Kevin Hoffman

Before I get to the blog post, go check out the image. It's positively huge, so you might have to scroll a bit before you see something on a smaller monitor.

The main thing that I get from this picture is a feeling of awe. I mean, it's Saturn for crissakes... and we've got a machine flying around that planet, taking pictures that can be assembled into the massive image in the link and sending those pictures across the solar system back to machines on Earth. Just take a deep breath and stop and think about that for a minute. Today we take virtually all things technological for granted - nobody notices that our phones are using more technology today than the super computers that launched man to the moon 40 years ago. Nobody seems to care that when we were younger, the most awesome kickass gaming rig was a 486 DX2 that ran at 66Mhz. 66Mhz! And that was really just a trick, it's clock speed was really only 33Mhz.

So now on any given day I can use the Internet, wirelessly, from a coffee shop, on a 13" device that doesn't need to be plugged in all the time... and I can use that Internet to download an image of Saturn - taken by a spacecraft that man built and can be remotely controlled with insane resolution and detail (each of those little white-ish specks in the above image is actually a high-res moon, not a piece of dust on the camera lens...).

Maybe its just me, but the whole idea of this fills me with awe and wonder and I feel like a kid again when the universe was huge and the world was a playground full of stuff to learn and explore... and it leads me to just one question:

If we can put men on the moon and send scientific spacecraft to Saturn to take high-resolution photos, then why the $@#(!%)# can we not build a single piece of decent consumer-grade software that isn't slow and riddled with bugs?!

Enjoy the pic! :)