Another workspace pics. And other things.

As usual my blog is running a late night double feature, like how the old theaters used to do it. Or will it be a triple feature?

Here's a link to another collection of workspaces, this time workspaces for science fiction writers. All of them are quite well known. Some of them are even known to me. Although I'd have loved to be able to see actual workspace of William Gibson/Neal Stephenson/Warren Ellis with their computers as well. For reasons explained elsewhere I really dig that kind of stuff. I think Neal Stephenson is the person who taught me to take the Apple platform seriously way before it was cool to be Apple (writing this takes me back. In the past there was a time the Mac OSes were horrible systems with windows based computing platforms being the operating systems of the future. People would always get into a fuss about how the public school system was failing the children by letting them use Apple based products while the rest of the world ran on windows. They were so naive back then).
Like I guessed, writers certainly live in a whole lot of clutter. Most of them are surprisingly clean though, even when counting the fact that most of them probably cleaned up a little before the scheduled photoshoot... It's the same with research labs actually. Kid, I'm speak this from experience, so listen up. While everyone out there will tell you that a well-organized workspace/rooms etc are essential for productivity you should see the workspaces/rooms of the most brilliant people in arts and sciences. Trust me, none of them are capable of maintaining a clean room on their own. There's always some kind of mess, some kind of clutter. Ever looked at desktop of Albert Einstein? The thing is like a maze. And, I too have some clutter issues when I'm running large private projects that span months at a time. It's only that I try to clean everything up and keep them clean when I don't have anything long-term running out of my own place (I once covered a whole wall with post-its for notes and plans/numbers for my thesis (of  sorts). My then-room was in a truly crazy state back then). However, despite the clutter the workspaces of people who actually work on things tend to have some weird method to their madness. For example, it's rare to see actual 'filth' among the clutter. Sure, there are notes, pieces of papers, books and gadgets everywhere. If the person is in laboratory oriented profession perhaps even some reagents. But never filth. No half-eaten food rotting away, no weird yellow/brown stuff of mysterious origin. All the clutter is information, all of them information vital to whatever he/she is doing. Food isn't information and it's not vital to finding out some new law that governs high energy plasma. Or writing science fiction. Or designing proteins to save human lives. So yeah, if you walk into a work/room of a person and smell rotten food all over the place, the chances are he/she isn't working. Just being lazy and wasting time. But if you walk into a work/room and find crazy amount of papers and scribbled pieces of stuff everywhere, don't touch anything. Those people get stuff done.

Here's a July system guide from Ars Technica aimed at building gaming machines. Even the 'value' gaming machine on here (~$900) is effectively futureproof. You'll be running contemporary games four years from now on with that kind of machinery. you can add some more oomph with careful attribution of either 4 or 8 core processors into the machine, with 16GB RAM or more. But then that would be overkill. Not only would such machine be future proof, it will be on equal standing with some of the heavier single semi-supercomputers in some labs, the kind used for rendering in-house protein calculation. Of course, machine like that will guzzle electricity so anyone who can run that kind of machine for four years is probably very rich or don't pay his/her own utility bills.

Despite the fact that most of my computing needs these days run around mobile solutions systems like that are very tempting to build. Just imagine the things I would be able to do with a graphics card with 1GB DDR3 dedicated memory with all sorts of crazy shader appliances. Not just games, mind you. With upcoming frameworks like CUDA it would be possible to offload computing intensive processed to GPU instead of running them straight out of CPU, in fact turning them into mini suprecomputers, at least compared to the puny units of our current generation. Even laptops might be able to run some serious number crunching once the system's perfected.