto a computer, it checks your permissions against a local file, and then displays your desktop relating to that single computer. With more and more computers going onto the Internet, why wouldn’t you check login permissions based on a central server, and display the desktop and applications relating to that account, rather than that single computer?
While many people talk about an Internet based operating system, I think the first step should be an Internet based user authentication system that pulls the basic “display and organization” settings from the Internet.
Microsoft could implement something like this fairly easily. The advantage being that you would always have the desktop you know and love, on nearly any computer connected to the Internet. Also, if you were using storage space on the web, and had it mapped as a drive, it would be there waiting for you.
Lastly, while it might not be feasible to have all your applications follow you around, it should be easy enough to correctly implement the settings you use on certain applications that are installed on the computer you are using.
Say you are using a friends computer, and they have an FTP program. That FTP program is the same as you use at home. When you log into your custom account, it should poll the computer to see what software it has, if there are any matches to the software you use on your primary computer, it should drag the related settings to your account on your friends computer, allowing you to easily FTP into your site with any saved session data you may have at home.
Syncing would be a real pain for this type of “bring your home experience with you” Operating System, but in the end, most everyone I know has tweaked their settings in one way or another at home, creating efficiencies that are lost when hopping onto someone else’s computer.
While I think an operating system on the Internet might be too large, heavy and frustrating, this idea could be the bridging step to that goal, as the file size related to a database of information, settings, background images, network shares, and more would most likely be miniscule compared to transferring a whole operating system.
Does this idea have any merit, or am I just crazy? Let me know in the comments below.
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Everyone knows that we live in the Milky Way galaxy, correct? Well, scientists have recently realized that the MIlky Way galaxy is not only spinning faster than they initially thought, but it is also larger than was previously calculated.
We used to think the Andromeda galaxy was larger than our own, but now it seems the Milky Way is of a comparable size.
From CBS News via the Associated Press:
Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, Calif.
That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The slight 5-foot-5, 140-pound astrophysicist said it’s the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a 6-foot-3, 210-pound NFL linebacker.
This means that our galaxy will intersect with the approaching Andromeda galaxy much sooner than previously predicted, but still billions of years from now.
It could mean though a higher chance of finding intelligent life in our own galaxy though as a higher density means more stars, and possibly more habitable planets. I am very interested to see if this effects the overall calculations on the number of Earth sized planets in the Goldilocks zone.
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