Is Ancient Greek Computer a PR Stunt for Olympics?

Published on July 31st, 2008

Posted by hhopper in Technology

Scrabulous returns as Wordscraper.
Netflix working with LG only for downloads?
NASA looking for water on Mars.
The Greek computer stories I am now convinced are a BS PR stunt.
Yahoo exec makes Yuil search engine to show up Cuil.
EDS to be part of HP.
Microsoft redoes the search engine yet again.
IE beta up for grabs.
Madden out on Aug. 11… the game that is.
Make a computer from spare parts for no money.
China limiting web access during Olympics. Why?

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8 users responded in " Is Ancient Greek Computer a PR Stunt for Olympics? "

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# 1 jasmoran66 said, on July 31st, 2008 at 4:37 pm

I’m fairly confident that months will continue to go by for the foreseeable future, at least…

# 2 edwinrogers said, on July 31st, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Why aren’t NASA looking for oil, on Mars?

# 3 jim h said, on July 31st, 2008 at 5:12 pm

The “Greek Computer” (known as the Antikythera Mechanism because that’s where it was found) is absolutely real, and a fantastic piece of history. A few months ago there was a great article about it in Smithsonian magazine – here’s a story on their web site:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient_calendar.html

# 4 Eric said, on July 31st, 2008 at 6:54 pm

HP hasn’t been HP since they sold off the test equipment and atomic clocks, and started selling calculators and overpriced PCs in WalMart.

# 5 QB said, on July 31st, 2008 at 8:26 pm

The most irritating thing about IE8 is Microsoft people constantly calling it “I-Yee-Eh”. They can’t seem to get out that last consonant or something.

The new developer tools are kind of OK. The Javascript and HTML editing rate an “OK that’s nice I guess”. The CSS review and history viewing is quite good. Various Firefox developer plugins don’t need to quake in their boots yet.

# 6 Stu Mulne said, on July 31st, 2008 at 10:35 pm

The Antikythera Mechanism is quite real. I doubt, however, that the latest “it does this” information is accurate. Mostly, I think, because we simply don’t have other examples. Unless the Church trashed them all, and didn’t bother to mention that, you’d expect more of these.

That said, working with bronze to make something like this isn’t really all that difficult. The principles probably are a bit of a breakthrough, but the overall technology isn’t. (Look at the Egyptian and Roman medical instruments. No gears, but the same kind of precision.)

IMHO, there is some Olympics-related hype here, givn the conclusions being delivered, but we live in a world where a lot of popular History is what’ll sell. Does anybody remember “The Scorpion King” and the television special (A&E or History?) that tried to relate the movie to an early Egyptian Pharaoh named Menes because he had a scorpion on a ceremonial object?

(I figured that if the narrator said “Scorpion” one more time, I was going to mail him one.)

Regards

# 7 pedro said, on August 1st, 2008 at 6:30 am

No one is saying the Antikythera is a fake but boy, are those chinese hungry about PR for the olympics or what?

A few weeks ago, I saw a newspaper cut-out on a customers BB showing how there is possibility for a paralympic record holder to be allowed to run at the China olympics with regular runners and how his struggle to get approval was going on.

Talk about publicity stunt.

This must be the most overhyped olympics ever. Wonder why.

# 8 Mister Mustard said, on August 3rd, 2008 at 7:13 pm

“Everyone knows GoDaddy, it’s the largest domain name registrar in the world. The company is mostly known from pulling shitloads of dollars into the booby Super Bowl marketing campaigns filled full with sexually suggestive material, which get always rejected a number of times before being accepted to air in the television. Anyways, soon it is going to be the renewal season for me, also it’s the final time to purchase a bunch of new domain names, so I was stumbling around in order to find the best offers. The inherent curiosity took me to GoDaddy, and guess what…

How much time may it take to find complete information about pricing on their own website? Five minutes, maybe ten? Well, I’m sorry but this time I simply have no idea – and I can only tell you that after 15 minutes of hard-digging through the all of their marketing brainwash I came up with nothing, so I tried Google Search. And check out what I found under “godaddy renewal prices” – a series of comprehensive articles clearly showing the way GoDaddy deals with people. Go on, find out how the world’s most popular domain registrar does it’s business. It is really interesting and worth reading, just go on and read.

http://wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/01/wincent_vs_goda.php

Bummer that GoDaddy is a scam. And bummer that Danica Patrick is a “GoDaddy Girl”. And bummer that Cranky Geeks accepts an internet scam to sponsor their show.

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