Some historical geek stuff

First, George Lucas must need to buy another few ranches or something, because here come the Star Wars movies on...Blu Ray.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/14/george-lucas-officially-announces-star-wars-on-blu-ray-in-2011/

I have purchased the "original" ep 4, 5, and 6 four times now - the original VHS tapes (Han shoots first), the THX remastered VHS (Han shoots first) which was a dumb purchase because I didn't have a sound system to handle the better sound at the time, Special Edition VHS widescreen (Greedo shoots first, Jabba in Star Wars, super cleaned up special effects, extra Darth Vader walk scene in Empire), and finally the Special Edition DVD widescreen (Anakin at the end has been replaced by the Episode 2 and 3 Anakin). I doubt I'll be buying the Blu-Rays unless something changes - I haven't dove into Blu-Ray yet and don't plan to, as I predict in 5 years physical media will be obsolete in favor of everything being streamed/online.

Second, a fun "comparison" article between the Apple II graphics tablet (from 1979) and the Apple iPad:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180224/Face_off_1979_Apple_Graphics_Tablet_vs._2010_Apple_iPad

Of course realistically there is no comparison, but it is a great illustration of how technology has changed between 1979 and 2010. I think one of the most interesting points is that the graphics pad was $650 in 1979, the iPad and its thousands of times more advanced technology is $499 in 2010. $650 in 1979 is $1900 in 2010 adjusted for inflation. So for roughly 1/4 of the cost of the 1979 graphic pad we are getting the iPad.

I didn't have a graphics pad, but I did have two Apple IIGS's, and grew up learning to program on Apple IIe's and original MacIntoshes. I remember the memory card we added to our IIGS - originally it comes with 512k of memory (k!!!!) and there was a huge card you could buy, roughly the size of a VHS tape, that added another 512k (k!!!). I just bought two tiny 2G (gig!!!!) memory modules that were about the size of a half a credit card.

And the original Apple IIGS processor? 1MHz (one megahertz). My current Intel core i7 is 3GHz (three gigahertz). My phone processor is 1GHz. The processor in the TV is probably at least 300MHz, heck the fridge probably has a microprocessor bigger than that, the ABS in my car uses at least a 486/66MHz processor :)