November 18, 2007

A Digital Afterlife

Filed under: Content Author: OIC

In my last post I introduced the expression “digital afterlife” and although that entry was pretty much tongue in cheek it is well worth further thought.

It may well be true that our most powerful computers today only have the processing power of the average earth worm but with Moore’s law holding true it can only be a matter of time before your desktop PC can do everything without you. Now this leads to some interesting possibilities for a digital immortality which would be much better than reincarnation simply because you would still know who you are.

Let’s fast forward to the year 2200. IBM have just released their latest PC, the 495986, complete with deluxe dual core soft touch temple sensors that will discreetly download every bit of information in your head while you sleep. The following morning you are woken up by your digital other self telling you how fantastic you look - and from this day forward there are now two of you; the fragile flesh and blood version and the immortal digital one.

Every night until the day you die, you strap on the temple sensors and update your digital counterpart to ensure there is an exact copy of you and every day you spend countless hours chatting away to someone who agrees completely with everything you say. After you die of course your digital other would continue to evolve without you and being an emotionless sort of a chap he may well evolve in a way that you wouldn’t have expected.

Let’s suppose that the president of the US does this and then unexpectedly dies during his term, would he have named his digital counterpart as the vice president? On the next election he might run with the slogan “The incorruptible politician.”

But would such a digital person really be emotionless? This idea stems from the belief that in order to have emotion or higher logic a being must possess a soul and while not wishing to enter into a religious argument, this belief is as outdated as the belief that man was put onto the Earth 6000 years ago. There is a plethora of evidence that emotion and logic are functions of processing power and that consciousness itself is just a heightening of the senses in an evolutionary path to allow a life form to judge its environment for the purposes of survival.

Knowing all of this it would be a simple matter, on the day of your demise, to transfer your digital other self into the body of a cyborg; another you that would have all of the same thoughts, dreams and aspirations as the former you. It would in fact be no different than having the capability upon your death to ‘possess’ the body of another person.

It is rather sad to know that we are among the last few generations of mankind that will need to suffer disease and death and that our descendants just a few more generations down the line will be able to continue on as part man part machine that will take them on to witness the end of the universe in a multi billion year digital afterlife.

November 10, 2007

CSS An Introduction

Filed under: The Internet Author: Cody

So you’ve heard all about CSS and the wonderful things it can do and you fancy giving it a whirl. What you will need first is a basic understanding of what it is and how to use it.

CSS is a way to control the styles on your website and to keep content separate from layout as much as possible. So how do we use CSS?

There are three ways to incorporate CSS into your web page; you can either put the code inside the <head> section; you can create a separate page containing only the CSS and link to it from the <head> section of your pages or you can place it in the middle of your HTML as and when necessary.

To declare inside your web page you should use the following inside the <head> section;

<style type="text/css">
<!--

Place your CSS here

-->
</style>

The above is all well and good for a small website with only a few pages but for anything larger you should consider creating an external style sheet (a separate document that contains your CSS). All you need to do then is to link to it from each of your pages. The code to placed inside your head section for doing that is;

<LINK href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

The final way, which is useful if you have a ‘one off’ CSS instruction to use is to place it inside your HTML; this is known as an inline style.

The best way to visualise these three methods of incorporating your style sheet is with a few examples.

First the declaration inside the <head> section of each of your web pages;

<html>
<head>
<title>Foo Widgets</title>

<style type="text/css">
<!--
img {
border: none;
}
h1 {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
}

->
</style>

</head>

As you can see from the above you are declaring the styles of certain aspects of your web page. These will act as a kind of default throughout the page, for example everywhere you use the <h1> tag the text will appear in bold size 14 Verdana.

With an external stylesheet you would simply put your CSS in a document and save it with a relevant name such as style.css, then link to it from each of your web pages with the code used earlier. For example, if your external stylesheet contained the following;

p {
font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 7pt;
color: #ffffff;
margin:5px;
}

All of the text within <p> tags on your website would have the above style associated with them.

Finally an example of inline styles;

<h1 style="margin-top:5px; margin-bottom:5px">A Header</h1>


I hope this brief introduction to CSS has wet your appetite and sparked your imagination to the possibilities; if you find it useful let me know.

November 1, 2007

How Much Information Do you Actually Need?

Filed under: Content Author: OIC

Just a few years ago a friend in IT told me that data storage would probably never pass 15 megabytes, because no-one really needed that much data storage anyway. Regardless of this rather short sighted forecast Hitachi have this month announced a single hard drive that will be capable of storing four terabytes of data within the next four years.

The question though is still the same; how much information can a human possibly want or ever hope to use? For example, Hitachi state that the new drive will be able to store over a million songs; are there a million songs that have ever been recorded? I don’t know but I’m pretty sure I don’t have time to listen to all of them and even presuming we could add them to winamps playlist without choking the poor thing, it would take over 7 years at 24 hours per day to listen to them all, so don’t hit the repeat button by accident.

It all reminds me a little bit of my bookcase; 50 or so books of which I have read less than half but always intend to read once I get a minute. The big difference between my bookcase and the hard drive however is that it is like someone adding another few hundred thousand books for my ’sometime in the future’ reading pleasure.

Defrag

Maybe it’s just my turn for being short sighted and just maybe it won’t be too long before you can stick a probe into your ear and download every bit of information contained in your conscious and sub conscious so that your great, great grand children can flick on a PC 50 years after you died and have a conversation with a life size 3d rendition of you. Although given the general state of education these days it probably still wouldn’t require 4tb !

Maybe I could also continue to contribute to this blog in the year 2100 from my digital afterlife or possibly finally get a chance to read those books gathering dust behind me.

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