Check it out while it's still up...

March 23, 2005 3:52 AM

The future is now on Amazon.com: a 10 Ghz processor, 30 Terabyte storage, .14 pound wonder of the world.
Some customer reviews:

"... although Windows still crashes, the machine is so fast it crashes before you even boot it up. So by the time you booted, you've already crashed and rebooted and didn't know what happened. "

"This thing is fast. Bad fast! I can see space and time warping, bending and "melting" around the vicinity of this machine when I run Microsoft Werd. Eventually a strange mini-black hole will open up and Steve Jobs' face will appear. He tells me lots of secrets about the future."
posted by zardoz (33 comments total)

So this computer, it doesn't exist? I'm a bit out of touch with cutting-edge technology. What's the story behind this single link to Amazon.com? And whose referral account is getting the credit when I click it?
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:20 AM on March 23, 2005

Operating System: DOS

I think that you've stumbled on their April Fools Day surprise, a little early.
posted by veedubya at 4:31 AM on March 23, 2005

the reviews are pretty funny.
posted by bashos_frog at 4:33 AM on March 23, 2005

Yeah, just where is that ref ID pointing, anyhoo? I smell a rat.

THERE IS NO DANA, ONLY ZAROZ. GO FORTH AND KILL.
posted by loquacious at 4:34 AM on March 23, 2005

yup (same model number, another vendor)
posted by moonbird at 4:37 AM on March 23, 2005

I'm a bit out of touch with cutting-edge technology.

"A bit" out of touch, or "whole orders of magnitude" out of touch?
posted by Wolfdog at 4:40 AM on March 23, 2005

Thanks for the link, moonbird. I like how "MP3 playback" is listed as an Audio Feature.

And on preview, Wolfdog, I say this kindly, but perhaps you're a bit out of touch with dry irony.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:43 AM on March 23, 2005

For a brief nanoscond my parts tingled at reading 10.00 GHz AMD Athlon. Way to tease a girl, man.
posted by dabitch at 4:48 AM on March 23, 2005

I bet it was an April Fools joke on some manager at Amazon, not on the public. Reminds me of something we did to our manager back in '99 or so. I scraped and "defaced" a few pages off of our website, hosted them on our staging server, and someone then snuck into our boss's office and hacked his hosts file so he'd go there instead of the real site.

The really fun part is when we got the division president to play along by coming into his office and playing Chicken Little....
posted by lodurr at 4:54 AM on March 23, 2005

This is hilarious.
Thanks, zardoz.
posted by tcp at 4:56 AM on March 23, 2005

pwns.
posted by nthdegx at 5:23 AM on March 23, 2005

What? Only 2GB memory? How the hell are you supposed to maintain a flux field around the warp core with that?
posted by NinjaPirate at 5:39 AM on March 23, 2005

In all seriousness, how long will it be before we actually have computers like this? Ten, fifteen years, tops?
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:45 AM on March 23, 2005

Well, the .14 lb part might be a little tough to match within 10 years, especially if we're looking for 10GHz....
posted by lodurr at 5:51 AM on March 23, 2005

unfortunately, it appears that the future can not be gift-wrapped.
posted by rude.boy at 5:56 AM on March 23, 2005

It plays Half-Life 3 even before the game is developed. And you complete the game in under 10 seconds.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:57 AM on March 23, 2005

In all seriousness, how long will it be before we actually have computers like this? Ten, fifteen years, tops?

We're at 3 GhZ for processors right now. According to Moore's Law, we'd reach 12GhZ in about three years. Usually RAM is only considered in doubling factors from 8, though, so more likely it would be 16GB of RAM, not 12.

A standard full-tower PC motherboard can take up to 3 gigs of RAM; I'm assuming laptops can take a gig right now so 2 isn't far off. The only farfetched suggestion right now is the weight.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:00 AM on March 23, 2005

Ten, fifteen years, tops?

that's way too long. It wasn't long ago when "gigabyte" was like a science fiction word... things move really fast these days. Most of the numbers here don't even sound that crazy already. You can get hard disks with a quarter of a terrabyte now, so that's around the corner, and processors have already passed the gigabyte line.
posted by mdn at 6:24 AM on March 23, 2005

You're all so far behind the bleeding edge of the knife it's ludicrous.

*dangles 50 petabyte solid state thumbdrive on his keychain and whistles innocently*
posted by loquacious at 6:45 AM on March 23, 2005

My only complaint is that the monitor blocks the right half of the keyboard. Other than that... WOW!!!

Most of the reviews have the same jokes (they're geeks, not comedy writers), but that one cracked me up.
posted by fungible at 7:34 AM on March 23, 2005

Isn't there a theory that the information flashpoint, when we're actually inventing too quickly, will happen in 2017? (My source for this is an issue of Promethea, written by Alan Moore of course, so take that as you will.)

I predict April Fool's prank now, actuality in under five years.
posted by kalimac at 7:38 AM on March 23, 2005

Yeah except that Moore's Law says nothing about Hz, it describes the number of transistors you can fit on a chip. And PCs have definitely stopped getting faster at the rate they used to. I believe we should have 10GHz today, if things progressed at the rate they did in the 90's. Hell, 3GHz machines have been out for like 3 years now, and it's rare to see higher than that today.
posted by knave at 9:17 AM on March 23, 2005

Kalimac: I think what you are alluding to is Vernor Vinge's Technological Singularity. The idea is that at some point "technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict".

I personally think there will be multiple singularities. As technology progresses beyond human understanding, humans will augment their minds and bodies with the technology to keep up. They will then progress through another singularity, another augmentation, singularity, augmentation, ad infinitum. I am just waiting for the immortality pill so I can be there to see it.
posted by pheideaux at 10:25 AM on March 23, 2005

Isn't there a theory that the information flashpoint, when we're actually inventing too quickly, will happen in 2017?

I think you are referring to The Sigularity.
posted by Bort at 10:26 AM on March 23, 2005

Ah, the Sigularity. First people just put their names at the bottom of an email. Then they added a little joke, or their address, or both, or a witty poem. Before you know it, sigs were growing exponentially in size and complexity. In 2006, the first sig virus was discovered in the wild. In 2009, the first sentient sig was found, and in an ominous bit of foreshadowing it called itself Skynet...
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:05 AM on March 23, 2005

Sorry, the first sig virus is from 1991.
posted by sonofsamiam at 11:14 AM on March 23, 2005

Well, it's gone now. Someone should check back on April 1 to see if it's back up.
posted by tdismukes at 1:01 PM on March 23, 2005

That's more a sig trojan than a sig virus. A proper sig virus would have code that would automatically reproduce it to another person's system instead of relying on a human.

Now, OTOH, if I had a sig that was graphic and had something like a Langford basilisk that forced you to copy the sig to something else, that might be a proper sig virus.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:35 PM on March 23, 2005

I disagree. sigs are programs that are not interpreted on the substrate of computers, but on the substrate of the human brain. Any mechanism that induces the interpreter to replicate the program is fair game for a virus, if you ask me.

If sigs were programs intended to be run on electronic computers, but required human intervention to replicate, then I'd call it a trojan.

(thx for the BLIT story heads-up!)
posted by sonofsamiam at 1:46 PM on March 23, 2005

And whose referral account is getting the credit when I click it?

Amazon only pays a fee (via their affiliate program) for purchases, I believe.

As for the computer, its operating system is DOS, but I thought that DOS had some severe limits on the amount of memory and hard drive space that it could use. (Maybe it runs a bunch of DOSs in parallel?
posted by WestCoaster at 2:16 PM on March 23, 2005

Does anyone one have saved pages of the Amazon thread? I'd love to post them somewhere and keep them alive, as Amazon is deleting them. Rapidly. (sniff)
posted by humannature at 2:17 PM on March 23, 2005

This is a funny post.
Thanks Zardoz.
Regards,
Numlok Von Numnuts III of the clan Numniculus, Esq. MSSLP
posted by numlok at 2:26 PM on March 23, 2005

Amazon finally deleted the last of the posts. I saved some and posted them here for posterity.
posted by humannature at 6:17 PM on March 25, 2005