Star Trek is out in theaters, and the geek world is jumping for joy–not to mention having a little fun with the technology that is and always has been a mainstay of the franchise. There are lessons to be learned from comparing Trek’s capabilities to today’s reality, especially since we stack up pretty well.
ChannelWeb’s slideshow Why Star Trek Needs a VAR demonstrates that even the 23th century could use an upgrade. They point out that the Enterprise, with its 10-story building sized data center, might actually have less sophisticated storage devices than today’s data centers, which are equipped with virtualization and other efficiencies.
Might we add that the starship would also benefit from the next generation of intelligent compression and deduplication, which would no doubt please the ship’s computer no end. Surely, the data is mainly unstructured and full of already compressed files, from its ship’s log items to ballistics analysis to medical imaging files from sickbay.
Security woes are nothing new, but one would think they’d have most of them patched by the time our great-great-great-grandchildren are signing onto their Facebook pages. Apparently not. ComputerWorld’s Ira Winkler takes us where no journalist has gone before–offering a blow by blow description of security failures (and the lessons we can learn) as depicted in the movie. Warning, that section of the article is full of spoilers.
It’s somehow reassuring to see familiar corporate logos lasting into the future. As several blogs are tracking, Nokia has some serious product placement in the film, with emphasis on one particular touch screen phone moment. This issue also came up in this week’s episode of Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, which also got into Trekmania with its “Not My Job” quiz on the original James T. Kirk, William Shatner.
There has, of course, been a lot of chatter on Twitter about Star Trek. One example is a discussion I had with fellow storage bloggers @Storagezilla and @Stu about what would happen if they put the Star Trek Prequel together with the Star Wars Prequel. Would Spock’s logic win, or are Yoda’s Jedi powers too great even for that clever Vulcan? Hard to say.
Photo: GeekSugar
