10 Timelines From The Terminator Universe

Time travel can be confusing. Every time someone steps into a time machine, it changes everything. However, that can be convenient for writers piecing together new movies -it explains every continuity goof and every great new idea that would be hard to explain otherwise. io9 lays out ten different timelines that work in one part or another of the Terminator movie series (and TV show).

I’ve mulled it over some more, and I still believe there has to be a timeline where someone other than Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. When The Terminator was a standalone movie, you could read it either way. Either there’s a circular causality, where Kyle is “always” John Connor’s father, or Kyle’s time travel creates a new branch. But Terminator 2 pretty much establishes that time travel always creates new branches, because there’s no fate but what we make. And the Connors, with their friendly T-800, are able to stop or at least delay Skynet. But of course, your mileage, even backwards and forwards through time, may vary.

Whether they make complete sense or not, reading these may help prepare you for Terminator Salvation.



An introduction to SpiceWorks: The free and awesome way to manage your network

I use SpiceWorks 3.5 to document and manage a lot of functions on my network. The best part about it is that it is free! I don’t know why so many administrators refuse to document their networks.

Maybe they feel it helps their job security, but in the long run, this can become quite a problem. You need to have documentation on all your systems and equipment — just in case!

Spiceworks will help you document, map and find out about what is going on with your network. I am talking about drives with no space left, full event logs, security issues and much much more!

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No more geeks in fifty years?

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Richard Demming wrote a short story called “The Shape of Things That Came” back in 1950.  The story, set in 1900, is about a writer who has traveled forward in time to 1950 and back again.  He tries to publish a story about the future technologies he has witnessed, but it’s rejected — the editor says it’s unbelievable because with so many advances in only fifty years, it’s impossible that everyone could take them for granted.

I read this story for the first time just last year, and I had to wonder what a modern version of it would look like with all the advances in technology we’ve seen since the fifties.  Just as in Demming’s story, today we take even the most recently introduced gadgets as commonplace components of our lives.

Now TechRadar has published nine predictions for the future of computing over the next fifty years.  If I’m still alive in 2059, it would be interesting to compare how closely reality follows these prognostications.  I’m guessing that they’re pretty far off the mark, given the history of such predictions and the accelerating pace of technology.  Even looking forward five years into the future is getting pretty dicey, never mind fifty.

For instance, take the predictions about photonics.  This is a technology that already exists.  Is it realistic to think that no better alternative will be developed in fifty years?  And will it really take that long for computing to reach zettascale?  Will advances in display, storage, speech, and touch be only refinements on what we already have?  Think of all the innovations in computing over the last fifty years and then tell me we can’t do any better than that.

But the one that really got my goatee is the ninth and last point: “Being a geek won’t matter”, because everyone will possess geek powers.  A commenter named “matrixdweller” captured my reaction precisely:

Making the assumption that everyone will be geeks would be like saying, back in the early 20th century, that everyone would be an auto mechanic since automobiles would proliferate to a great extent. The more concise conclusion would be that everyone would know how to drive.

Sure the technical know how of the average person will far exceed that of the average person today. Similarly on how each generation’s technical know how is more advanced than the preceding generation’s (my parent’s still can’t set their digital clocks). There will always be those that have a more advanced comprehension of a subject than the general population.

Of course there will be geeks — they just won’t be working on problems that will have already been solved for fifty years.  Instead they’ll be exploring new technologies that haven’t even been dreamt of yet.

Long live geeks!



Electric Dark Side

What would be the next step after playing music with a tesla coil? Stepping into the music yourself, wearing a Faraday suit, of course! Patrick from ArcAttack does just that, with an appropriate theme song. A comment at Metafilter says it all: “Now, see, if Vader had offered THIS to Luke as one of the benefits of the Dark Side, well, things would have just ended up a lot different.”

[via Metafilter]

Sand Music

Sound designer Diego Stocco realized this song by using various sound samples created with sand alone.

I had some sandbags in the backyard that I used in November during a rainy day. I was moving them to a different spot when I heard the noise of the sand. I thought that maybe I could try a new sound design technique so I bought some piezo film transducers and started to experiment with them.

The entire track is created only out of tuned sand tones. No additional sounds or waveforms. I emphasized the inner notes of the sand grains and mapped them on a sampler as a series of instruments. The grooves are all played live with various techniques, including taping two piezo films to my fingers.

[Via Neatorama]

In Search of Airness: Video of the Austin Air Guitar Preliminaries

Enjoy this brief glimpse into the world of competitive air guitar. Filmed by us last Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz Theatre in Austin, Texas, these guys are just the preliminary qualifiers for the international air guitar championship. Relive the only good part of the 1980s that’s still good today as the long hair flies. And yes, if you’re in the Austin area, there’s another qualifier coming up in a couple months so you, too, can compete.

If you’d like to see the video in HD resolution, just hit this link, which will take you to the video’s high-def page on Vimeo.

Star Trek Character or Erectile Dysfunction Pill?

quiz_head_startrekvsed

It doesn’t often happen that the funniest thing I’ve seen all day would be a mental_floss quiz, but that happened today. And I thought of you. Can you identify whether ten names are Star Trek characters or erectile dysfunction medications? I couldn’t; my score fell within the margin of error for random guesses, which is pretty much what they were.