The End is Nigh! - Part 1 - the Robot Apocalypse

I spend some of my time thinking about how the end of the world will occur.  We have all seen Terminator, Terminator II: Judgment Day and The Matrix (you're missing out if you haven't) so we all know that once machines start thinking for themselves they will decide that they no longer need humans around.

The BigDog from Boston Dynamics has been on my radar screen as a potential aid to the military of the United States.  It would be an advantage if our troops didn't have to carry around hundreds of pounds of gear and could instead tell a robot were to haul the stuff for them.  Now that I have seen the video below of the BigDog tossing a cinder block almost as far as I can, which was uploaded to YouTube in February of 2013, I now think of this machine as the harbinger of death.  Behold its awesome power:

Why must robots inevitably be programmed for

destruction?  Can't we teach them to love?

The time was that having a moat* around my place was enough to prevent robotic death machines from storming my one room hovel.

The joke is on them.

I don't have anything worth pillaging.

Now as you can see from this other video, all these creatures need to do is fling cinder blocks into my moat until they create a land bridge and simply walk over them.  The BigDog has been able to walk over cinder blocks since 2009:

Skip ahead to the 1:28 mark to see how it can

walk over cinder blocks

Stay tuned for more ways in which I envision the world ending.  Who knows, you might even learn something.


*My moat is still largely in its conceptual phase.  However, a dog did dig up some of the dirt around my place in the middle of the night several years ago.

Yay Technology!

Impressive Collection of Robots You Got There

Skynet Is Getting Closer to Achieving Their Goals

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

I would like to be writing this on a computer running the Windows 8 Consumer preview.  

Unfortunately, the upgrade from Windows 7 to 8 is taking roughly forever while connected to WiFi at my favorite corporate coffee shop with a thing for the color green.

Man, I Only Have 14 Hours to Spare

Shortly after taking the above screen capture, the preview installer decided to give up on the idea of estimating the time remaining entirely.  Then, just before I took a second screen capture, the installer decided that it lied before and adjusted its estimate up slightly.

Just Because the Calendar Added a 29th Day to February Does

Not Mean that You Will Have Time to Get Ahead on Any Projects

After asking one of the green apron people if she would mind staying a few minutes after closing time the following minor miracle occurred.

If you have a fast internet connection, you can download the preview of Windows 8 from Microsoft here.

Update 2/29/2012 11:42 p.m.: I did get Windows 8 running this evening.  Here are some of my initial reactions to the new version of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system:

• Don't bother installing the Windows 8 update unless you have a monitor that supports a resolution of at least 1024 x 768.  My netbook doesn't like anything above 1024 x 600 so I'll have to plug into an external monitor to access a lot of the new elements featured in the Metro interface.
• The Metro interface that has drawn so much attention is actually really intuitive.  Having a scroll wheel on the mouse you're using makes it easy to slide back and forth across this interface.  Holding a left click and dragging the brightly colored rectangle and square icons allows you to quickly slide them around to move the ones you will use frequently all the way to the left where they belong.
• Knowing some of the more popular Window shortcut keys will help. 
• The Start button is gone. 
• Clicking in the very bottom left will cause the Metro interface to pop up.
• The top right and bottom right are also hot corners now and they bring up a menu of settings that remind me of the menu in the recent Unbuntu releases.
• Finally, Windows 8 is not ready for people that just want everything to work yet.  The first thing I did was to download Firefox to replace the built-in Internet Explorer browser.  Oddly, Windows 8 didn't know what to do with a file with a .exe extension.  Weird.