OnLive and remote visualisation

S pointed me — actually, given his level of evangelism, I was more a frogmarched than pointed — towards the recent stuff about the OnLive online gaming system.

Interestingly, I remember going to a whole load of SGI presentations on something similar — remote visualisation — back in 2001 or so. Of course, they were using an Onyx 3000 to covert large data sets into polygons and a high bandwidth OC line to shunt the results to an output device. I'm not quite sure what happened — it seemed like a pretty cool, if expensive, concept — but I don't think it was ever turned into a commercial product.

In other news, I notice that WD have come out with a 2TB hard disc. That's more storage than the Cray had 10 years ago. God, I feel old...

Reynolds on Fripp

I've been a bit slow with this, but I notice that Al Reynolds has a post on his contradictory relationship with the music of Robert Fripp:

I've been listening to it in its various forms for more than twenty five years, yet I've never really had anything resembling a conventional emotional connection with it. It's more like mathematics, or physics. I suppose the analogy would be looking up at a cliff: it's huge and soaring, impressive in a bleakly magnificant way, but it's also kind of forbidding, with an attendant risk that chunks might break off at any moment. It's certainly in no way warm or consoling, in no way capable of cheering you up, but then I don't suppose that's remotely the point.