Category Archives: Snippets

A short post or comment (well, for me) about some topic that doesn’t warrant a full blog article.

For many weeks I’ve been having tons of problems with my mouse pointer skipping across the screen seemingly without rhyme or reason. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth (I won’t admit to the renting of raiment…or the refusing to paint of raiment) I think I found the reason: the color in parts of my mouse pad rendered the laser in the mouse ineffective to the cause. Since changing out that mouse pad for a different one which lacked the offensive color zones, no noticeable problems (so far).

Sometimes it’s the simple things that trip us up the most easily in our complex technological world.

I dug into the archives and started reading the ads from a 1981 issue of Byte Magazine. My gosh, how in the world did we ever find the money to buy any of this marginally useful stuff? At this point in time I was on my second computer and about to do my first build from scratch using chips, wires, wirewrap boards, and discreet components — releasing much magic blue smoke during that learning curve.

You could buy one of them there new-fangled 5MB (yes, megabyte) hard drives for just $2995! For those who wanted so much storage that no one could possibly fill it, you could get up to 100MB of HD storage for only $19,980. These come with data transfer rate of between 590 kB/s and 900 kB/s. By comparison, you can now get a Seagate 4TB hard drive (that’s ~4,000,000 MB) with 146 MB/s (~146,000 kB/s) average throughput, for $209.

If you didn’t have that kind of cash, you could snag an 8″ double-density floppy drive (about 500 kB formatted) for just $425 – box of 10 disks only $24. A bargain!

We’ll know that we’ve created artificial intelligence the moment we realize that we’ve also created artificial stupidity. That revelation might be delayed a bit, however, as natural stupidity is so pervasive and we seem to lack adequate filters.
CJ Carter

An Observation on Artificial Intelligence